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The Worlds in Motion site notes that the first keynote address has been announced for this year's Austin Game Developer's Conference. Last last month the first speakers, such as Damion Schubert and Min Kim, were announced for the MMO-focused event. This week the event's first keynote has been announced, and it's very different from your average early-morning droner. Fans of The Office rejoice! The folks behind the Dunder Mifflin social networking game will be offering up ways of "driving user behavior and increasing engagement".

Other events announced include a technical discussion on Tabula Rasa's shading technology; that's an in-depth session aimed at MMO developers looking for cost/benefit tradeoffs. Probably the most exciting announced talk this week is Nick Fortugno's talk entitled What Your Mother and Your Ten-Year Old Can Teach You About MMOs. He gave a similar lecture at this year's IMGDC event, previously discussed here on the site. Interested parties will get early bird status through August 27th.

This past weekend, scientists gathered on World of Warcraft's Earthen Ring server to discuss how WoW changes and is changed by its ten million, hugely international player base. They might have held their "Convergence of the Real and Virtual" conference in a conference room near some airport somewhere, but that would have been dull. Airport hotels don't provide photo opportunities with Thrall -- and Thrall doesn't DO hotels. Any session notes that advise attendees to get the flight point AHEAD of time are sure to end up someplace fun.

Sessions included the use of online games as laboratories to study human behavior; the interrelationship of virtual and real-world economies; the future of virtual worlds; and why Professor Abercrombie won't let elemental shamans on her Karazhan runs. Well, maybe not the last one. We have some questions of our own. If you could do your real world job in an MMO such as WoW -- would you? And if you did work in WoW, and your boss was dressed in blues and greens he picked up from the Murlocs in Southshore while you were fitted in epics from Black Temple, would you still respect him?

[Via Virtual World News]

theMIX agency and RoomFullofPeople just recently announced plans to host InterPlay, a one-day event that will explore the overlap of online games and social networks that has nothing to do with that other Interplay. The conference is planned for May 22nd and will take place at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco.

If you happen to attend you can expect to see speakers from companies such as Bebo, DoubleFusion and Electronic Arts. Their will also be a strong showing of venture capitalists to offer their own perspectives on several subjects. The panels being offered seem like they'll vary, some of the included examples are "Micro-Transactions and Virtual Goods", "Funding the Social Gaming Sphere "and "Advertising and Marketing on Social Games".

Sounds like a fairly well-rounded event and being that it's only one day it should be full of interesting discussions for those interested in either social networks or virtual worlds.

Last Saturday saw the Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums conference, organised by the Alliance Library System take place in Second Life. We didn't advertise the conference here on Massively because the available places went within minutes of registration opening. However, the presentations from the conference are gradually becoming available. I have to declare a personal interest here: I co-presented one of the sessions, but there were many other sessions covering a wide range of topics of interest to those in virtual worlds and libraries, education and museums.

Although not directly linked to this story, another view of the future of education crossed my desk the other day. KnowledgeWorks is carrying a map of the future forces affecting education. Whether it will affect you personally, professionally, or is of more interest to you as a parent, it is well worth a look.

The Sun Worldwide Education and Research conference, which starts today and runs until Wednesday has an intriguing entry on tomorrow's agenda entitled Project Wonderland, Darkstar and Immersive Education. If you follow the link to their (long) video about the session you will see that it isn't quite ready to roll yet, but they have taken a number of the issues with Second Life (which they identify at the 800lb gorilla in the room) and they are deliberately aiming to circumvent them.

I have to say that, being hard of hearing, I found the video really hard to watch and understand - the audio quality isn't the highest, but I think from what they said, they are working, deliberately, with open source code wherever possible, or code that is going to be open sourced soon. Many will regard this as an improvement on Second Life, although Linden Lab are aiming this way. However, it also appears that there are some high cost outworld tools required - for example outworld modelling is possible, but only in Maya if I understood their too quiet speech.

At first, and second take, this is not yet ready to go live, but it is looking like it could be a real contender, and it does look like they have learnt the lessons from Second Life.

Stanford University and Stanford Humanities Lab are hosting the Metaverse U conference on the weekend of 16th/17th February. They will be discussing Second Life and virtual worlds in general and exploring "the cultural, technological, legal, and economic issues surrounding virtual worlds" according to conference organiser Henry Lowood.

If you would like to know more, or to attend, the conference website is up and running, and the conference schedule and registration forms are available online.

Virtual worlds and online gaming continue to grow in cultural importance, changing the outlook of commerce and entertainment almost daily. To make sense of these changes, Stanford University feels it's high time they convened a group of leading experts in the field to discuss what it all might mean, both today and reaching into the future. To this end, the Stanford University Humanities Lab is hosting the Metaverse U Conference, to take place on campus on February 16th and 17th.

Among the notable names speaking at this event are Raph Koster of Areae's Metaplace; Cory Ondrejka, formerly of Linden Lab; Howard Rheingold, author and critic, credited with coining the term 'virtual community', and many other guests. In fact, those three in particular will be speaking together in conversation on Saturday, an event I expect will be both illuminating and provocative.

I'll be attending with Massively's Barb Dybwad, so look for us and say hi! If you can't make it, however, don't despair -- the organizers have told us that "we are about to announce that the entire conference will be streamed for free into Second Life for anyone who wants to attend there."

The Online Game Developer Conference, a place where all sorts of MMO industry luminaries can gather en mass to discuss all sorts of pertinent concepts. The conference otherwise known as the OGDC is going with a new name this year; ION Game Conference. The main reason behind this change in name and logo are said to be due to the conference's growing world-wide appeal. Last year the then-named OGDC managed to pull nearly 20% of their attendees from outside the United States. We suppose that when you're pulling that much of your attendance from Korea, Germany, Japan and Australia a moniker that evokes an electric charge of attraction is suitable.

The ION Game Conference is scheduled to take place from May 13th to May 15th, 2008 in Seattle, WA at the Waterfront Marriott Hotel. If you decide to attend, early registration (including discounted attendee rates) open up on January 28th. ION claims it will offer "aggressive pricing" that won't "compromise" the conference's high quality. If you're interested in the MMO industry at all depending on the prices a trip up to Seattle in May doesn't sound so bad.

[Via MMOWatch]

After the success of IMGDC 1.0 (the Indie MMO Game developers conference) in Minneapolis in April, things are moving forward again for the 2008 session of IMGDC 2.0 at the end of March.

The conference will take place in Minneapolis again, at the Minneapolis Convention Center from March 29-30. Early bird registration is available, with registration costing only a hundred dollars (US) until 15 November.

Word is that the last conference was great, and I'm told that folks are really looking forward to attending this next one. There's a terrific lineup of speakers, and I'm wishing I could be there.