You will 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 3, Tuesday, August 21, 2007.

This was the last day of official conference, and the day was packed. My notes will be too short and not really do it justice. To me, the highlight of the day was actually the people I met and the conversations at the breaks and meals. Thanks to everyone I met for taking a few minutes to chat and make introductions!

The first session was on “Understanding Virtual World Inhabitants”. This was a discussion about demographics of players and virtual world residents. Most of the discussion was fairly academic, and there was a lot of talk about how the research was done. I think it’s great that most of the research actually happens in-game or in-world, and by people who are not only interested in the sociology, but also in the games and virtual worlds.

The second session was “Space, Place and Culture inside Virtual Worlds”. This session actually dealt a lot with the physical and geographic design of the worlds. The discussions about architecture (building and world, not technical/server) were very neat to hear. Also, I really enjoyed the comments about how worlds, their in-world geography, buildings and avatar designs all go together.

The third session, “Wealth of virtual worlds”, were about how economic, legal, and political policies in-world affect the virtual wealth of players in those worlds.

The final panel, “Building virtual worlds”, was the highlight of the day for me. It included:

• Hui Xu, HiPiHi
• Mike Wilson, There.com
• Jean from Linden Lab (sorry I missed your last name, Jean)
• Vincent Teubler, GoGoFrog
• Richard Bartle, the designer behind the first MUD

It was really to hear all the opinions from these guys. All the worlds represented really have different approaches in various ways, and design decisions, the visions they had when starting out, and challenges they faced was very stimulating. I think this session could have gone on for hours with the interest there was in the audience.

Finally, the evening wrapped up with another great dinner and networking evening, this time out by the pool. There was good weather, great discussion, and a fun time for all.

This entry was posted by jeremy on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Events. 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.