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Philip Rosedale’s presentation at SDForum was followed by an interesting panel on “in-world culture,” moderated by Dan Terdiman of CNet News.com. Panelists included Wagner James Au of New World Notes; danah boyd, a social media researcher at Yahoo! Research, and a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley doing research in teens’ use of technology; Susan Choe, CEO, StrayFish, who’s been following metaverse technologies since 2000, at first for Yahoo! and now for her own firm, which is currently in the process of launching; and Nicole Lazzaro, president of XEODesign, who says, “I make games more fun.” Her firm works with game-makers like Sony, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft to “create more emotion.” XEO “defines the emotional mechanisms that drive play,” and “heightens the emotional profile in play experiences.”

Lazzaro also spoke about emergent behavior, including new uses of language in World of Warcraft, and gave a fun example of players who created Level 1 characters in City of Heroes who they dressed as Oompah Loompas. Many “serious” players were enraged and managed to guide monsters toward the Oompah Loompas in order to kill them, while others were huge fans and resurrected the Oompah Loompas each time they were killed. Lazzaro described Similar examples coming out of the Matrix Online.

Lazzaro also spoke about the challenges she’s encountered over the last 14 years her firm has been in business, as they’ve tried to convince developers that they need to make much more investment in time and development up front, rather than waiting until alpha testing, when “the Titanic is here, the iceberg is here, and your hair’s on fire.” Change course early and it’s easy to avoid disaster.

James Au spoke about the fact that Second Life — which he has covered for the last 3 years or so, first as Linden Lab’s in-house and now on his own — is emergent from top to bottom. Au also spoke about the strength of SL culture, where people tend to value SL itself more than any affiliation with companies like Coca-Cola, Disney or MTV (which came to SL last year to do a fashion show). Even small companies coming into the world have sparked protests. But the world has gotten so big that that kind of push-back has now fallen away. Corporations are moving in slowly and not encountering much culture clash.

danah boyd spoke about the power of virality when people occupy collective environments like virtual worlds. boyd also mentioned Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture, a book to be released this summer, which outlines studies around media participation and business. “You’re seeing all of this collide in really interesting ways. Sites are participating in everyday interactions. For the current generation, they see it and they know it. On MySpace, bands have profiles, companies have profiles — [users] are not stupid, they know this is being paid for and brought to them. The participants are the ones doing the most creative things, and the compaines are figuring out, if we want to play with you, we have to do that on your terms.” She also pointed out, “People get bored when they stop interacting with other people.”

Susan Choe spoke about the migration of virtual world activity from east to west. “A lot of things that Philip showed in his presentation is sort of a composite of the different online community sites” that have been happening in Korea, she said. CyWorld, a huge Korean social world, has shown many of the behavioral characteristics we’re just starting to see in the US and Europe now. Choe mentioned things like people gambling on how well other people will do in online video games. She also mentioned a figure of $800 million in transactions taking place in Korea just in the casual game market, not including MMOs. “It’s not really naything that any one of us can say what a community can be like,” Choe said. “You couldn’t make people be a community for school alums, you couldn’t make people be a community for profsessional social networking. It’s what people make it. We are just the providers of that platform”

As Lazzaro pointed out, “A movie will never hand you a jet-ski to save the world from nuclear war. A game has to.”