State of Play V - business and marketing panel

The key theme to come out of this panel, comrpised of five virtual world marketers and creators, was that real-world businesses would have a very difficult time merely transporting their offline presence into static in-world presences. Branding is highly dependent on audience interaction. User-led development and conversations are critical to branding and marketing.

The panelists seemed to agree that looser protection of trademarks was necessary to improve branding in virtual worlds. Allowing participants to play with the brand (or at least, *within* the brand) was necessary to create conversation. Ken from Centric made the point that IP decisions are business decisions - he would recommend that corporations recognise the advantages to open IP policies and allow people to participate and play with their brands.

Most of the panellists noted that a lot of their future work would involve user participation and user-led development. There seemed to be a recognition that selling objects in virtual worlds was not going to be a viable model, although Guntram Graef noted that Anshe Chung Studios and related developers were still heavily reliant on IP rights and enforcement.

For me, one of the amazing things in virtual worlds is that the only really scarce resource is creativity. I think that to a large extent, business models based on artificial scarcity (selling *objects*) in these environments are not going to be sustainable. At the very least, they are going to require constant effort to maintain. They are also going to be extremely fragile - vulnerable to 'amateur' or 'non-economic' production, and highly vulnerable to the changes made to the environment by platform owners.