17h55 - 18h30
A Debate: Casual vs. Serious Games
Jeff Clavier - SoftTechVC (moderator)
Mathieu Nouzareth - Boonty/Cafe.com
Hubert Thiblot - Curse

New Media has many mashups – and what happened and a Williman Shatner mashup was quickly copied and it the game creators benefit.

Casual – if my mom can play the game it can be classified as “casual”.  Good example is “hidden objects” in games – they’re addictive,  20-50 years old, skews towards woman 60%.One of the thesis of developing gaming is that games can be developed quickly and cheaply. 

18h45 - 19h30
Is there reality to a virtual world economy?
Sasha Frieze - Virtual Worlds Forum (moderator)
Clay Shirky - New York University
Marc Samwer - European Founders Fund
Mattias Miksche - Stardoll

To the current generation to play these games, they don’t see them as “virtual” but as an extension of reality – therefore the choice of “virtual” to term Second Life and other Virtual Worlds is a poor one.

A theme with this panel and an earlier on the interoperability of social networks have a similar slant – there’s a desire to link virtual worlds together just as social networks also suggest they should be interoperable; however, there is another opinion that virtual worlds are often a closed destination that have their own metaphors and it’s not appropriate to merge them.