Things get even busier for me starting tomorrow at 6:40am, when I fly out of San Diego and up to Stanford for a Metaverse Roadmap Meeting and the Metaverse U event at Stanford. At the latter I’ll be participating in a nice long on-stage conversation along with Cory Ondrejka and Howard Rheingold.

Then I am off to GDC. First up, I am opening the Worlds in Motion Summit:

Why Gamers should Care about Virtual Worlds
Speaker(s): Raph Koster (Areae)
Time: 10:05am – 11am
Virtual worlds may be a nascent medium, but already lessons on user behavior, open worlds and content democratization have begun to surface, promising to provide new insight and evolution on the way we play and socialize. Industry pioneer Raph Koster, whose company, Areae, is set to join the revolution in a big way, saw these new insights coming before wider adoption had even begun, and he will discuss why virtual worlds and online spaces are more than a fad—and why you absolutely should care.

On Friday afternoon, last session of the week, the redoubtable Sean Riley (lead programmer for Metaplace) and I will be doing an “antemortem” of sorts on building Metaplace. It’s called a postmortem in the program, but really, we’re not done yet, so…

 Metaplace Postmortem: Reinventing MMOs
Speaker: Raph Koster (President, Areae, Inc.), Sean Riley (Lead Programmer, Metaplace)
Date/Time: Friday (February 22, 2008)   4:00pm — 5:00pm
Location (room): Room 135, North Hall
Track: Game Design
Secondary Track: Vision
Experience Level: All

Session Description
In August of 2006, Areae set out to try to reinvent many aspects of the fundamental architecture and design of virtual worlds and MMOs. The goal: move away from the current model and towards systems that work more the way the web does today, using open standards and encouraging user participation. In this session, we’ll walk through how it went, and how it works. We’ll discuss the challenges for game developers learning to “talk web,” and the implications it has on designing games that work this way.

Idea Takeaway
Come learn lessons from web development that apply to games, and how to adapt current design paradigms to the broader Internet.

Intended Audience
The technical content will be light to moderate, so this should be of interest to anyone working in online games.