When Governments Come Out To Play
This panel will discuss the challenges and opportunities that governments experience as they work to create spaces for civic engagement, expand networks and advocate in virtual worlds. Speakers will explore questions of how governments best operate in virtual worlds, if governments are able to provide meaningful interactions between nation states and global citizens in virtual worlds, and what challenges governments face when they go virtual.

Speakers:
Julie Barko Germany
Tori Horton
Elizabeth Losh
William May
Jean Miller

Current Legal Issues for Virtual Worlds
The panel will cover legal issues like the problems with user generated content ownership, patent questions that have emerged since the important re Bilski decision changed patent law for virtual worlds and videogames/software generally and a discussion of the Worlds, Inc. suit, the ever-fun difficulty of EULAs, and the legal minefield surrounding digital wallets.

Speakers:
Timothy Bechen
Roxanne E. Christ
Sean F. Kane, Esq.
Nikitas Elias Nicolakis, Esq.
Andrew Zaffron

Beyond the Magic Circle
This panel is about virtual worlds and cross-reality environments, passive MOGs, and social networking. It will look at the ways that we're pushing out from the hard-edge of the virtual world as defined by the client on your computer and the server at the other end of the line. Virtual worlds have always had a porous boundary between the physical and the computer-mediated, but this border is becoming even fuzzier. What interesting new models are now possible for connecting virtual worlds with other content, with the physical, with different technologies? And what types of games and spaces will we see in future as these boundaries become even more uncertain?

Speakers:
Beth Coleman
Justin Hall
Elizabeth Lane Lawley
Alexander Macris
Jerry Paffendorf

The New Classroom
The creation of any educational video game presents many unique challenges. And these challenges are only exacerbated when trying to create an educational massively multiplayer game or virtual world. There are educational theories to which they are usually aligned and must respect. As well, there is a wide set of curriculums with which the game must also align itself. Finally, there is the over arching issue of creating the product within the restrictions set forth by these educational theories and curriculum. In this panel discussion, leading researchers and creators of educational virtual worlds will discuss these and other challenges based on their own experiences. A central theme to the discussion will be to try and establish some best practices for the integration of theory and curriculum into educational virtual worlds.

Speakers:
James M. Bower, Ph.D
Sande Chen
Margaret Corbit
Ricardo Rademacher
Selen Turkay

Economies and Economics
Speakers here discuss the various types of economies and economics that we find in virtual worlds, ranging from a discussion about gold farmers in World of Warcraft, to the way that some designers build economies for their worlds, and how players interact with virtual goods. They will also examine how developers manage primary and secondary markets for virtual items, the way that players interact with their virtual goods, and why people pursue the same line of work in both the physical and virtual worlds.

Speakers:
Edward Castronova
Julian Dibbell
Stephanie Rothenberg
Andrew Schneider
Margaret Wallace

Across Countries and Cultures
This panel that is about the different approaches that people bring to virtual worlds and MMOs, and the different cultures that emerge within them. Speakers will examine different sorts of gameplay that emerge, why this happens, and the nature of the cultures that foster this. They will also discuss the way that people playing from different countries and different (physical/geopolitcal) cultures bring different expectations to the worlds they inhabit online. In short this panel is about diversity and gameplay in all its forms. What happens when individuals from different countries and cultures wind up on the same servers, how do they interact, and what does this mean for intercultural communication?

Speakers:
Herbert Burkert
Mia Consalvo
Will Leverett
Torill Mortenson

Developer Roundtable
Our conference theme is "Plateau" and our idea in suggesting this theme was to address the current status of games and virtual world development. If you take a look at the current lineup of MMOs and VWs, most of the design ideas were present in the earliest games and worlds. An outsider might justifiably say that we haven't come very far in the last twenty years. Our speakers in this panel are all game developers and will address directly whether we have plateaued in MMO/VW/games. They will examine innovative design solutions, and try to give an idea of where we might go from here.

Speakers:
Nick Fortugno
Jesse Houston
Raph Koster
Dan Norton
Michael Sellers

Government and Policy
Governments and political institutions generally don't get games, and until recently they have been reluctant to engage much with virtual worlds. But one thing that you can say about the hype in virtual worlds over the last few years is that it has encouraged “serious” institutions to begin looking at the field. This panel will examine physical-world governance, policy and governmental action and ask what use they have made of the opportunities of games and virtual worlds to date, what they are likely to do, and what more can be done. It will also examine some of the regulatory activities that face games and virtual world developers, and how these challenges can be faced.

Speakers:
Ken Doroshow
Seth Krauss
Ren Reynolds
Andrew Sparrow
Kevin Werbach

Kids, Tweens and Teens
Anyone who has followed virtual worlds knows about the amazing uptake in the kid and young adult market, in games and social spaces like Webkinz, Habbo Hotel, Runescape, Club Penguin, There and Whyville. Our speakers will examine the special challenges of youth spaces, looking at questions like the community management of young audiences, special regulatory and management issues that emerge, and how to engage younger audiences in the environments. They will also ask about the special role of parents, and how these spaces may reinforce certain models of ex-world relationships.

Speakers:
Betsy Book
Erin Hoffman
Douglas Thomas
Angela Tiffin
Joost van Dreunen

Security & Surveillance
Virtual worlds are now mainstream and populous, and with their acceptance and significance come all manner of problematic behavior. Whether we're talking about domestic criminal activity like money laundering and the dissemination of objectionable content, or about terrorism training in virtual worlds, these online places raise issues for security professionals and law enforcement. At the same time virtual worlds allow for total surveillance of participants, the interests of security can't help but clash dramatically with privacy rights and the expectations of users. This panel is comprised of experts from multiple viewpoints in the security/surveillance debate, and the speakers will talk about the nature of the security aspects, concerns, and opportunities of human behavior in virtual worlds, and present differing approaches to dealing with these sorts of behaviors.

Speakers:
Lt. Charles Cohen
Roderick Jones
Michael Schrage
Bart Simon, Ph.D
Michael Theis

Lunch - Old Media, New Media and New New Media
In this roundtable chat a passel of seasoned reporters and journalists will chat informally about the way they report, write about, and understand the new media forms that virtual worlds represent. Each has published a range of material for the general audience on virtual worlds and machinima and other components of this new media form, and they will share war stories about the way that they try to make arcane virtual worlds understandable for the general audience, how they sell these ideas to editors, and the challenges of trying to be serious about crazy worlds and weird games.

Speakers:
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Bernhard Drax
Julian Dibbell

Philanthropy and Virtual Worlds
Foundations and philanthropies occupy a unique space in virtual worlds, with a tremendous opportunity to legitimize what happens in virtual worlds as well as reach a networked audience that is critical to obtaining many organizational goals. Speakers will discuss how philanthropic organizations can use virtual worlds to foster their missions. They will share how they frame their objectives in virtual worlds to appeal to governing board members, internal competing agendas, and press media. And they will look at important foundation questions regarding the process to fund virtual world research, methods to reach philanthropic objectives such as education or outreach, and why philanthropy should be an active player as virtual worlds take shape.

Speakers:
Jia Ji
Dr. Merrilea J. Mayo
Diana Rhoten, Ph.D
Dr. Connie Yowell

The Laws and Governance of Virtual Worlds
It wouldn't be a State of Play conference without us discussing difficult issues of governance, institutions and the legal theories underlying them: Our first conference was about this topic in a big way, and we want to see how far we have come since then. Our speakers on this panel will talk about the ways that virtual worlds resemble the pre-modern governance structures of the feudal system, the way that virtual worlds can help to understand property systems, and why virtual communities must govern and police equality.

Speakers:
James Grimmelmann
Gregory Lastowka
Yee Fen Lim
Juliet M. Moringiello
Jon Penney

Studying Virtual Worlds
This roundtable discussion will examine how we go about studying virtual worlds, looking at the range of quantitative and qualitative approaches available. Our panelists are the leading researchers of virtual worlds, and they each come from different methodological backgrounds. Sometimes their approaches differ, and in one recent debate a number of them got into it over their view about the way that virtual worlds research is (and should be) done. We expect a lively debate about the problems with studying virtual worlds and how some methods might be better used to get at the answers to useful research questions.

Speakers:
Tom Boellstorff
Timothy J. Burke
Thomas Malaby
Dmitri Williams

In which we have a drink before (tearfully) saying our goodbyes…