The UK's Edinburgh Interactive Festival, set for August 12-14, 2007 at the Royal College of Physicians, is focused on "expanding the creative culture of games." To that end, they're planning keynotes, debates, panel sessions and cross media industry discussions to examine gaming's impact on consumers and entertainment companies as well as traditional media.

Recently, the Festival's lineup has been expanded to include virtual worlds, with EVE Online creator Hilmar Petersson and Linden Lab's Jim Purbick joining the discussions. Purbick will participate in a 'Developing for Second Life' strand of panels on the 14th, while Petersson will head up ‘Exploring EVE Online’ on the 13th, and will also contribute to the ‘Virtual Societies’ discussion on the 14th.

In his welcome statement on the Festival's homepage, Chairman Chris Deering said, "For our delegates, partners and speakers, Edinburgh offers one thing in particular above all other industry events - a unique networking opportunity for those who are truly passionate about games. It also offers a stimulating and challenging two days of conference, debate and discussion that brings together people from all tiers of the worldwide games and interactive industries."

[Via MCV]

Melbourne's X Media Lab will hold a conference August 10-12 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image called “Digital Worlds: Social, Virtual, Mobile,” to showcase virtual worlds, social networks and mobile communities. The event will also feature a Professional Day, including the opportunity for designers of online worlds to nominate their own projects for consideration by professional mentors-- and there's a considerable list of mentors in attendance. From X Media Lab's site:

International Mentors include world renowned film-maker and co-founder of Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation, Shekhar Kapur (Director of “Elizabeth"); Dr David Liu, CEO of Beijing’s Cyber Recreation Development Corporation, and the world’s most ambitious virtual world project; Dale Herigstad, 4-time Emmy Award winner, including the first Interactive Emmy; Francisco Cordero, the General Manager of Bebo, the UK’s largest and fastest growing social networking site; Kamar Shah, Nokia’s world-wide head of Marketing; Kevin Anderson, the Head of Blogging and Interaction at The Guardian newspaper; Marcelino Ford-Livene, Head of Interactive Advertising for Intel’s Digital Home Group (Los Angeles); Director of London’s SMARTlabs, Lizbeth Goodman; Martha Ladly, for ten years the Editor and Producer at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Multimedia and now the Director of Toronto’s Mobile Experience Lab; Australian Film Commissioner Tom Kennedy; Telstra Big Pond’s General Manager of Innovation, Jason Romney; Liz Heller, Founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based marketing innovators Buzztone; Brian Gruber, Founder and CEO of Fora.tv; and Stuart Knight and Nicholas Dryden, the founders of Xtaster.com, the UK’s funkiest music community.

We are also deeply proud that the Lab will include a delegation of the Chairman, the Founder and CEO, and the VP Technology from the Cyber Recreation District in Beijing, the biggest digital media industry government investment in China.

The University of Edinburgh has already announced a few virtual worlds-specific panels at the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival, to be hosted August 12-14th. Now they've added an additional symposium on August 15th, which will feature sessions specific to combining video games with academia, aiming to "generate new insights into the industry and culture of interactive digital media, computer games and virtual worlds."

The symposium will be keynoted by online games consultant and producer Jessica Mulligan, and Ofcom strategy manager William Garood and IBM's Chris Francis are also set to speak. Other sessions will include "Computer Games and Innovation," "Regulating Virtual Worlds," and "Industry and the Role of Education."

Speakers include William Garood, strategy manager at Ofcom, and Chris Francis, from government programmes at IBM.

Registration for the event costs GBP 50,($100 USD) or GBP 40 ($80) for attendees also registered for EIF, and there is no registration fee for full-time students.

The event is being organised by Hanna Sommerseth, of the University's Visual and Cultural Studies Unit, and Ren Reynolds of Terra Nova.

[Via GamesIndustry.biz]

Organizers at New York Law School in partnership with Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, Trinity University, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore will host a global conference on virtual worlds, focusing on the impact of online social environments on education, law, politics and society. State of Play V: Building the Global Metaverse will be held on 19-22 August 2007 at the Marina Mandarin Hotel, Singapore, the event's first time in Asia.

From the press release:

"State of Play V looks seriously into virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games," says Dan Hunter, conference co-chair. "We have expert panels who will talk about how these worlds create legal challenges for real world governments, we will examine how they can be used in education and for learning, and we will ask what are the philosophical implications for the widespread migration of users into these worlds. In addition, we also have a series of discussions about how to make a buck from these worlds, and the challenges of building them. In the workshops at the end of the conference we will have focused sessions on issues of identity, commerce, and the opportunities for ASEAN nations in the development of these worlds."

Experts from around the world will speak about:

• Cross-cultural communication and avatar-to-avatar diplomacy
• Strategies for understanding behaviors and values of virtual world residents
• Regulating speech, property, and addiction in the metaverse
• Building transnational businesses in virtual worlds
• Using virtual environments to teach students of all ages
• Space, place, and virtual world cultures

Further info and registration information for State of Play V can be found at www.nyls.edu/stateofplay.

Europe's Virtual Worlds Forum 2007 is set to take place in London October 23rd-26th, and it's announced its program and speakers, all focused around "the commercial and brand opportunities and the corporate benefits of collaborative working in virtual worlds."

The variegated panels include "Kidalicious: are children the future for virtual worlds?" featuring Sulake's (Habbo) Timo Soininen, MindCandy's Michael Smith and BBC Digital Content VP Alice Taylor; "The future is blurred: social networking meets virtual worlds," with The Multiverse Network's Corey Bridges, and the Guardian's Meg Pickard and Aleks Krotoski, and "Virtual world business models," with NCSoft's Thomas Bideaux, Makena's Steve Victorino and Areae's Raph Koster -- and that's only to name a few!

Other speakers include the "Father of the MUD" Richard Bartle, Gartner Research VP Steve Prentice and Millions of Us founder Ruben Steiger.

[Via Wonderland]

Anthony Zuiker, the creator and executive producer of the CSI television crime drama franchise, will deliver the opening keynote at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo on October 10 in San Jose.

Virtual Worlds Management, who produces the event, says Zuiker will be talking about how CSI: NY plans to extend the TV property into the interactive virtual world space to engage with customers, partners and employees. Could a virtual crime scene investigation be in the cards? We'll have to wait and see!

Broadcast TV pros are finding a lot of common ground in virtual worlds. Just recently at the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival, Peter Cowley of reality TV bigs Endemol also talked about the affinity for virtual worlds as a natural extension of broadcast properties like Big Brother and Deal or No Deal. Writer and TV producer Lee Sheldon is set to keynote the Writing for Games track at the Austin Game Developers' Conference in September, to discuss how some TV traits, like episodic content, have a lot to teach the multiplayer online gaming and social space.

"With the advent of virtual worlds, television franchises can now engage fans directly, immersing them into their brands, producing an exciting extension to the creative process," says Christopher Sherman, Virtual Worlds Conference Executive Director.

At this year's Edinburgh Interactive Festival, digital ethics consultant and Terra Nova writer Ren Reynolds led a panel titled "Protest in Virtual Worlds," with industry veteran Jessica Mulligan, Linden Lab's Jim Purbick, and Hilmar Petursson of CCP Productions (EVE Online). On the heels of a community scandal surrounding allegations of manipulation and developer misconduct in EVE that resulted in CCP's establishment of an internal affairs oversight group, the discussion was focused around what goes on behind the scenes in online worlds, and on identifying the reasons users become disgruntled and raise protest.

"You get a lot of protest in these things, from governance, game mechanics, political process and griefing," Reynolds said. "People try to run virtual worlds as a service, but people playing the game view this as a community."

"We have been planning democratically elected community representatives for a long time, and you need a venue to discuss societal issues in the world as they grow bigger and bigger," Petursson explained. "To grow beyond 500 people, you have to install some authoritarian figures into the community or build some defined structure into it."

"There are hundreds of people in Second Life who are earning their living in Second Life, which makes governance even more important," Purbick noted." We've been looking at resident governance in Second Life for a long time. We now have a public issue tracker."

Purbick says that despite doing a lot of "reaching out" in Second Life, petitions and protests by in-worlders are still commonplace, owing to issues like changes in economic governance, losses by users when land efforts are terminated, the limits of technology, and even things like the addition of voice, which many Second Life residents didn't want.

Purbick also pointed out that growth in userbase can result in problems for users. "We had to drop live help," he recalled. "We couldn't continue to give everyone free money, which caused protest."

Real-life issues coming into conflict with online world regulation can also create user protest situations; Purbick referred to the recent ban on gambling in Second Life and user fears of sexual censorship; certain jurisdictions make it illegal to have certain freedoms online.

"Linden Lab is a bottle-neck: we're trying to get out of the way. We're moving to let the users create the software as well as the content. We are moving towards a much more federated structure," Purbick says.

Mulligan identified three different types of users: first, the citizens, who "look out for everyone"; second, the "tribesman" user -- some 85-90 percent of the userbase -- who are invested in looking out for the microeconomy; and then the "Barbarians," who "couldn't care less. These guys create 80% of the problems," Mulligan explains. "They don't care about your rules or player justice systems."

"We don't manage expectations well in the online world," Mulligan conceded. "World of Warcraft are horrible at customer service, there [are] just no managed expectations. In 9 out of 10 virtual worlds, there is no meaningful communication [between the organization and the users]. The community says one thing, marketing says another. This really comes down to unfulfilled promises."

[This exclusive on-site report from Andrew Doull and Leigh Alexander originally appeared on CMP Game Group sister website Gamasutra.com.]

A new Tech Confidential blog makes note of the recent outpouring of adoration VCs have for the virtual worlds space, and rounds up some big numbers, too:

Virtual worlds have also been attracting plenty of real VC capital. The $700 million acquisition of Club Penguin by the Walt Disney Co. and all the money "World of Warcraft" is bringing in to Vivendi SA (nearly $287 million in the second quarter) has venture firms excited about investing in virtual worlds. Doppelganger Inc. announced an $11 million financing to support the recent launch of its online virtual world — vSide — which will be three times larger than its Music Lounge predecessor.

Other venture-backed virtual worlds include: Linden Research Inc., the San Francisco-based operator of Second Life with $30 million in funding; There.com with more than $33 million; Helsinki-based Sulake Corp. Oy with more than $26 million; and Multiverse Network Inc. with $4.75 million.

The blog also correctly observes that advertisers and media companies are now looking seriously beyond television into the online space, and "with immersive environments, virtual worlds could be one of their biggest opportunities on the Internet." Tech Confidential and The Deal plan to discuss these big-bucks movements in depth at their upcoming Convergence 2.0 conference on September 17th in New York City.

Our sister site Gamasutra recently spoke with Jane Pinckard, content director for the Austin Game Developers Conference to be held September 5-7th at the Austin Convention Center in Texas. This year's event includes a focus on virtual worlds along with MMO games, as Jane discusses in this salient excerpt:

What’s new in the MMO game space this year at the show?

We have a keynote by Hiromichi Tanaka, the producer of Final Fantasy XI. The thing that’s really compelling about that game for our advisory board is that it’s a multiplatform MMO, which is really difficult to do. You have players on PCs and on consoles interacting, and that’s a huge technical challenge that they were able to roll out successfully.

Another trend has really been RMTs and microtransactions – as a general category, it would be “alternative revenue streams.” MMOs are traditionally subscription-based, but there’s all these new things going on, particularly in the Asian markets, where there are virtual items sales and different ways of monetizing the consumer, so that’s been a very strong trend. We have several sessions that address that and how it’s being done in Asia and how those models can be applied to US markets.

What’s going on specifically for the virtual worlds-specific audience?

Well, there’s a little bit of a debate about whether virtual worlds belong with gaming and game development. But World of Warcraft is a virtual world; they’ve built a virtual world that happens to be part of a very structured game experience. So it’s not open-ended like Second Life or other titles that are tied to marketing initiatives and other products. However, there’s a lot of things going on in virtual worlds that I think can be applied to the game market, and I think that the advisory board has selected certain things [to reflect that].

One of the keynotes is Sulka Haro, and he’s the lead designer on Habbo Hotel. That’s not strictly a game, but there are some cool things being done in that world that can impact games, and might be successfully applied to games. Also, the social aspects of virtual worlds have a lot of interesting possibilities for games – combining a virtual world with social networking applications, as Habbo Hotel does.

There’s also a panel on making money in virtual worlds that focuses on Second Life, but of course people have been making money off of online games for a long time. So I guess it’s about “what can games learn from virtual worlds?”

We go back and forth at the advisory board about this. I don’t see that a distinction is necessarily very helpful [between games and online worlds]. There are a lot of things that virtual worlds are making strong progress that I think games could benefit from, like handling transactions. Though, things like the Station Exchange auction system, where users can trade items officially with Sony Online’s blessing – that’s an interesting step in that direction.

You can now read the complete interview at Gamasutra.

Today marked the first day of conferences at the State of Play V conference in Singapore. Organized by Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, New York Law School, Trinity University, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, the conference on virtual worlds invites experts across disciplines to discuss the future of cyberspace and the impact of these new immersive, social online environments on education, law, politics and society.

As per this SoP’s mandate, panels featured more than just the “usual suspects,” the primarily Western voices which have dominated games scholarship thus far. While both established and upcoming Western voices do seem to be making up a significant portion of attendees to the conference, many Asian countries have come – most notably from Singapore, Korea and China.

Prior to the panel sessions, we were addressed by a senior official from the Singaporean government. Dr. Balaji Sadasivan, Senior Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Information, Communications and the Arts, said that the importance for collaboration in games, noting the “drive to tap into the digital age.”

The first session, 'Building Businesses in Virtual Worlds', dealt with those businesses grown inside of worlds, but also those which are being brought inside. Second Life mogul Guntram Graef, said that corporations may need to “exit the magic circle,” in order to succeed. Jerry Paffendorf of Electric Sheep Company also encouraged corporations and developers to look at how they might use unique intellectual property and stories created within games.

Meanwhile, Thomas Malaby answered the predominantly business-oriented tone to the session by asking a question: could game-making be becoming less about gamers, and more about the corporations attracted?

The second session, 'Regulating Virtual Worlds', focused strongly on the different issues inherent to applying nationally and internationally binding laws to game spaces. Charles Lim Aeng Chang, of the Singapore Attorney General’s office, explored the issue of accommodating local governments, an idea which seemed immediately rebuffed.

David Post complained over the absence of in-game legal systems. Addressing game developers as “Ye Olde Game Gods,” he asked when developers would take the issue of online law seriously, most especially by enforcing player-made decisions. Richard Bartle then pointed out that most often, players don’t actually want laws – just as “most people like Gods to not do much.”

'Education, Kids and Teens in Virtual Worlds' examined some of the past, current and future classroom applications to games. Aaron Delwiche presented his courses which brought players into MMO spaces, while Angeline Khoo and others described certain areas where playing games actually taught difficult and emotional life lessons. You know, gank and be ganked. Not mentioned overly in the discussion on education was Harvard University’s Berkman Center, which had premiered at the SoP their initiative to teach essential life skills through the learning of poker.

While many people are exploring games as an educational tool, Dr. K. Pelly Periasamy of Nanyang Technological University asked a simple and pertinent question: “Is it applicable to the real world? The feel among the panelists was that games do hold limits as an educational tool, though there are also immense opportunities.

Connie Yowell of the MacArthur Foundation brought up her concerns, asking whether some ‘new’ game theory may be “replicating rather than pushing the edges,” using established themes rather than exploring the untested. She also said that now is the time to do such research – as worldwide interest, and more importantly the resultant funding, will only last so long.

The final session worked on the topic of 'Connecting East and West'. The prolific Allen Varney moderated. Referring to their rapid growth, he suggested that event hosts “Singapore will surprise us.” Joshua Fouts reminded attendees that while we may all get excited over the numbers in World of Warcraft, it’s still just roughly half as large as its counterparts in Asian virtual worlds.

This was also the first session to include a translator. Judge Unggi Yoon of Korea spoke at length on how Korean culture influenced, but then was in turn changed, by games. He also spoke on the reasons behind the development of the PC Baang, or Korean PC room, saying that many sprung up and were run by individuals and families who had been struck hard by the Asian financial crisis.

What was fascinating about Judge Unggi Yoon’s speech is that a room full of bustling academics fell almost completely silent. Even if only for a moment, it seemed that the vision of this conference had been realized. East and West are sharing with one another.

[The preceding article by Neils Clark originally ran on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

[The following article by Neils Clark originally ran on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Following yesterday's opening day coverage, the second day of the State Of Play V academic conference in Singapore tackled issues like legal precedents in in-world property ownership and saw “Game Gods” from Second Life, There, and MUD creator Richard Bartle speak on building virtual worlds.

Refreshed from the previous night’s safari, games academics from the East and West again convened this morning for the SoP V in Singapore. The first panel of the day addressed the topic of Understanding Virtual Worlds Inhabitants, looking at the ways in which we can understand the gamers online.

“You’re going to arrive as a three-year-old,” said Thomas Malaby, Assoc. Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. The consensus among the panelists seemed to be that every game world today is unique, and that playing inside remains one of the few ways in which we can reach an informed understanding. Stanford’s Henrik Bennetsen said that, “It’s one of those things that’s hard to understand from the outside.” Even so, he later noted that the rewards are, “totally worth it.”

Also in the panel, Ian Lamont put the spotlight on how the popular press shapes many people’s thinking on games. “Their understanding will be shaped by the coverage in the news media,” he said. Many editors only have a couple hours of day, sometimes in which to research four or five different articles. Some journalists also “go for the low hanging fruit,” continued Lamont, provided by PR companies. As a result, there’s not much to counter the seemingly standard overgeneralization and sensationalism in the popular press.

Space, Place and Culture inside Virtual Worlds primarily flitted around the idea that locations and architecture can have a marked influence on how players act. “Architects structure spaces, and those in turn then structure us,” said Kevin Collins, a Law Prof a penchant for architecture at Indiana U. He and Eric Champion of the U. of Queensland looked at how space then creates culture, at times having an intense influence over our daily lives.

At lunch, Harvard University’s Charles Nesson discussed the use of gaming as an educational tool, most specifically using poker. He hinted on an idea that, while not new, is very compelling: games could be used to revolutionize the educational system. Nesson’s Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society has apparently been “inundated by requests,” from schools looking to join.

After lunch we looked at the Wealth of Virtual Nations. Panelists discussed the current legal precedents, and the stumbling blocks ahead of developers looking to make property ownership inside of virtual worlds more robust. Nick Abrahams of Australia’s Media and Telecommunications Group said that we have to “craft a bargain that is somehow fair.” And then there are cases like Bragg vs. Second Life, where a SL user is looking to reclaim his original property after having been pegged and banned for unfair land buying. Balancing these problems among many jurisdictions is difficult, and as with many new situations, Abrahams said that “you gather precedent wherever you can.” Countries have been, and will continue to learn law from one another.

In one of the real highlights to the conference, Judge Unggi Yoon again amazed the conference. Korea’s legal system is already in the process of passing laws to regulate the trade, sale and taxation of virtual goods. Their current plans are to implement a system wherein virtual properties are going to be considered “public,” which is to say real properties with regard to tax laws on transactions. Korea, however, won’t be regulating small trades between two people, which they are considering “private.” Yoon said that the system would be in place by the end of the year. This lead to a great deal of speculation: to what degree will the East lead regulation inside of online spaces?

The final session dealt with Building Virtual Worlds. The panel featured CEOs and Executives from Second Life, There.com, the Chinese counterpart to There and SL: HiPiHi, and gogofrog, a take on 3-D internet using the Flash engine. And Richard Bartle was there, too. Where these “Game Gods” primarily discussed the specifics of making virtual worlds work, on a number of levels, Bartle brought us back to the dawn of games programming. He walked us through the process of using punch-cards and databases and compilers to create the coding behind virtual worlds. When the process was finished, he then only needed “a little bit of imagination at the top.”

Today, he said, most people just sew together coding and make a database. Bartle looks forward to a point in time, a few years from now, when all that will be needed is that little bit of imagination at the top. “We don’t need to understand a combustion engine to drive a car,” he said, though most of us cannot imagine living without today’s vehicles. And yet his clear excitement was tempered with an apprehension. “I’m afraid that people are going to take away my toys,” he said. It does follow that when the real world endorses the journalists who propagate generalist and sensationalist images of gaming, some fears are warranted.

The problems, hurdles, and possibilities given game companies won’t be solved by ignoring research, beating the same themes or gameplay to death, or leaving the respective East or West well enough alone. The companies who make and take ground will show an earnest understanding and compassion for both the worlds that they create, and global audience which plays them.

Independent game studio Last Straw Productions announced keynote speakers for both days of the Indie MMO Game Developers Conference 2.0, which aims to provide content, community and contacts for artists, designers, programmers, and Indie entrepreneurs.

The Indie-themed keynote speaker on March 29th is "Indie Evangelist" Jay Moore. Previously, Jay was director of business development at online tool developer and game publisher GarageGames, where, among other things, he launched IndieGamesCon and worked to establish Torque as the game engine platform of choice for independent game developers.

The MMOG Design-themed keynote speaker on March 30th is industry guru and "founding father" of virtual worlds Dr. Richard Bartle, co-writer of the first MUD in 1978 and author of the 2003 book Designing Virtual Worlds, now an industry consultant and a professor of computer game design at the University of Essex, UK.

“IMGDC is honored to have such renowned industry professionals as keynote speakers. It doesn’t get much better than this!" Says IMGDC founder and director Jonathon Stevens states. "IMGDC 2.0 is going to be an incredible conference building on the passion and excitement we saw last year. Last year, we got you excited, this year you’ll leave IMGDC with a passion and love for an industry that desperately needs it!”

IMGDC will be held March 29th – 30th, 2008 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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.

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.]

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!

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.

When we talk about the future of online gaming, it's impossible not to think about microtransactions and Web 2.0. And not everyone quite agrees with what that future will look like -- so, when some experienced online gaming folks got together to share future predictions at Austin GDC, some sparks flew, as you'll see in the following feature which originally ran at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.

On the final day of the 2007 Austin Game Developers conference, GoPets' Eric Bethke, Areae's Raph Koster, EA Mythic's Marc Jacobs and Sony Online Entertainment Austin head John Blakely convened to answer a question, in a panel of the same name: What are the biggest online gaming opportunities?

Microtransactions

Jacobs raised issues with microtransactions relating to the value of the items sold, and Bethke chimed in: "Whatever you write in your EULA is your best wish, but we have hundreds of years of English common law about transactions."

"We really really really have to make a distinction between the concept of microtransactions -- which means spending a tiny amount of money -- and the ownership of digital assets," Koster stressed. "They are not the same thing. We cannot equate them." He added, "Betting the farm on business models instead of audiences and consumer needs is always a bad idea."

"Out of the top 10 MMOs in USA and Europe, WoW is probably the only subscription-based [game], and the only one that comes on a CD. Habbo is bigger than WoW in Europe." Koster noted.

"You don't go to The Gap and buy a $99 monthly subscription to clothes," Bethke added.

Jacobs disagreed. "I think RMT doesn't work in a lot of games. I think it's bad for the players and bad for the consumers," he suggested. "I think anyone who says there is 'one model' is wrong. Eric, if you say simply, 'this is bad and there is only way we should be doing it,' then you are engaging in the same thing you accuse me of doing."

So will a big RMT game come? "Yes, it will happen -- of course it's going to happen that someone is going to do a great game that will involve heavy RMT," Jacobs answered. "When it's going to come, God only knows. I don't think it will open the floodgates. I think, like the subscription model, it's just a model and people will try it and, like most MMOs, it will fail."

A possible success route, as Blakely suggested: "Engage your consumers in meaningful ways and give them choices. I'm a consumer, I love choices."

"The thing that is confusing is that RMT is not a model, it's thousands of possible models," clarified Bethke. "I love that, in Nexon's KartRider, if you want to switch [your user interface] you can buy 100 switches for a buck. If you want to be a competitor, you put in 4 cents."

"Think about your life; we are consumers, we thrive as consumers," added Blakely. "Whenever you bring people together, they'll participate in transactions."

"You look at the ecology that's been built up around The Sims, where people have item-based sites -- that is the exact same thing... as somebody selling epic mounts," Koster pointed out.

User-Generated Content

The panelists discussed Web 2.0 and the advent of user-generated content. "It's almost a bizarre question. This feels like two conferences going on at once with two distant branches of the family who don't like each other," Koster said. "To some degree, that used to be the coolest thing about the game industry. Richard Garriott was UGC at one time. We can't be snobbish about UGC. We are all users. There is a category error here."

He continued, "The technical sophistication to make content has gotten too damn high for the typical user. How many of you used to like playing mods? Seen any good ones lately? People can't even make a texture anymore -- it's making eight of them. 50 percent of Americans are creating content on the web... that's only if you count uploading their own photos, writing a blog or contributing to a community site. If you add in [things like rating on eBay] it's 100 percent of users! If you look at something like Facebook... it has levels, it has points, it has items, it has reputation systems, it has kabillions of users... there it is!"

"I hate the distinction between virtual worlds and games," agreed Bethke. "You want directed content to get them started -- they don't know what to do in your world. This is the skeleton? The user-generated content becomes the flesh between the bones. A great game would be a virtual world people could have a full existence on, and enjoy interacting on."

"You mention polish and quality -- which I agree, for seed content, [is] incredibly important, but we need to throw in some words like 'empowerment'." Koster suggested. "From what we see, the huge area [where] user-generated content flourishes is in fansites."

"I think Blizzard should sell gold -- I would buy it," Bethke noted.

Xbox Live Arcade

The topic turned next to Xbox Live Arcade. "Xbox Live is one of the most successful stories in the game industry," Jacobs pointed out. "Look at what Microsoft has done with it, and what people said when they launched it."

"The issue is that on the web, there is such a noise level -- and not just a noise level, a noise level of totally kick-ass product," Koster added.

"I think that the future of gaming will be large virtual worlds with RMT transactions," Bethke suggested. "I think the Web 2.0 guys are failing by not putting in good content," he added, as opposed to content-rich MMOs. "When I'm in the web space, I go 'you web guys, do you not realize you suck at content, you suck at fun?'" Koster agreed -- suggesting MMO guys are missing the boat as well.

"Subscriptions are one big thick chunky tool, it's hard to make them work for that user," Bethke said.

"There is a balancing point with [the value of microtransactions items]," Koster said. "And believe me, your customers will tell you about it."

Virtual Worlds Management has announced that Christian Renaud of the Cisco Technology Center will deliver the Thursday keynote at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo to be held October 11, 2007 in San Jose, California.

Renaud is the chief architect of Networked Virtual Environments for the Cisco Technology Center. Its staff members support Cisco's Corporate Development unit, helping to determine Cisco's future technologies and developing them into new revenue streams for the company.

Renaud will discuss the ways that virtual worlds platforms and technologies will drive the creation of new enterprise apps. "With all the media attention surrounding virtual worlds, this conference is the ideal opportunity for corporations to learn how this technology can be applied for maximum benefit and increased productivity," he says.

Renaud continued: "I hope to help with this effort by distinguishing what it really means within the context of existing and future communications infrastructures and how organizations can leverage the benefits of virtual worlds technologies and applications."

At the 2007 DEMOfall conference, which runs September 24-26 in San Diego, Web commerce and media solutions company View22 Technology unveiled a new "3D Web community" to allow users to create, share and explore interactive 3D scenes in their browser. It's called SceneCaster, and it aims to connect online worlds with internet commerce and social networking.

At the time of this article's publication there are few details available as to how, exactly, SceneCaster works; the website features a beta countdown and a "coming soon" screen. According to the press release, though, SceneCaster allows users to create, share and discuss their own 3D scenes or to transform existing 3D scenes using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Integrating with Google's 3D Warehouse and providing access to that content catalog, it aims to enable userrs to search for, collect and customize content for their own scenes.

"SceneCaster is one tool in the 3D Internet landscape that helps make immersive, social media accessible to everyone," said Sandy Kearney, global director, Emerging 3-D Internet and Virtual Business at IBM. "By providing an easy-to-use environment and a wide range of content, SceneCaster offers an exciting marketing opportunity for virtual environments."

A number of firms joined SceneCaster at DEMOfall 07 as launch partners, including Akamai, e-interiors, iStockphoto, Kohler, Oddcast, SmartFurniture, Wolfgang’s Vault and ZeroFootprint. Smart Furniture president T.J. Gentle said that SceneCaster can help his customers create virtual versions of their interior spaces to better visualize how SmartFurniture's products can fit into their design scheme, while allowing friends and family to collaborate. SceneCaster promises more partners and sponsors to be announced following its US debut.

The Virtual Worlds Forum Europe 2007, to be held October 24-25 in London, has announced an expanded list of speakers and exhibitors and a growing list of exhibitors. Workshops are scheduled for October 23 and 26.

Speakers include keynotes from Paul Ledak, vice president of development, Digital Convergence, IBM and Lord Puttnam of Queensgate, and presentations from industry leaders including Dr. Richard Bartle, Raph Koster at AreaE, Jessica Mulligan at Sunflowers, Alice Taylor at Channel 4 Television, Rob Seaver at Vivox, and Thomas Bidaux at NCSoft, among many others.

“First year conferences in any discipline usually start very small, and grow significantly in years two and three, but the immediate popularity of VWF Europe has exceeded our expectations,” says conference director Sasha Frieze. “Key players in the virtual worlds space, including developers, analysts, and investors, have recognized the future of this rapidly expanding market in Europe , and have generously supported the show in enthusiastic numbers.”

Frieze noted that 15 major exhibitors from five countries are on board including IBM, River Runs Red, and There, and that number is growing.

"IBM, as a founding sponsor, is investing in the Virtual Worlds Forum because of its leadership position as the first virtual worlds conference in Europe , and for the importance of cultivating a collaborative virtual world community," said Paul Ledak, vice president of development, Digital Convergence, IBM. “As the 3D Internet evolves, we will see a transformation in how businesses use these environments to realize business value. The Virtual Worlds Forum will be an excellent venue to collaborate with the community and discuss shaping the future of virtual worlds."

Workshops include Virtual Worlds 101 on October 23rd, Enterprise Virtual Worlds on October 24th, Risk, Reputation, and Virtual Worlds on October 26th

At the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in San Jose today, CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker gave an intriguing, if 'abstract' keynote speech discussing how the popular U.S. TV show is intending to integrate online worlds - specifically Second Life - into its storyline, and how he sees the future of entertainment as increasingly spanning web-based and offline spaces simultaneously.

Starting out his talk, Zuiker told of a childhood in Vegas as the son of a twenty-one dealer, who himself worked as a casino employee until he got the idea for CSI, a franchise which encompasses multiple cities and, Zuiker says, has come to be worth $6 billion.

The power of television helped Zuiker to support his parents' retirement, and it's a power that continues growing in the current generation, as he explained how music videos and regular communication have been replaced by user-customized content, digital music and social networking sites like Facebook.

Now, Zuiker says he's looking to a new future -- stating that connected online and mobile experiences are the future of TV. "The future will be a web-native program, not television," he says, foreseeing mobile alerts for a show's narrative as part of a participatory experience.

Further illustrating the strength of the relationship between TV and Web, Zuiker recalled a time that the models of softcore pin-up site SuicideGirls were on CSI, and the show mentioned the Web address specifically. Despite resistance from NBC, Zuiker went ahead with the reference, and found that visits to the SuicideGirls site increased 50 percent during the airing of the show. "What that told me was that while people are watching television, they were also online at the same time," Zuiker said.

He then had the idea to use the mobile platform to create an interactive experience around the show. It's called CSI Q, and a question asked partway through the CSI show -- like the crime motive, or who the killer is -- can be answered via cell phone for a dollar. At first, there would be about 40,000 respondents. Then, Zuiker made the question easier, and saw that the number of respondents rose to about 75,000. "People want to be right for their dollar," he observed.

Now, Zuiker's team is partnering with virtual architecture company and conference lead sponsor Electric Sheep to welcome CSI viewers who may not understand virtual worlds. He announced that on Wednesday, October 24th, a CSI:NY episode will feature actor Gary Sinise's character chasing a killer in Second Life, leading up to a cliffhanger ending with an online conclusion.

Zuiker also noted that Second Life is suffering a backlash because of what users and investors expect to see in exchange for the large amount of money being invested in virtual items, storefronts and branding opportunities. He proposed that rewarding the users for interacting with product placement can add value to the experience both for users and for brand identities.

He concluded with a plea to investors to continue consider virtual worlds, stating that combining televison, online, and mobile entertainment is the way of the future. Worlds In Motion will have further coverage from the Virtual Worlds Conference in the near future.

[Chris Woodard contributed to this report.]

A panel at the 2007 Virtual Worlds Conference titled, 'Demographics and Numbers: Where Things Are and Where They're Headed' brought together Michael Cai, director of Broadband and Gaming at Parks Associates, Mary Ellen Gordon, owner of Market Truths Limited, and K Zero managing director Nic Mitham to parse out the demographics in the virtual worlds space.

Looking at market penetration, Mitham opined, "I think it’s pretty fair to say that virtual growth to date has been heavily based on word of mouth and viral marketing.” Moreover, Mitham expects the trend to continue, calling on the example of companies like BMW opening Second Life islands to widespread media coverage as a driver of Second Life population growth.

Finding New Markets, Developing Existing Ones

One can't rely purely on PR for advertising, Mitham added, stating that he hopes to see traditional marketing to start happening. "We’re seeing children actively adopting Club Penguin, Whyville, Habbo... as they eventually grow out of it, they will be looking for new worlds to grow into. There’s a huge market already there, waiting to happen."

The market is developing globally, too, Mitham said, noting that European countries are also actively embracing virtual worlds. Though typically Russia and South America are slower to adapt, Mitham noted, these are large growth areas that will begin adopting virtual worlds more in the future.

"We don't see much for 'silver surfers,'" Mitham added, noting that older users are also a prime growth area. Similarly, he expects corporate adoption to broaden, as companies like IBM encourage their employees to move into virtual worlds for corporate uses, and educational institutes are using virtual worlds in the classroom for the set aged 8 to 15.

Engaging New Users

It's a matter of product development, he said -- developing new products for marketplaces that already exist. Mitham also noted that better user interfaces and new user orientation will assist in driving more widespread adoption, as will other avenues of access like web-based remote viewers.

Diversification is the other key avenue, Mitham noted -- bringing new products into untapped markets, as with category-centric "vertical worlds". One example Mitham raised is Football Superstars, a virtual world currently in development for people who play football and soccer. Half the world is for playing football, the other half is for living the life of a footballer.

Beyond this, there are platform-centric virtual worlds, such as Sony's upcoming PlayStation Home, which will be used as a convergence tool for gamers. "The reason for going in isn’t the new technology; people are going in for a specific reason,," Mitham said.

Additionally, Mitham said that avatars that can cross worlds -- the interoperability work IBM is currently involved in -- will be "a really good driving factor for getting more people engaged in virtual worlds."

Mitham offered some projections on growth in virtual worlds he believes will take place between the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008. He anticipates growth of registered accounts in Second Life to increase from 10 million to 20 million, 1 million to 7 million for There, .6 to 3 million for Kaneva, from zero to 10 million for the Chinese virtual world HiPiHi, an increase from 3 million to 10 million for Whyville, and from 15 million to 30 million for Club Penguin.

Parks Associates' Michael Cai took the stage. "I’m still trying to formulate my analysis for the industry," he said, explaining that Parks Associates will be launching a new gamer study in the next 3 to 6 months.

The Demographics of User Retention

Cai said that about 6 percent of broadband users visit a virtual world on a weekly basis; 18 percent of them have tried at least once. So, he said, about one third who try a virtual world stay there, though he didn't quantify how many return visits or what frequency of regular use quantifies "staying." Cai says that Second Life is still number 1 in terms of user retention.

He noted that 71 percent of users are aged 18 to 24, numbering more visitors to social networks than virtual worlds "by a large margin." This is mostly because of ease of use, he says, adding that more females use social networks contrasted with more males who use virtual worlds. "People use these things for hooking up, so male to female ratio is important for growth," he added.

Some other interesting numbers -- for teens who play games in general, including but not specifically virtual worlds, 76 percent play with other people, 19 percent play alone, and 42 play with their moms, Cai said.

Promoting Brand Images in Virtual Worlds: Pros and Cons

“So what are the business implications of virtual worlds?” Marketing and advertising is very promising for the virtual world," Cai said. He noted that 500 out of 1000 internet users in a questionnaire were Second Life users, and the same questionaire found that 60 percent of them watched less television. "Advertising needs to migrate to virtual worlds as opposed to in-game advertising," Cai explained.

While Cai noted that the large majority of Second Life users consider the world a good forum to promote brand images, he noted some pros and cons. As a positive, filling Second Life with brand messages creates an accurate real-world replica. It can leverage avatar interaction and viral marketing, thereby not requiring the player's full attention the way an MMORPG does. And virtual world involvement generates a lot of real world buzz.

On the downside, though, virtual worlds presently have a small base of active and concurrent players. Also, they may not be appropriate for traditional in-game ad formats due to low collective traffic in most areas; Cai cited cases where marketers spend 300,000 to make an island, and a month later, there's no one there. Another con is that properties set up by brands in virtual worlds require active management and maintenance. According to Cai, the best results for virtual world marketing are currently delivered through organized events -- however, technical limitations can keep the scale of such events limited.

Making a Good Impression

Mary Ellen Gordon is the owner of Market Truths Limited, who performs market research analysis in both the real and virtual worlds, mainly Second Life. In the company's first quarter 2007 survey of Second Life, Gordon says 40 percent of users had positive impressions of real-life brands in Second Life -- and in the second quarter survey, that number increased to 60 percent. She attributes the increased positive results to making Second Life more realistic and bringing in assets, in addition to population increases in the world.

She suggested marketers broaden their focus in terms of virtual world tactics by doing things like giving away virtual versions of real-life products, sponsoring events and then customizing or co-creating real-life products to reflect in-world events. Still, she noted, most tactics are perceived more positively when undertaken by brands for which pre-existing attitudes are positive.

She concluded the panel by predicting future diversification of the types of brands that are present in virtual worlds.

[Chris Woodard contributed to this report.]

It seems that mobile connectivity to virtual worlds is right on the horizon. But what about a virtual world actually self-contained in a mobile phone? At the 2007 Virtual Worlds Conference, Ironstar Helsinki CEO Joakim Achren demonstrated and discussed MoiPal, his company's mobile virtual world that works on basic Java handsets.

"The idea was like, your friend in the phone," Achren said. "It’s an avatar that lives in your cellphone." The mobile pal is controlled like a Sim, or a Tamagotchi. Achren explained that he got the idea from thinking of how adults have facebook and kids and 'tweens have Club Penguin -- but what about teens?

"They are usually not at home, but they always have a mobile phone with them," Achren noted. "And they usually have the best phones. It is a means of self-expression, like ringtones. But self expression should be more than just ringtones."

Achren did say that, as it happens only during idle time, gaming and social networking on a mobile platform still have to integrate with a website, especially since mobile phones have such restrictive memory. "Concentrate on using the mobile to do something simple and realistic," he advised. "You can’t just take Second Life and put it on a mobile -- except for Japan, maybe,” he joked.

“It has to be a personality extension... and it has to be free,” Achren continued, noting it's not generally a good idea to aim a subscription-based service to kids, since they probably won't even try it. Incentivizing free content is a much better method, he said.

Moreover, there are a lot of possibilities for the mobile platform. Achren highlights simple 2 or 3-dimensional content items that can be created on a phone without challenging the memory restrictions. There's also social networking. "You’ve seen Facebook on a mobile. It works pretty well," Achren said.

“Mobile gaming is here to stay, so why not think of mobile when it comes to virtual worlds?” He added.

Successful apps have to be client apps. For Western countries the handsets really allow for just text, but Java handsets can be adopted by just about all phones. Achren noted that Flash is becoming more prevalent on handsets, so it may be handy in the future, but for now, "Java is the way to go," especially since Java code translates easily between a mobile phone and a PC.

It also needs to use very little wireless data -- less than 1 megabyte, according to Achren. "It can't be a 100 dollar phone bill every month," he noted.

Achren described his company's own experience. In 2005, they had developed their own mobile game engine, and they wanted to do something special with it. The pet aspect was a good fit, because it was simple -- you feed the avatar and play games with it, without the need for a network connection. Users can stream their stats to the server, but it's not required. There are also elements of adventure gaming involved. "That’s how we thought of the world, a world with a lot of things to do, not just standing around and talking.” So MoiPal incorporated missions, pre-scripted events, and a narrative.

Most notably, MoiPal is persistent. "Even when you’re sleeping, your pal is doing something," Achren says. The avatar can travel on its own to a virtual city, and upon returning will report to the user about its adventures. "When you wake up in the morning, on the bus you can see what your pal has done and send him or her to do something else while you’re at school," Achren explains.

The website acts as an extension of the world. "It gives you a godlike view of what's happening," Achren explains. Through the website, users can see what others are doing with their pals, their decorations, clothing choices and other game elements. There's even a version of the mobile game available on the website in a pop-up window, for those users who can't play the game on their phones.

The content is monetized directly, through virtual goods that can be obtained through a variety of payment options like SMS, PayPal or a credit card. Users can buy gaming extensions, decorative items and other content bonuses that provide better equipment and resources. There are also indirect monetization models, like sponsorships, advertising and product placement.

"Ringtones and wallpapers are old news," Achren says. "Having brands give items and missions is a better incentive."

We're pleased to announce more of the speakers who'll be participating in the upcoming Worlds In Motion Summit! Nexon's Min Kim, Millions of Us' Reuben Steiger, Rmbr's Gabe Zichermann and GoPets' Erik Bethke will be joining the event; previously-revealed speakers include Areae's Raph Koster, Worldwide Biggies CTO and Nicktropolis co-creator Chris Romero, Conduit Labs' Nabeel Hyatt and Relic Labs studio head Adrian Crook.

The Summit, which is organized by the editors of WorldsInMotion.biz, will be held on Monday and Tuesday, February 18-19th 2008, as part of the 2008 Game Developers Conference. The Summit will focus on the intersection of online worlds and games, and the official description of the event is as follows:

"The Worlds in Motion Summit is a definitive event tailored for the growing number of industry professionals and Fortune 500 companies developing interactive online spaces for both entertainment and commercial purposes. Discussion forums will delve into online worlds, social gaming and media and player created activity.

These will provide insight for developers of all backgrounds into how the game industry is collectively building socialization into games and integrating personalization and player-generated content into gameplay — while widely accessible Web and networking tools are looking to the game industry for their way forward."

In addition, following its initial announcement, the inaugural Worlds In Motion Summit has announced two more speakers, and is expected to debut many more over the next few weeks. Now joining the event will be:

- Nexon's Min Kim
(Already a pioneer in areas of online socialization, personalization and microtransactions-based virtual economies in Korea, Nexon successfully brought games like MapleStory and Audition to a variety of markets around the world, including North America and Europe, and Min Kim of Nexon U.S.A. will discuss how knowing individual markets helped these titles achieve big success wherever they've gone.)

- Millions of Us' Reuben Steiger
(Millions of Us has successfully brought various music and television properties into the virtual world, most recently supporting CNN's Second Life launch, and Millions of Us CEO Reuben Steiger will be discussing how virtual worlds will play a pivotal role in the convergence of entertainment media, as formerly disparate content meets in a single online experience.)

- Rmbr's Gabe Zichermann
(Ten-year industry veteran Zichermann developed the concept for rmbr in early 2007 after realizing that he had stopped enjoying the process of dealing with his friends’ online photos, and that a game-centric approach might fix the problem. He will share his perspectives on web concepts and 2D virtual worlds as a dominant paradigm.)

- GoPets' Erik Bethke
(Author and developer Erik Bethke, CEO of GoPets.com, will discuss the tenets of user engagement, and share how taking a lesson from Richard Bartle's four gamer "types" helped grow revenue and create user engagement with his virtual pets product.)

The Summit is available to attend via several different Game Developers Conference 2008 passes, and more information is available on the Worlds In Motion Summit webpage.

Evergreen Events has announced that its online focused event, OGDC, has been retitled the Ion Game Conference, set to take place in Seattle from May 13th to May 15th, 2008. This year's theme will be "redefining online," which the organizer says corresponds with an increased global focus for the event.

The company says 20 percent of attendees for last year's event were from outside the United States, representing countries such as Korea, Germany, Japan and Australia. With the aim of addressing a broader worldwide audience, Evergreen says that social networking, virtual worlds and multiple platforms beyond the PC will be a core focus for the ION Game Conference.

The company says its current deadlines for Ion remain on schedule, with the call for speakers set to close January 21st. Last year's topics included "Automating Online Game Balance”, “The Chinese Game Market: Latest Developments and Trends”, and “Secrets and Challenges of Localizing and Monetizing Different IP: Real World Cases” with speakers including Sony Online Entertainment's Alan Crosby, 38 Studios' Brett Close, and Disney Online's Mike Goslin.

Said conference director Peter Freese, “At Evergreen Events, we wanted a new identity that represented what we offer with our conference: unsurpassed networking opportunities and unique sessions and panels you cannot find anywhere else, among hundreds of like-minded online game industry veterans from around the world. Ion best symbolizes these qualities.”

Evergreen Events, organizer of the 2008 ION Game Conference, has announced that Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley will deliver the Wednesday, May 13th keynote address at the conference in Seattle.

Smedley will discuss the past, present and future accomplishments of SOE and the MMO market in general, the organizers say.

Smedley is responsible for SOE's overall vision and growth, and management of its employees. He has previously held positions with ATG, Knight Technologies, 989 Studios, as well as Verant Technologies, where he was co-founder before it became SOE in 2000.

ION Conference director Peter Freese said, “John Smedley and SOE have had an indelible impact in the online game industry. His insight of the past and vision for the future is a message we are excited to share with our attendees.”

Interested parties may find registration and other information at the official event website, http://www.ionconference.com.

Think Services (formerly CMP, also parent of Worlds in Motion) has announced that Mitch Kapor will keynote at Life 2.0 Summit Spring, a six-day virtual conference taking place in Second Life March 15-21, 2008.

Kapor is board chair of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life; chair and founder of the Open Source Applications Foundation; co-founder of the Electronic Frontier and Mozilla Foundations; and is best-known as the creator of Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet that revolutionized enterprise computing in the 80s. He will speak about current work to enhance the user interface for virtual worlds, enabling even more immersive experiences in the medium.

Life 2.0 Spring will offer 7 tracks, metaverse marketing, community nurturance and involvement, 3D commerce, metrics and ROI, tools and techniques, and will dive deep to explore business applications and opportunities offered by emerging virtual world platforms. Evening sessions will provide highly-topical roundtables, and offer a forum for professionals in Higher Education, Government, Public Works, Green Technology, and Social/Humanitarian/Philanthropic work to network and share ideas.

Conference director John Jainschigg commented, "We are delighted to welcome Mr. Kapor back to Life 2.0, and eager to hear more about his current work. He was kind enough to address our audience a year ago, at the founding of this event. Much of what he looked forward to in that first keynote has come true -- the virtual worlds phenomenon has exploded, Second Life's user base and concurrency have grown 600%, and our show is tracking about the same. So it's a great time for another look forward from this master of technology and market insight."

Virtual Worlds Management, organizers of the second annual Virtual Worlds Conference in New York City, have announced keynote speakers for the event set to take place April 3-4, 2008.

Keynote addresses will be given by: Girls Mattel Brands general manager and SVP Charles Scothon; Barbie Tech senior brand manager Rosie O'Neill; MTV Networks Music & Logo Enterprise Group EVP Jeffrey Yapp; Electric Sheep CEO Sibley Verbeck; Neopets SVP and general manager Kyra Reppen, and IBM Systems and Technology Group VP and associate general counsel Steve Mortinger.

Virtual Worlds Management executive director Christopher Sherman commented, "Virtual worlds are rapidly reshaping the toy, media, and entertainment industries. This year's Virtual Worlds Conference keynoters are individuals who are leading the charge, leveraging existing content, brands and intellectual property to create new, high-margin virtual worlds that excite, entertain and engage audiences."

Interested parties may visit the official site for further information on the upcoming event.

Vancouver-based networking company Utherverse Inc. plans to accompany Vancouver's New Music West Conference and Festival in May 14-18 with a virtual version of the festival in its online erotic virtual world, Virtual-Vancouver.

Advertised as "the first massively multi-user online music festival," the online event will provide audio and video of performing Canadian independent bands simulcasted in near-real-time. Adult users will be able to attend the festival by creating an avatar and visiting Virtual-Vancouver's ampitheatre.

In an interview with technology site Wired, Utherverse CEO Brian Shuster described Virtual-Vancouver's capability to host large-scale events for tens of thousands of users: "The trick comes in allowing hundreds or thousands of user avatars to appear in the same region of Virtual-Vancouver -- in this case, having thousands of users in a single amphitheater so that they can all enjoy a concert together. It is this problem that we have solved with a system that dynamically spawns new 'dimensions' of the amphitheater as needed, to accommodate as many users as necessary."

He continued, "In this way, the amphitheater will never be so crowded that anyone will have trouble enjoying the show, and users can move easily around the physical space, as well as between dimensions, so that they can meet, dance and interact with any of the other concert-goers from around the world."

In response to a mandate by the State Council of the People's Republic of China ordering all online entertainment and game pages to redirect visitors to web sites commemorating last week's earthquake victims, several China-based MMO operators have announced that they will be suspending services for their games during the country's three days of mourning, May 19 to May 21.

The mourning period comes one week after an 8.0-magnitude earthquake devastated China's Sichuan Province, leaving an estimated 50,000 dead and over 245,000 injured. China's government has pulled all entertainment programs off television for the three-day period, ordering cinemas and other public entertainment venues to close their doors to customers until Wednesday. Additionally, national flags are flying half-mast across the country and the Beijing Olympic torch relay will be temporarily suspended.

World of Warcraft operator The9 Limited has announced that it is suspending operations of all its games for the three days to honor the tragedy's victims, as have several other China-based MMO operators, such as Giant Interactive (ZT Online), Sohu.com (Tian Long Ba Bu), and Perfect World (Legend of Martial Arts). All aforementioned services will resume on May 22nd.

The period marks the first time China has undertaken a national period of grieving other than for a national leader. The last time the country observed a mourning period of this length was in 1976 with the death of former Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong.

At the Games For Health conference in Baltimore, epidemiologist Nina H. Fefferman, Ph.D of Tufts University and Rutgers University spoke on the difficulties in modeling disease origins and control, and how examining MMO populations could solve some of the problems inherent with more traditional models, joking that that she was going to "use gamers as my 'guinea pigs.'"

She started off by listing the three general models currently used to study disease control: compartmental models, network models, and agent-based models. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the principle problem is that all three make significant behavioral assumption - and people are hard to predict. As Fefferman pointed out, they may stay home from work during an epidemic, or they may not; they may self-quarantine for fear of exposing health workers.

"During the anthrax scare, people acted irrationally, asking for smallpox vaccines," she pointed out. "You can't convince people on these things."

An Outbreak Of Corrupted Blood

A fascinating - and completely accidental - case study occurred in 2005 within Blizzard's World of Warcraft, which at the time hosted some 6.5 million players of diverse age and background. Issues of race, gender, and seniority issues are built in, since the players are real people, and the world is highly social, with real-world factors such as transportation, working together, and friendships arising as a result of game mechanics and player groupings such as guilds.

Free-to-play virtual world There.com, created by Makena Technologies, and teen magazine CosmoGIRL! have teamed up for a "Get Ready for Summer" event starting today. The event is a collaboration with Gillette Venus, Cover Girl, and Tampax Pearl.

There.com is a 3D online virtual world in which members can customize and create their own 3D character, meet and hang out with friends in real-time using voice and text chat, build virtual homes, and even create and sell their own virtual items.

There will be a number of different activities for There.com players to get involved in with the "Get Ready for Summer" event, including a dance-off contest sponsored by Tampax Pearl, a "smooth moves" competition sponsored by Gillette Venus, and a photo hut sponsored by Cover Girl in the CosmoGIRL! Village.

Said CosmoGIRL! publisher Vicki Wellington: "Dance parties, fashion shows, and photo booths have been elements of the CosmoGIRL! Village from the beginning. The popularity we've seen with the parties we've hosted so far has attracted other big brands, including Gillette Venus, Cover Girl, and Tampax, to help take these events to the next level."

Teen and adult residents in virtual worlds There.com, Whyville, Second Life, and Teen Second Life, all took part in a unique collaboration in which a combined reported audience of over 10 million users watched a live video stream from the Waldorf Astoria on March 20. At the event, which was coordinated by Global Kids, Inc., former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s first award for international justice.

During what was reported as the largest massively multiworld simulcast to date, audiences in the four virtual world communities engaged in discussion and debate over the event, with support from the Global kids staff. Global Kids hosted a similar event in April with a simulcast of a presentation by Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Said Linden Lab founder and chairman Philip Rosedale: “This is exactly the type of use I envisioned when we developed what would become Second Life almost nine years ago. I believe virtual worlds have a responsibility to not just enhance the lives of its users but make a tangible difference in their communities and the larger society. Global Kids’ innovative work in Second Life, and this event in particular, serves to demonstrate how virtual worlds can be used to address real world concerns.”

Global Kids online leadership director Barry Joseph added, “This unique collaboration among some of the largest teen-oriented virtual worlds emphasizes the importance of using virtual worlds for education and civic engagement. It was inspiring to be part of such a unique collaboration with such amazing partners.”

Berlin-based MMO developer and operator Metaversum has partnered with Bitfilm to create Bitropolis, a virtual art city in 3d online world Twinity in which users can attend a virtual version of the Bitfilm Digital Film Festival.

The festival, which is running from May 1st to July 12th, celebrates films which use digital technology in creative and innovative ways, such as 3D blockbusters, internet flash movies, machinima, or short clips for mobile devices.

Bitropolis will encompass a cinema, art gallery, night club, and bar, the last location allowing visitors to gather for virtual drinks after films. Filmmakers and 3D artists can rent their own "studio cube" and host special film screenings or other events. The studio cubes will be scattered throughout the Bitroplis cinema, which will be showing all of the nominated festival films.

Said Metaversum co-founder and chief marketing officer Dr. Mirko Caspar: “Bitropolis is a wonderful example of the vision that we are pursuing with the virtual world Twinity. Real events, such as the Bitfilm Festival in Stuttgart and Hamburg, are given a whole new dimension when they are transferred into a virtual world. We thus enable users from all around the world to take part in the festival and experience the best featured films,” comments Dr. Mirko Caspar, CMO of Metaversum GmbH.

Online game publisher Outspark has announced that it will soon allow players in its MMORPG Fiesta to virtually tie the knot through in-game weddings. Leading up to the new feature's launch, Fiesta will offer its users purchasable in-game tuxedos, wedding dresses, and wedding certificates beginning July 3rd.

The event will follow Fiesta game master WiLDFiRe's wedding with bride Isya in two special in-game ceremonies on July 1st and 2nd, both of which players can attend ater completing a wedding quest. Outspark has also teamed up with technology provider Dynno to allow up to a thousand players to watch a live broadcast of the event.

Also, Fiesta will host bachelor and bachelorette parties from June 24th to June 27th as WiLDFiRe's wedding date approaches. During the parties, players will be able to dance, socialize, win prizes, and more.

Global virtual community for teens Habbo has announced that it will be working with the Matthew Shepard Foundation, a non-profit organization promoting compassion and acceptance among young people, to educate users and promote diversity through an "Erase Hate" project.

Starting July 7th, the Matthew Shepard Foundation staff will host discussions twice a week in Habbo.com's InfoBus, a virtual room designed as the inside of a bus. Users will discuss issues such as dealing with bullying, discrimination and hate experienced on and offline and how to encourage respect among peers.

Said Sulake North America president and Sulake Corp.'s EVP of marketing, ad sales, and business development, Teemu Huuhtanen, “The Matthew Shepard Foundation is exceptionally qualified to provide support to our users as they navigate their difficult teen years. The InfoBus has always been a popular resource for our teen community and we know they will take advantage of this opportunity to share their experiences and learn new tools to foster acceptance and compassion.”

Matthew Shepard Foundation executive director Judy Shepard added : "It is a mission of the Foundation to support young people and provide them with the resources to lead healthy, productive, hate-free lives. Our partnership with Habbo will allow us to have ongoing conversations with young people about what they can do in the fight to replace hate with understanding, compassion, and acceptance.”

Celebrating the fifth anniversary of MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, publishers Lucasarts and Sony Online Entertainment have announced the Star Wars Galaxies Trading Card Game.

The first release for the online trading card game, Champions of the Force, is scheduled to debut late summer 2008. The game will be available exclusively to users with valid and active subscriptions to Star Wars Galaxies.

Subscribers will receive five free booster packs per month and will be able to purchase starter decks and additional booster packs through Sony Online Entertainment's Station Store.

The trading card game offers decks for both the light and dark sides of the Force, enabling players to fight virtual matches for the Rebel or Imperial factions. Players will also be able to collect cards within the MMORPG to add to their collection. In addition, “loot cards” can be redeemed for virtual items usable in the Star Wars Galaxies game.

Beginning July 22nd, Lucasarts and SOE will throw virtual “Empire Day” festivities which will include appearances by Princess Leia, regularly scheduled Imperial parades, in-game fireworks, performances by the Max Rebo Band, and the debut of two new statues for the Emperor and Yoda.

Furthermore, Star Wars Galaxies subscribers will also be rewarded with in-game items, such as a Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back virtual poster and wearable goggles inscribed with a “V.”

Animated avatar site Meez has teamed up with Flash games broker FlashGameLicense to present a contest inviting Flash developers worldwide to compete for $20,000 worth of prizes by creating games using the Meez Inside Avatar API.

Launched in February, the Meez Inside Avatar API allows developers to create Flash games which can be hosted anywhere online and which enable users to import their customized 3D Meez avatars. Meez and FGL plan to run the contest from July 8 to September 8. Entries will be judged on their ability to integreate avatars with creativity, addictiveness, sound, graphics. and polish.

The grand prize winner will receive $10,000, while the second and third place winners will receive $5,000 and $2,500 respectively. Five Honorable Mention winners will be rewarded $1,000 each.

This competition follows Meez's mid-June launch of Meeznation, a new virtual world built specifically for its custom avatars. The new space accompanies Meez's virtual rooms application released for Facebook earlier this year.

Said Meez CEO Sean Ryan: “Gaming is a big draw for the Meez community, and we know that our personalized games are always the most popular ones. We’re pleased to be partnering with FlashGameLicense on this contest and excited to see what results from harnessing the creativity of the Flash game developer community to provide a personalized game experience for a wide range of gamers, not just those on Meez.”

Berlin-based MMO developer and operator Metaversum announce the opening of a virtual cinema in 3D world Twinity.

German cinema operator CineStar, with the help of web agency byForce Sunrise, opened the Cubix movie theatre, which is located in Twinity's virtual recreation of Berlin. Metaversum is creating scale replicas of various cities for Twinity and plans to debut Berlin, its first virtual city, in Twinity's upcoming public beta.

As part of Cubix's opening, CineStar and its partner Warner Bros. Entertainment are presenting bonus material from Batman film The Dark Knight, a merchandising shop, and an event hall for The Dark Knight parties in the virtual theatre.

The cinema will also have a The Dark Knight competition, movie trailers, flash games based on current movies, and highlights from the recent Bitfilm festival.

Said Metaversum CMO Mirko Caspar: "The cooperation with CineStar and Warner Bros. perfectly mirrors our vision for Twinity. Attractive entertainment content that can be shared with like-minded people in Twinity gives the real cinema experience a whole new dimension. Visiting the virtual Cubix becomes an exciting event for all Batman fans."

Just a few years ago, Jamie Cheng was an AI programmer at Relic Entertainment working on the well-received hardcore strategy game Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War.

Now he is the CEO of independent studio Klei Entertainment, which has released its own original downloadable games, including Eets, on PC and Xbox Live Arcade, and helped Metanet develop N+ for XBLA.

Klei recently teamed up with Korean free-to-play publisher Nexon (MapleStory) for its next game, Sugar Rush, described as an "online arena combat game."

In a Penny Arcade Expo panel, Cheng reflected on how he got into free-to-play games and what he has learned about making them.

Habbo Developer Sulake has claimed that it is to stage "the world's largest online gathering" within the virtual world of Habbo on the 19th of September with charity War Child, to "raise awareness of the impact of conflict on young people" and in support for the UN International Day of Peace on the 21st of September.

Seven teens with whom War Child have been working with in Uganda are to also take part in the virtual event, and are to share their experiences of living and working in regions that have encountered conflict.

Sulake and War Child conducted a worldwide poll to explore young people’s views on conflict, which revealed that over 50% of teens globally think that social networking sites should be used to "raise awareness of important issues," and that they are "more effective than real-world marches or petitions submitted to governments.”

“Teens around the world are passionate about serious subjects," commented Phil Guest, Habbo Regional Director, Central Europe. "They are using new communication tools, such as virtual worlds and social networks, to make their voices heard.”