You’ll see a lot of coverage of State of Play on other blogs, like the Terra Nova blog. However, I’ll be posting some of my thoughts and observations over the next few days. My thoughts will be brief, just noting some of the things that stood out to me, and paraphrasing. I apologize in advance if I misinterpret anyone’s comments here. Here are some thoughts from day 2, Monday, August 20, 2007.
Monday started with a keynote from a minister of the Singapore government. He had some interesting remarks about the Singapore government’s approach to virtual worlds. They are being cautious but actively looking at virtual worlds to understand the potential they have for facilitating government services to citizens.

Next was a session on “Building businesses in virtual worlds”. Bret Treasure had some interesting comments on what businesses have been looking for so far in virtual world presences:

1. Collaboration tools
2. A new sales channel
3. A brand promotion tool

Ted Tagami put forth the view that virtual worlds will be a new user interface for designers in the future.

During the discussion, there were some other interesting thoughts exchanged:

• Many companies just bring their real-world business in-world, and it almost never works. Companies need new ideas and creativity.
• Closed worlds give companies total control, but at a cost. Closed worlds tend to be much more focused and revolve around stories.
• Metrics are still being worked out, but there’s a lot of data available to measure.
• There’s still a lot of opportunity out there.

The next panel was on “Regulating virtual worlds”. A lot of the themes discussed here have been discussed much more eloquently by people over at Terra Nova, so I won’t put a lot of notes here. Taxes, politics, trading and contracts continue to be fuzzy issues for virtual worlds.

The following session was “Learning in virtual worlds”. This is still an exploratory space, but people are starting to do very interesting things here, not only with expected approaches like distance learning, but using multiple worlds to illustrate many points. I liked Aaron Delwiche’s view that if you give students a lot of room to experiment in virtual worlds, you’ll be surprised by the results.

The final session of the day was “Connecting East and West”. This was a great overview of the difference in gamer or virtual world resident behavior in different countries. Judge Unggi Yoon’s description of Korean online gamer behavior was very interesting. The panelists also pointed out other points, such as:

• Our cultures influence our in-game or in-world behavior
• Gamers can set game incentives to influence that behavior
• Too many American (N. America + S. America) and European game companies ignore Asia, even though Asia really leads in online games.

We wrapped up the evening with a great dinner at the Forest Lodge at the Singapore Zoo, followed by the Night Safari. Overall, a great day at the conference!

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This entry was posted by jeremy on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Events, Metaversum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.