Habbo has announced the kickoff of its very own film festival, using the Habbowood MovieMaker tool. It's a comprehensive editing device that allows users to select from a wide range of virtual sets, props, special effects and mood music; cast Habbo "actors" and script dialogue to build scenes. Up to ten different scenes can then be combined using the MovieMaker tool to create an animated film up to five minutes long."

With the tool, Habbo is launching the "Habbowood Digital Movie Awards 2007". Aspiring filmmakers can take the director's chair and create, star in and share their own animated movies in hopes of winning a Habbowood Award. For the next ten days, the Habbo community, which numbers more than 15 million registered users in the United States, will select the ten top films through a combination of page views and scaled ratings. Each day, the Habbo staff will choose a winner from this top 10 to comprise the final nominees which the Habbo community will vote on to select the Habbowood Award winner.

The winner will be announced and special awards, such as Best Director, Best Writer, Best Actor and Best Actress, will be presented live in Habbo's Theaterdome during the virtual Habbowood Digital Movie Awards gala, on September 21.

Habbo.com opened its doors to Habbowood three years ago. Last year, the hugely popular US movie contest garnered more than 140,000 animated short films. On a global level, Habbowood generated more than 700,000 movies last year. For the first time, the winning film will be entered into a global contest against the winners from 18 other Habbo communities around the world to compete for a grand prize trip for two to Hollywood.

An expert panel from the fields of animation and computer generated visual effects (VFX) will judge the competition, including Matt Johnson, VFX supervisor at critically acclaimed visual effects and digital imaging house, Cinesite; Antti Jokinen, celebrated director of music videos for Will Smith, Missy Elliott, Celine Dion and Shaggy; Tim Searle, award-winning 2DTV animator and Jim Thacker, editor of 3D animation bible, 3D World

"The Habbowood Digital Movie Awards will prove that teens can create imaginative, successful movies, just like their Hollywood counterparts," said Teemu Huuhtanen, EVP, Habbo Business and president, North America. "We are challenging teenagers to write the script, choose the location and direct the actors in their own movies to create a winning film that will demonstrate a combination of originality, timing, and artistic flair."

Our sister site Gamasutra has an interview with CEO Hubert Thieblot and general manager Wilson Kriegel of MMO-focused gaming portal Curse. Since its founding in 2005, it's developed from an add-on database into its current fourth iteration - a fully fledged community touch-point, complete with social networking aspects, game-specific Wikis, and user submitted videos.

The venture attracted investor interest toward the end of last year, with $800,000 raised in an angel funding round in December. More recently, at the end of July, Curse announced that it has received $5 million in Series A funding from French venture capital firm Private Equity and investors. From the interview:

GS: What do you think are the most important elements in making the business a long term, global prospect?

HT: We have a few focuses. First is working much closer with game developers and publishers. We want to position ourselves into a service company, where we provide a service for them and the community. We build websites for them, we apply our knowledge about building a successful website with multiple services, which they do need for the game nowadays.

We are also building a huge sales force, so, again, making money is a huge part of Curse, and it’s what we do everyday. We’re also building a premium site, to combat against Gamespot, FilePlanet, IGN, and so on. It’s going to be a monthly subscription, and I think we have some pretty neat ideas about how to sue the social network and the add-ons and downloads, and all of this will tie together. We’re adding an application into this.

WK: I think the root and the essence of what Curse is, more than being a social network site, is the development of web technologies and innovations. I like to consider us a web technology site, in that regard – a lot more like Photobucket and Digg and YouTube, where technology is the essence of user generated content or what’s most pertinent or relevant to that particular individual or particular IP. We intend to stay in the MMO space, and there are many contents to cover in that space. It’s very mature in Asia, which will enter the US market, and we intend to facilitate that.

The premium subscription, ecommerce – it’s all in line with what our community and user base is accustomed to, and is willing to transact on. I think, at the heart of that, is innovation of product and services, and value added services, both to the user base, and potential partners, like publishers. I think Apple is a good example of a company that is successful because of innovation around products. I hope that we – not to compare ourselves to Apple – but I hope we can stay within that philosophy of innovating for the consumer for a great product and great value adds.

I think that’s the key to why we’ve been successful, and why we’ll continue to be a viable, profitable, innovative company.

Millions of Us has hired Second Life economist Peter Phillips -- creator of the LindeX virtual currency and former "central banker" for that world -- as technical director. Inc., an agency specializing in virtual worlds, has hired Peter Phillips as Technical Director.

As it develops trading systems for virtual goods on multiple platforms, Millions of Us says it hopes to benefit from Phillips' experience. He will also lead the technical team at Millions of Us, helping the company's clients as they aim to bring virtual assets like goods, celebrity avatars and themed content into various virtual worlds

Prior to Linden Lab, Phillips was Live Team Lead on Ultima Online at Electronic Arts where he coordinated the development, quality assurance, operations and customer support efforts to grow the player base and keep the service running smoothly.

"We'd be lucky enough to have Peter for his technical skills, but he's also proven himself as a virtual economist," said Reuben Steiger, CEO, Millions of Us. "Our clients will benefit not only from his ability to scale our infrastructure, but also from his work on the industry's most ambitious virtual trade and programming projects."

Media Machines, a San Francisco-based company that develops tools and content for online 3D virtual worlds, has received $9.4 million in its first round of funding, according to PaidContent, citing SEC filings from PEHub. The round was led by Mohr, Davidow Ventures.

The company was founded in 2003 by Tony Parisi, co-inventor of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) standard back in 1994. Former Electronic Arts VP Keith McCurdy is CEO.

The company's free 3D virtual world Web browser plug-in, the Flux Player, lets users manipulate virtual scenes, worlds, avatars, gadgets and games in a standard browser, in addition to other 3D Web authoring products and services.

Cornell University is aiming to give grad students the opportunity to explore the financial "wild west" within a completely virtual community. A new course, Professor Robert Bloomfield's Business and Oversight in Second Life, will use the virtual world to help students study business in the absence of regulation and to examine the issues surrounding all kinds of business transactions -- all within Second Life.

Second Life makes a good venue for the study of unregulated business; Cornell cites stats of $1.5 million in exchanges daily among its subscribers, along with Second Life's three stock exchanges, six banks and a real estate market -- all of which are ungoverned by fixed laws.

Cornell says the course will require students to write an analysis of any oversights or issues that they observe in this virtual world, and a series of in-world discussions will take place with guest speakers who are currently conducting business in Second Life. In addition, there will also be a number of speakers who are experts in intellectual property, e-business, regulation, and the business of the virtual world.

The first annual Advanced Learning Technologies Summit (ALT Summit) aims to explore how serious games, virtual worlds, social networks and technologies such as robotics and haptics can be leveraged to inspire, educate and train the “next-gen” workforce. It has announced its featured speakers for the inaugural conference:

From the press release, the presenters include:

Ben Sawyer, co-founder of DigitalMill and founder of the Serious Games Initiative, Games for Health, and Games for Change;

Doug Harward, chief executive officer of The Exceleration Group, founder of trainingindustry.com and trainingoutsourcing.com and a leader internationally recognized for his background in training and business process outsourcing;

Karl Kapp, professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University and scholar, writer and expert on the convergence of learning, technology and business operations; and

Anne Murphy, executive director of the Digital Promise Project, a coalition that has developed ground-breaking legislation for digital support of education.

The ALT Summit will offer tracks spanning learning in healthcare, education, government and business, and each track will deliver sessions on theory and research, practical applications, examples, and ideas for getting started and gaining support. Current sponsors include WakeMed, IBM, the American Research Institute, Wake Technical Community College, Virtual Heroes and Epic Games.

The ALT Summit will take place at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Cary, N.C., on December 11-12, 2007.

Mobile learning content management solutions provider Giunti Labs has announced a collaboration with Coventry University's newly formed Serious Games Institute (SGI) and Cisco to provide demonstration software showing what can be achieved in combining mobile and virtual worlds e-learning.

The fruits of the collaboration between the SGI, Giunti Labs and mobile learning specialists Ambient Performance will be on display at the Serious Virtual Worlds conference being held at the Coventry University Technology Park TechnoCentre on September 13th and 14th.

The conference will also feature the launch of Coventry University's Second Life island and highly visual and interactive demonstrations including presentations from the Institute's industry and academic partners. Among those making presentations at the conference are Cisco, Forterra, Linden Labs, Giunti Labs, Daden ltd, Ambient Performance, PA Consulting, IBM, and Trusim.

"The extraordinary success of virtual worlds such as 'Second Life' as virtual social spaces for play is leading us to examine the potential for the serious uses of these worlds," said the SGI's director, David Wortley. "The theme for this first Serious Virtual Worlds conference is 'The Reality of the Virtual World' and examines how virtual worlds are now being used for serious professional purposes.

"SGI is focusing on virtual worlds and immersive environments because these are key elements for serious games," Wortley explained. "The SGI is going to be the place in Europe to find expertise in virtual environments as applied to learning - especially as they are used to link virtual and real environments."

Angus Turpin, manager for Giunti Labs in the UK and Ireland, commented: "Giunti Labs are supplying the SGI with back-end development, consultancy and software based on our flagship e-learning and mobile learning content management platform learn eXact, Europe's leading
solution for learning content production and authoring now adding mobile and virtual learning worlds authoring capability."

This will enable the SGI to demonstrate drag-and-drop positioning of digital learning content; 3D hotspot positioning, and triggering and tracking of learning content by the avatar into those zones. It will also allow SGI to have the tools to create, package, manage and track SCORM-compliant contents which will be contextualized and delivered to Windows Mobile 5 PDAs within the SGI Cisco Wi-Fi network. The X, Y and Z co-ordinates of the mobile devices may also be used by other virtual world applications.

"Giunti Labs are proposing to supply the tools, training and support to enable the creation and repurposing of content using its authoring suite and to test extended third party deployment via this test suite, as well as offering the requisite training and support," said Turpin.

Areae president Raph Koster, designer of Ultima Online and previous CCO of SOE, gave his talk at GDC Austin in front of a full-capacity crowd, all of whom were eager to catch a shred of what he’s been talking about for the last year or so – how the web is destroying games in terms of revenue and access.

“As you might know,” he began, “I’ve got this new startup thing going. I want to talk about some of what we’re doing… but I can’t."

"For the last couple of years now I’ve been paying a lot of attention to how the web works, and how the web is eating the game industry’s lunch. Despite WoW we’re rapidly approaching a point where out of the top 10 MMOs, 7 or 8 of them are on the web, don’t sell on a CD and have a million users.”

Areae's Plan - 'Play Anywhere'

Koster wants his company, Areae, to follow this model, and have a concept of ‘play anywhere.’ This means being on the web, being on all platforms, and dissecting why those models are successful. He then got into a technical design discussion of how you go about that. Koster subscribes to the idea that games can be broken down into elements of game grammar, like a (post) structuralist reading of a film. He showed a slide with a bunch of networking sites, and pseudo-games by the traditional definition, such as ARGs, Line Rider, Hotornot, Club Penguin, and fantasy football.

“All of these,” he says “are more popular than EverQuest. Why? After pondering what these things have in common, I think we as an industry have really gotten it wrong about what games are.”

Koster went on to say that games are not the interface, and they are not the display. So you should cut those things out of your design, if you want to design for everywhere. It’s really hard, he admits, but all those other things do it.

“If you’re like me, you’re really tired of hearing about Web 2.0,” says Koster – but he maintains that the elements of the concept behind the buzzword are sound. “The thing is we don’t trust the users to modify our [game] assets,” he says. Things like MySpace allow people to modify the source code, and determine the experience they’ll have.

New Paradigms For The Game Industry

Koster mentioned a recent statement by the co-chair of Columbia records, essentially saying “our industry is dead.” People are filling iPods with free content, and nobody wants to pay, and suggesting that the game industry is getting to be the same way.

The Areae co-founder suggested that the industry monetizes people who even just want to try a game, and of course people want to try before they buy, which is spoken to by the success of XBLA and PSN downloadable demos. He also noted: "In the game industry we try to have the blockbuster openings – those are easy to ruin. The web is about word of mouth."

“The value in web products is not in the content,” he asserts, “but in the data of how people use the content. Amazon’s real value is in what books you’ve already bought, because that’s how they sell you more books. The whole web is based on metadata.”

Koster says that all these companies are trying to figure out how to get away from opening big, from high production values, and from monetizing trials.

Game Grammar

On the lower technical end of his grammar discussion, Koster says “There are very few game systems – we’re usually plugging together things we’ve done before.” This means things like how fast users can press the button, traversing spaces and weighted graphs, determining trajectory, etc. Odds calculation is the hardest one, he says, because the human brain is really bad at it.

He says games are inherently social. All games, even single player ones, are two player. The other player is an algorithm, or the computer. When you play against Space Invaders, they’re playing against you.

There are games where the other player is playing the same game, he says as in Space Invaders (goal is shoot the enemy), or where they’re doing something different, like in Pac-Man or Donkey Kong. There are parallel games, which are like in a footrace, where you’re playing the same game (against physics in this case) where you’re rated at the end for how well you did. Competitive games are playing the same game against each other.

Koster suggested that parallel games are infinitely scaleable – but competitive games are not. Team based games always support limited capacity – you only need so many healers in your group… there’s always a point where adding more roles just breaks down.

Bridging the Gap

He continued that World of Warcraft has massively parallel teams, working against an asymmetric thing, which is a monster, and lots of people can do it at the same time. This is a step.

Koster continued by suggesting that the hot platform is the net. The net says the platform can be anything - there aren’t real hardware requirements or interface problems. The hot topic right now is the non-gamer. The hot feature is other people (as in YouTube), not the systems we write. The hot technology is connectivity and simultaneity. He added: "The hot game is a mini-game. Really small games."

The big thing in the traditional game industry now is haptics – but those aren’t designed for everywhere. “Look at the challenges people have putting a game on the DS and…anything else,” he says.

“When you look at the kinds of problems we ask people to solve, and the things we assume them to do, it’s like we’ve given them a PHD in mathematics. No wonder you sit mom down and she asks how do I move?”

So how do I run everywhere?

Interfaces are a huge barrier - they just get much more complicated, Koster suggested. There’s information overload, and to prove it, he showed a screen from WoW, with scads of boxes and statistics on it.

“If I look at that WoW screenshot,” says Koster, “I see a user interface begging to be simplified.” He calls for something along the lines of just showing the most pertinent information – and already there are hacks to do this. “Every time you make an assumption about inputs or output, you’re shrinking your user base. This is really the secret behind the DS and the Wii – it’s mapped to stuff we already know, which reduces the learning curve.”

Here’s what works in this new model, according to Koster:

- the system is the game, not the interface, not the presentation.
- any button will do.
- long phases take your time – response time is rough.
- be done fast, once you’ve made a decision.
- do it side by side. Has to be massively parallel.
- extended accumulated state – save your profile.
- no roles – classless – teams are deterministic.
- representation agnostic – draw it however.
- open data – change it however.

Things that don’t work:

- twitch games.
- Inputs that are locked to commands – dance mats, styluses.
- Models that rely on specific representations (ie 3D).
- Models reliant on prior art – if you haven’t played every RTS you’re screwed.
- Narrative lock – if you tamper with our story, it won’t be good!

Parallel models:

- Badges (achievements)
- Ratings (skill or social)
- Rankings (high scores)
- Reviews (and tagging)
- Gifting
- Networks
- Leagues (segmentation)

The grammatical elements of those successful ventures he mentioned hit a lot of those grammar points. “The games we’re making today are really bad at hitting those points,” he says, and as such limit their audiences. “There’s no reason why WoW couldn’t be represented by anything other than an RSS feed, and if you could, it’d probably be doubled in users.”

[The preceding article by Brandon Sheffield originally appeared on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Electronic Arts has announced the beta launch of The Sims On Stage, a free interactive online webiste-based toolset that lets users record, watch and share karaoke songs, stories, comedy routines and other creative projects.

The Sims on Stage is based on the SingShot Media karaoke community, which EA acquired earlier this year. EA says "thousands of well-known rock, pop and country songs" will be available at launch; For the members not vocally inclined, The Sims on Stage also offers "Open-Mic Recordings," for spoken-word and comedy performances.

In addition to karaoke, The Sims On Stage will also feature a "Movie Mashup" that will allow members to create original movies featuring The Sims content, some of which will include assets made available only to members of The Sims On Stage community. Recordings can be kept private or publicly shared, and can also be uploaded to blogs and social networking sites.

The announcement continues EA's commitment to The Sims as one of its chief and most important brands - in the recent re-organization of the company, it has been elevated to one of the four main company 'labels' alongside EA Sports, Casual, and EA Games, the only single franchise to be given that honor.

“The Sims has long had one of the largest, friendliest and most creative communities in the world. With the release of The Sims On Stage we welcome a new kind of customer to our way of having fun,” said Rod Humble, studio head of The Sims label. He continued: “The world of interactive entertainment is now broader than ever thanks to new web-based technologies, and we are thrilled to give you a new way of having fun with The Sims On Stage.”

The Sims On Stage is now available in a beta version at its official website.

[The preceding announcement ran previously on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Two new companies have announced licenses of MMO content development tool BigWorld Technology Suite; London-based firm Kwari for its recently announced "pay-to-kill" online first-person shooter (a very intriguing, 'anti-social gaming' concept), and developer Bitcasters for an MMO based around its Storm Hawks animated series.

The Australia-based BigWorld licenses its middleware, comprised of the BigWorld Server, Content Creation Tools, 3D Client Engine, and Live Management Tools and Instrumentation, to game studios developing MMOs and virtual worlds.

"Kwari is creating a new arena of online gaming that is set to change the way we play games," said John De Margheriti, BigWorld CEO. "We are pleased to provide a technology platform that will allow their innovative game ideas to come to life, and we 're confident of the huge appeal that their online products are sure to bring to the market."

Bitcasters adds that, along with broadcast partners YTV and Cartoon Network who are broadcasting the show internationally, it will tie the Storm Hawks Spinmaster toy line and other Storm Hawks products into the online experience it's developing on the BigWorld platform.

“We’re very excited to be working with Bitcasters on bringing the Storm Hawks series online.” said BigWorld VP of business development Gavin Longhurst. “Their talented development team has made the most of BigWorld’s full solution to bring the great characters, great stories and the world of Atmos alive in a unique online experience.”

[This article also ran on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

You can now vote on which panels you'd like to see at the 2008 SXSW Interactive Festival to be held March 7-16 in Austin, TX, and several panels are up for consideration that are relevant to the online gaming and virtual worlds space.

Virtual Goods guru and Charles River Ventures partner Susan Wu has proposed three solid ideas: "Virtual Goods: The Next Big Business Model," exploring the ways virtual goods create opportunities for companies looking to explore engaging online experiences; "What's Wrong With Today's Social Networks," which aims to address ways to improve the standard Facebook or MySpace model; and "Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds," which addresses the forms these rights may take in a world where online goods are here to stay.

Michael Smith of Mind Candy(Perplex City) offers "Gaming and Tweens: The Kids are Alright," which discusses designing online experiences for kids with safety in mind, while Doppelganger's Andrew Littlefield suggests "Real Life Only Better: Cool Virtual World Communities," to discuss the appeal of creative self-expression in virtual worlds.

These are just a few of the proposed ideas -- in all, there have been 724 panels suggested! But it's a safe bet that virtual worlds, social gaming and online communities will be represented in a worthy way at the Festival, so tell 'em what you want!

CRV's Susan Wu has started an interesting discussion at her blog, based on a chat she recently had with Stanford Language and Information Program Director Byron Reeves. She says he's working with Seriosity (what a serious name!) to develop a platform to allow companies to create virtual economies by assigning currency values to different types of interaction and communication.

As Wu points out, the work Reeves is doing raises some interesting questions on how virtual currencies drive behavior and group dynamics. The questions she asks are sharp and pretty spot on:

- What does it do to a [company’s] culture if all interaction can be boiled down to some quantitative representation?

- Isn’t a company’s culture really just some expression of a collective utility function?

- And, has anyone done any studies measuring what type of correlation exists between the rate of change of a [group/country’s] economic growth and the rate of change of its language? I guess I’m curious if various Chinese dialects are changing more quickly than languages in more static socioeconomic conditions. I feel this must be true to some extent, but I wonder to what degree.

Gordon Walton, the co-studio director at BioWare Austin, gave a packed beyond capacity speech at GDC Austin. The interest is unsurprising given the topic of the talk, Walton's job working on a new MMO, and the stature of BioWare as a company. And Walton's jocular but insightful speech did not betray the expectations set by the eager crowd.

As everyone now recognizes, World of Warcraft is a towering titan above the MMO industry; its success seems unassailable, but at the same time its success is forcing a lot of developers and publishers to jump onto the MMO bandwagon. Clear lessons can be taken from the game's development, and with the help of quotes from Blizzard's own staff, Walton delineated what he felt were the 12 most crucial... though he ruefully noted there could easily be 60 lessons to learn.

Entertainment media publisher 10tacle Studios Asia and MTV Asia have signed a cooperation agreement to create, brand and market an Asian online entertainment channel; users will be able to access MTV content via a "one-stop digital destination," which the companies say will provide online gaming, 3D virtual worlds, social networks and other dynamic digital content.

In an ongoing rollout, this online entertainment channel will see initial release in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, with additional countries following over the next six months. In their press release, the companies say they'll use microtransactions, sponsorship, e-commerce and advertising as revenue streams typical to the Asian online games market.

“The 10tacle Studios and MTV partnership is a milestone for MTV Networks in strengthening our online gaming, entertainment and lifestyle offering to our audience in Asia. It is anticipated with tremendous synergies between MTV’s branded content and 10tacle Studios’ technology, as well as, the ability to create completely new multi-platform interactive experiences engaging MTV’s audience across the region”, said Robert Kim, senior director of digital media at MTV Networks Asia.

“10T Asia has redefined itself from a traditional games and production business by spearheading 10tacle Studios’ international online entertainment and lifestyle strategy. This close collaboration with MTV opens up incredibly exciting opportunities in the interactive digital media space through the convergence of on-air and online media platforms”, says Aroon Tan, CEO of 10tacle Studios Asia.

Nexon has introduced a brand-new ranking feature for MapleStory Europe. An online rankings database will now let users directly compare their progress against that of their rivals and friends, adding a competitive element to the game.

MapleStory has always ranked players according to their current level and experience total, but players will be able to see where they stand in reference to others when they search the online database of active players in the MapleStory database, by logging onto the Maple Story Europe homepage.

The rankings, which are updated on an hourly basis, are divided into Overall, World and Job categories, allowing players to compare their progress against all other players, those that play on the same channel, or those with the same in-game profession. In addition, the top three fastest movers in each category are singled out for special recognition on the website, giving high-flying players something extra special to strive for.

A fourth category compares players on the basis of Fame, MapleStory’s in-game popularity rating. From Level 15 players can, on a once a day basis, give (or take away) a fame point to any other player in the game. As players who rank highly on the Fame leaderboard are assured legendary status among other MapleStory fans, Nexon expects it to become an interesting and fiercely-fought category.

In addition to the new online ranking system, all posts and comments made on the www.mapleeurope.com forum are now tagged with the player’s in-game avatar, to encourage community involvement and reinforce character customization.

To celebrate the system launch, and to prepare for the upcoming in-game Oktoberfest, MapleStory Europe will run a special "Monster Invasion" event on September 10th, during which players will get to gain extra experience defending Victoria island from swarms of monsters.

[NOTE: This story is cross-posted from sister site Gamasutra.com's comprehensive coverage of Austin GDC 2007, which includes write-ups of keynotes, sessions, roundtables, and associated breaking news from the CMP Game Group's first Austin-based conference.]

Though it didn't attract the biggest crowd at the show, Sulka Haro's keynote speech on Habbo Hotel delivered a lot of wry commentary and useful information on the building of successful online worlds.

Even though his world is mostly populated by 13-16 year olds - by his own admission - Sulake Labs' Haro noted there are lessons to be learned about broadening the appeal of products that touch on one or more of the tactics Habbo Hotel takes in developing its userbase.

Habbo Hotel - The Basics

The talk started with statistics. Habbo Hotel has approximately 7.5m unique players per month globally -- nipping at the heels of World of Warcraft. In the seven years since the game launched, 80 million accounts have been created. Globally, the game typically has 100,000 concurrent users playing at one time.

The creators of Habbo Hotel came from the web development community. According to Haro, the team was originally "not much in gaming. We've since hired people from the games industry... the core product itself was really done from the web mindset of things."

It grew from a "Disco" project with just two rooms that attracted a surprising number of international players even though it was only available in Finnish. "Most of them couldn't understand Finnish but they still went through the registration... there was a massive crowd from Brazil who visited the site for some reason."

This project evolved into a snowball-fighting browser game, but here Sulka learned an important, early lesson. The game allowed players to buy better equipment. "People hate when you buy stuff that lets you do better in the game. There were a bunch of kids who couldn't do purchases..." These players soon grew frustrated with the players who could.

At the 2007 Austin Game Developers Conference, a roundtable discussion called 'Licensing MMOs Worldwide' was moderated by Corey Bridges, an executive producer and marketer for Multiverse.

The panelists included Calvin Yoo, in charge of international business development for Nexon Corporation, Jeff Anderson, CEO of Turbine Entertainment, which is currently starting to license out MMOs, Steve Goldstein, general council for Flagship Studios, who is also president of Flagship’s joint venture with Handbitsoft, and Joshua Hong, CEO and founder of K2 Network, which is licensing Korean titles to the West.

Hit the jump to read the full discussion, which originally appeared at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.

Get ready for acronyms. In a press release we received, Forterra Systems says that it will be working with the Orlando-based Defense Department’s Joint Advanced Distributed Learning (JADL) Co-Laboratory, with the aim of determining how MMO games might best be used in military counter-IED training -- Forterra says they'll even develop a demo prototype.

In other words, the effort is targeted to directly benefit the current U.S. military mission in Iraq, developing a highly realistic virtual training environment based on MMO technology that can support counter-IED training capabilities. Although this particular venture will focus on the IED mission, Forterra says the results will be applicable to other defense missions and training requirements.

The system that the Forterra team develops might even lead to an optional further project -- its possibly use in actual trials to study the training of soldiers around key aspects of counter-
IED operations.

The specifics of the research and development phase initially involve the provision by Forterra to JADL of its Forterra’s OLIVE (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) software platform that enables the generation of collaborative 3D online virtual worlds that can be scaled from single user applications to large-scale simulated environments supporting thousands of concurrent users.

The Forterra-led team includes Intelligent Decision Systems, Inc. (IDSI) and Rustici Software. IDSI will provide support for the instructional design required to determine the efficacy of the MMO tech as it's modified to support SCORM standards, while Rustici Software will provide valuable experience and insight into the technical issues around SCORM standards, Shareable Content Objects (SCOs), and the ADL runtime environments.

“Advanced distributed learning, reuse of content, and game technologies offer potential solutions for the training challenges facing the U.S. military, such as how to effectively combat Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs,” said Mike Macedonia, VP and general manager of Forterra’s National Security Division. “The research that we are undertaking will focus on defining technologies, interfaces, and standards so SCORM-compliant content can be used in an immersive 3D environment where smallor large groups of users that are physically distributed can collaborate for the purpose of training, experimentation or mission rehearsal.”

This rather fascinating Austin GDC panel put together several heads of important startups to discuss the trials and tribulations of forging out on one’s own.

Three Rings CEO Daniel James was the moderator, fresh in from the Burning Man festival, along with panelists Joe Ybarra, employee number 5 at EA and new founder of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, which owns the Stargate license; Anthony Castoro, founder and president of Heatwave Interactive; serial startup-ist Nabeel Hyatt, founder and CEO of Conduit Labs, and Raph Koster of Areae.

Hit the jump to read the full discussion, which originally ran at our sister site Gamasutra.

I hadn't heard about its beta announcement a couple weeks ago, but the good folks at Metaversed clued us all in recently about VastPark, a tool that's apparently simple enough that any user can create their own virtual world, and join their creations together with those of others.

Now, at Vastpark's website, it looks like they're ready for the first set of new users, as they're letting in those that signed up to the mailing list a few weeks ago take a first look and snag some bonus screenshots. It seems like invites to the beta are still open though, as they're still taking email addresses.

On the website, it says it's "a virtual content platform featuring free tools, revolutionary distributed content syndication and enables you to deploy your own virtual world or online game within seconds royalty free," -- and that early beta tools are coming. Sounds cool -- we'll keep our eyes and ears open.

[Via Metaversed]

In Friday's keynote at the Austin Game Developers Conference, Nexon America’s Min Kim discussed his firm's incredible Korean success with games such as Maple Story and Kart Rider, and explained how the company's microtransaction model adapted to the West.

Nexon, as Kim explained, was established in 1994 in Korea -- first a developer, then a publisher, they serviced their own games, as well as those of third parties. In 2005, Nexon’s revenues were $230 million, with a net profit of $75 million, and the company had some 1,600 people in its employ. And in 2005, 80% of their revenue came from in-game item sales.

“The great thing about microtransactions is that they’re scalable,” said Kim. “You can spend as little as zero dollars -- but as much as you want. You’re not linked to a certain scale.”

Hit the jump for the rest of Kim's keynote and Nexon's story, which originally appeared at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.