People crave community. We are social creatures. Today, we are social networking creatures. We do loads of things communally. We edit content communally on Wikipedia and we play multiplayer online role-playing games with a global community of “friends”. One of the most fascinating talks I attended last winter was at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco (read prior FanTrust blog coverage here) -- on the topic of How Wikipedia is Like a Multiplayer Game: it is addictive to its core community, has its own system of guilds and includes a crazy cast of real-life ...

Business models for virtual worlds and casual games are converging. As I mentioned in the blog “Money, Money, Money, Money”, players of the virtual worlds Second Life and Habbo Hotel are encouraged at every turn to purchase virtual goods in order to pimp their islands and their bedrooms. In Nexon's Maple Story, fans can purchase Minicooper cars for their avatar to drive. In the first few months, Nexon sold 120K cars for $10 each - $1.2 million in sales. ...