Virtual Worlds Forum

6th October    

• How to develop variety – why are we only achieving incremental change?
  
• If social worlds can do why it why can’t game worlds?
  
• Bottom up or top down approach to developing new genres
  
• “Female, divorced, 2 kids, highly literate, comfortable with technology..” what new MMO genre would intrigue her?
  

This brief session will cover aspects of content creation during MMOG development and post-release, including:

• Optimal team structure
• Development methods and approaches
• Empowering creativity
• Evaluating content quality and user reception

The realisation 'Content Is King' is an old one on traditional medias such as television, films and music. Games, however, still suffer from technology hype which often takes the development focus away from creativity and content, resulting in products disconnected from its intended audience. Pick a game box, look at its back -- you'll find 'marketing' lines such as 'featuring advanced graphics, H&L transformations, particles, thousands of weapons, destructible environments...', something akin to enticing people to watch a movie because it was filmed on Panavision cameras.

Once a production team understands what makes a game tick -- content -- its time to navigate the uncharted and subjective waters of quality content generation, using technology as nothing more than tools to achieve this goal.

The session will expose how Jagex and its teams deal with creativity, content production, evaluation and delivery, along with methods to reach good and consistent end results in a fast-paced development environment.

• What do we mean when we say ‘serious games’?
• What organizations are doing in 2008 and why they are doing it.
• Keeping it real for learning & development.
• The investment outlay – the real internal and external costs of a project.
• Sensible timescales & stages – implementing a project to guarantee success.
• Processes & approaches that work (and that don’t work)
• Deployment issues – hosting, bandwidth, costs, internal promotion and support.

• Variants of classic security and privacy problems in Virtual Worlds: e.g. port-scanning, DOS, profiling, identity theft, privacy in virtual worlds
• Security and privacy problems specific to Virtual Worlds: Virtual World Malware e.g. duping, virtual money theft, extortion, illegal automation.
• Legal, and social issues. E.g. definition and valuation of assets in Virtual Worlds, EULAs, Governance and dispute resolution

• Top 5 implementation issues to watch
• Information-sharing platform for providers
• Legislative clarification on IP issues and Virtual Assets
• Privacy policies and guidelines

• Encouraging people to learn very complicated things in an engaging and absorbing way
• Understanding what motivates people in these environments and how that might be applied to learning in the academic arena
• Which scenarios are better for serious learning?

• Tools and case studies
• Techniques and tools for data gathering and visualization
• SLOOG content indexation engine
• Metrics, studying user behaviour
• Benefits, users and privacy issues

• Why the open source model makes sense for virtual worlds
• Notable virtual world open source success stories
• Why you don’t need to develop the cost of base platforms to get to features
• Interoperability and cross technology – case study and highlights from OpenSim
• Developing virtual world features and sharing innovation in parallel with other developers
• Open source and cloud computing
• How you can participate

7th October

Building and launching a new virtual world is just the beginning of a long haul effort. Development never stops, technologies evolve and sometimes are completely replaced, and even business models may need overhauling. How can you plan the resourcing and investment needed to stay successful over years of operation?

• Community: customers, citizens or subjects?
• The technical challenges of community management
• Hackers, criminals, stalkers and cheaters: how to cope with them
• Cybercrime and punishment
• Respect for other cultures and individual responsibility

• Augmented reality – what’s the real purpose of having a VW on mobile devices?
• What new commercial opportunities does rendering VW on mobile platform provide:
  • Identity
  • Payment
• Unifying avatars and identity
• Implications of mobile device processing capability and user experience environment

The Semantic Web, intelligent avatars, and non-player characters: commercial reality time is here

Phil Hall and Mark Meadows, two of the leading experts in the field, tell you why blue chip companies such as BT, Renault, Sky, LTSB, Philips and Verizon are investing in conversational systems and what is coming around the corner. Often fronted by Avatars, conversational interfaces can replace services such as telephone call centres and face to face customer relationship management. Non-player characters have been a feature of the gaming industry for years, but if you put conversational systems and NPC's together in virtual worlds ... it makes logical sense. The panel will show the value of scripted and self-learning systems through case studies and live demonstrations, illustrate the future potential for businesses operating in virtual worlds, and show a glimpse of the near future. The session will be moderated by Lizzie Jackson who is completing a PhD on the facilitation of BBC interactive content.

• Technical overview and industry statistics
• Using natural conversational behaviours to generate profit and increase customer satisfaction - what we know works.
• Difficulties with algorithmic generations and the implications for non-predictable systems
• The economic and social benefits of using intelligent non-player characters in games and other sectors
• Harnessing intelligent avatars to encourage participation and sales in virtual worlds
• Using intelligent avatars for moderation and governance systems in virtual worlds
• "It's virtual life Jim, but not as we know it"...the future...

• According to Wikipedia, “Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal”.
• How can avatars interact neatly in User Generated Content virtual worlds? How should the environment be designed? What are the limits of texture sizes so they can produce the desired effect? Look alike environments, fantasy environments - what are the limits?
• A series of 10 do’s and 10 don’ts illustrated by practical examples