A new social gaming community called Mytopia has launched, blending casual games like Chess, Spades and Sudoku with existing social networking tools like Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo. It aims to offer MMO-style social features such as a virtual economy, teams and matches and connectivity features to players of casual games.

Players log in to Mytopia directly from the social networks they use – in addition to Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo, the games are available via Apple Dashboard Widgets, iGoogle Gadgets, Microsoft Vista Toolbar Widgets, and Yahoo! Widgets, or from Mytopia's own home portal.

Mytopia currently hosts eight classic games:Chess, Backgammon, Sudoku, Dominoes and Bingo in the club room, Spades, and Hearts in the card room, and Video Poker in the casino room, and the company promises new games added monthly. In addition to the games themselves, a "Town Hall" social feature lets users see others online and where they're logged in, read and post to message boards, and sort the leaderboards by their preferences.

Users also have customizable "My Home" profiles, which host their friends list and personalized profile and avatar, along with their in-game items, messages, chat history and privacy settings. Existing social networking profiles and friends lists can be transferred into Mytopia. Finally, the in-game shop lets users trade points they've earned for virtual in-game goods as well as real-world prizes, including gift certificates to online stores like Amazon and iTunes.

Mytopia CEO Guy Ben-Artzi commented, "Social networks are introducing online games to people who typically don’t consider themselves ‘gamers.’ These users want titles they can play with classmates, colleagues, and children alike. The traditional gaming market has largely overlooked these new users, but Mytopia is targeting new gamers with timeless, socially engaging titles that everybody knows and loves. There is no substitute for human competition, and nothing beats playing with people you like."

Talking as part of an in-depth new interview at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment's Joe Ybarra has revealed that the Stargate Worlds developer has a total of four studios at work, with second, smaller-scale MMO currently in development.

In this excerpt, Ybarra discusses the free-to-play biz model and the online game-as-service philosophy championed by Nexon and others, suggesting that one or more of the developer's next efforts might reflect a few of these progressive philosophies.

There are multiple products coming out, right? On multiple platforms, eventually, with the Stargate license. Are you planning things other than Stargate, too?

Joe Ybarra: Yes. In fact, Stargate, as an MMO, is the only large scale MMO that we are working on. We have another MMO that's under construction that's considerably less in scope, but nonetheless is still in that space.

But, another answer to your question is that all of our products will have online as their primary mechanism for delivery. And, in that regard, we don't focus entirely on MMOs. In fact, our second product is a completely different kind of a product. It's more of a peer-to-peer kind of an online activity. It's possible, like Stargate, that we can put it on console as well. But our primary focus is on the PC, and delivering online game experiences. All four of our studios build products in that space.

Have you thought much about the 'free to play' model, and what kind of business model are you going to go for?

JY: Yes, we have put a lot of thought into that. Yeah. And, it's my personal belief that it is ultimately where all the products go. Free-to-play, microtransaction business model, I think, is the winning solution, long-term.

I was actually talking to Min Kim -- did you see the Visual Fight Club thing that happened?

JY: No, I did not.

It was just him versus Kelly Flock, and they were talking about subscription model versus free-to-play model, but when I was talking to Min earlier today, he said that a lot of people seem to have really the wrong idea about what the free-to-play model is. The game is really a service, not a product. It's like, you're facilitating contact, and the game has to be built from the ground up for item sales. You can't just make a game and then put item sales into it afterward and expect that it's going to be functional. So is that something that you've been building in from the beginning, or is it more recent?

JY: Well in the case of our second product, which is what we're discussing -- our free-to-play product -- yeah, it's been architected from the ground up to support that activity. And without getting into the content of what this game is -- if I able to explain it to you, it would be obvious that, yeah, this is a really good proposition, or content model, for this type of transaction-based environment. Because some games lend themselves better than others do, and what we think is that in our second product, we've got something that is absolutely perfect for this kind of business model.

And, like you said, all online products, regardless of what they are -- MMOs, or peer-to-peer, or whatever -- have a service component to it, and, as you articulated, it really is a service. We look at Stargate Worlds as the example of that; it's that we're not building a product, we're building a real service organization to our customers. Especially if you're in the subscription-based model, you've got to be more added value to your customer than just shipping up a box and connect up to your service. We've know that from the very beginning. And that's a lot of the effort that I'm personally working on now, at Cheyenne, is building that infrastructure.

[You may read the full feature at Gamasutra.]

Some new and recent announcements out of VastPark, a product in development that promises, like Areae's Metaplace, to allow users to create and connect self-generated online worlds. It held a closed test last year, and opened its forums shortly thereafter. Now word comes that it's signed an agreement with NICTA, Australia's Information and Communications Technology Research Center.

VastPark will license NICTA's distributed network engine, aimed at allowing developers to deploy and scale online worlds efficiently to a broader userbase, as opposed to the more traditional client-server method. Through the agreement, Vastpark gets access to NICTA’s engine, and NICTA gets a commercial platform to conduct a large-scale trial of its technology. Eventually, the two organizations hope that VastPark will create an in-road to commercialization for the technology.

NICTA P2P project leader Dr Santosh Kulkarni said, “This is the beginning of what we expect to be a long-term relationship with VastPark as a partner in the development and commercialisation of the virtual world technology coming out of NICTA."

At the same time as the NICTA announcement, VastPark held its first multiuser stress test for its closed beta users, during which participants explored a first person shooter game under construction using the platform. The company also announced a proprietary software tool called VastServer. The company compares it to a web server, which serves up IMML, an XML-based HTML equivalent. According to VastPark, it acts as the message relay between all the site's users so they can interact with each one another in real time.

Explained VastPark lead developer Craig Presti, "Because VastServer is so light-weight and easy to run, we’re lowering the barrier to people popping up a virtual environment that they can share briefly as a meeting room or a game environment and then stop it. It makes virtual worlds into utilities, much like Skype conversations. Of course they can run them persistently but a lot of what we, as users, do is form ad hoc events and it’s terrific if we can run rich events online whenever we want very easily."

VastPark CEO Bruce Joy added, “We see a big future in communities working together to build meta-games with the platform. That is: Lots of little game maps that join together into one massive growing game. Community gaming is going to prove very compelling and we want to make it rewarding for everyone involved."

The call for submissions is now open for the 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference (GDC). Submissions to present lectures and roundtable sessions will be accepted for review by an advisory board until Monday, April 14th.

Presented by Think Services, a division of United Business Media, organizers of the industry-leading Game Developers Conference (GDC), the Austin GDC is a three-day event taking place at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas September 15-17, 2008.

The Austin GDC focuses on three main tracks: Game Audio, Writing for Games and Online Games, each with its own theme: “Breaking out of the Loop;” “The Future of Storytelling in Games;” and “Breaking Down Barriers,” respectively. The Online Games track goes even further in depth, featuring five sub-tracks of its own, including:

o Business and Marketing

o Design

o Social Networking & Community

o Technology & Services

o Worlds in Motion (Virtual Worlds)

The Austin GDC advisory board includes two new members, Raph Koster from Aerea Inc., and Mark Terrano from Hidden Path Entertainment. The advisory board also includes 18 other industry experts, including: Midway’s Marc Schaefgen, Dolby’s Lori Solomon, Multiverse’s Corey Bridges, Bioware’s Rich Vogel and Gordon Walton, Susan O’Conner from Susan O’Conner Writing Studio, and several others.

“We are excited to embark on the next chapter of the Austin GDC,” says Izora de Lillard, Event Director of Austin GDC, “Our theme this year ‘Evolve to Win’ reflects the need for developers to challenge themselves to think ahead in terms of community, online games, writing and audio for games. This year’s conference program will not only reflect new trends and technology in the immediate future of digital entertainment, but also include thought leaders with unique insight towards the long term evolution of game development and the industry.”

Submissions are also being accepted for the Game Career Seminar which will be held in conjunction with the Austin conference.

For a detailed list of topics and to submit a speaker proposal, please visit the official Austin GDC website.

Business Week has a new article profiling Nabi Studios' Toribash, an online community created by Singapore-based programmer Hampus Söderström. It's somewhat like a virtual world version of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots -- with social and community features added, like message boards, chat functionality, a group wiki, and even a virtual goods market that Business Week points out is doing quite healthily. Recently, a rare blood color (well, it's a fighting game) sold for $500.

From the article:

In the last two years, Toribash has become a virtual community with more than 42,000 members. Its members even flip-kick one another as they chat, exchange ideas in a public forums, and give direct feedback to the game's developers. On meticulously maintained wiki pages and discussion boards, players collaborate, designing complex fighting moves and sharing combat tips. To date, the game has received almost 30 official updates while gamers have played Toribash more than 3 million times on the official servers, with top players racking up 20,000-plus games.

Business Week also has some interesting facts on how Nabi got started up with Toribash, including how the free-to-play biz model helped accelerate the company's growth. Moreover, it reveals Nabi's next product, a car racing game with user-contributed features that launches in May.

[Game Maker Profile: Nabi Studios | Business Week]

A recent Forbes article by the versatile Bonnie Ruberg paints an interesting picture of Second Life as a tool for teaching English as a second language. It profiles teacher Kip Boahn, one of the leaders of a real-world German school for ESL, who has now built his own center in Second Life where teachers and students can avail themselves of academic resources for free.

The virtual environment seems to allow Boahn to create any number of situations both to engage students and to teach them new language applications -- for example, a rather wacky pirate scenario in which learners picked up words like "loot" and "booty," as well as more common fare like fast food restaurants.

From the article:

Boahn first began dabbling in "Second Life" as he was searching for ways to use technology to augment what happened in his real-world classrooms. "I became intrigued by the immersiveness of "Second Life" and other 3D worlds," he says. "The richness and multitudes of environments seemed to offer fantastic opportunities for exposure to language." Today, Boahn counts himself as part of a growing group of online ESL enthusiasts--including teachers from America and Europe, and students from countries as far-flung as Uruguay and China--who come together to practice language via text and voice chat.

The article has other info on Second Life for language education applications, too, but as for Boahn, he's now seeing some 75 visitors a day since his center opened in-world last month, and he's hoping for more once he starts advertising.

[How To Spark Remote Learning | Forbes.com]

Audio toolmaker Vivox has announced the addition of The Venue Network to its network, which means the virtual venue provider will now work with Vivox's communications when it launches in Autumn 2008. Users who attend events and presentations at TVN's virtual venues will have access to Vivox's suite of communications tools, including group voice chat, IM, 3D spatial audio, attendee lists, presence indicators, alerts and other features like presentation mode and multi-channel access.

TVN CEO David Gardner commented, "Natural speech is the cornerstone of human communication. To this end, TVN is laser focused on empowering our customers to communicate easily and effectively. Vivox understands these requirements and has designed its solutions and service with proven reliability and scalability which made the Vivox Network the natural choice for TVN. We are looking forward to a rich partnership in delivering an effective virtual collaboration environment.”

Publisher-sponsored in-game commerce platform PlaySpan has officially expanded its open beta to users of K2 Networks' MMORPG Global Mu Online. K2's users can now check out PlaySpan's platform directly through K2's game portal, GamersFirst.

PlaySpan is one of a few emerging tools that aims to provide a secure platform for player-to-player game transactions by integrating with the game's publisher, usually through the backend. The view surrounding technology like this is that publisher sanction and support for in-game commerce using a designated toolset will reduce fraud and protect players.

The two companies announced earlier this year that Global Mu would be the site of the PlaySpan open beta; prior to that, PlaySpan execs have said they're happy with the response the platform is getting in the Asia-Pacific region.

The company also announced a partnership with social avatar site Urbaniacs late in 2007. PlaySpan had announced VC funding to the tune of $6.5 million just prior to that, and at that time said it had already signed up 7 MMOs; it's unclear if Urbaniacs (which isn't an MMO) was one of those seven partnerships, or what other companies they're working with besides K2.

Said K2 CEO Joshua Hong, "We are committed to bring new and innovative ways to better serve our gamer community and integrating PlaySpan’s player-2-player commerce network is a great way to expand our overall service offerings. PlaySpan is built from the ground-up to provide highly secured and scalable microtransactions and we believe that this is the next generation of solutions to improve fight against fraud and game-balance issues faced by game developers and publishers worldwide.”

Developer Metaversatility has partnered with advertising agency GSD&M Idea City on a research program about consumer, product and experiential information across virtual worlds, to better serve their clients with the results.

The two companies worked together earlier this year on research technology and best practices for quantitative market studies, a system called IdeaBot that screens and surveys users of different virtual world products directly in-world. In addition to Second Life, IdeaBot works with Metaplace and There.com, too.

Marketplace planning director at Idea City Rene Huey Lipton commented, "As exciting as virtual worlds are, we know that deep knowledge and insight are needed to ensure that they are effective channels for our clients and their business objectives. We are excited to provide our clients with a unique service offering, combining world class research, marketing and in-world build capabilities."