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We spent most of Monday ensconced in the GDC Worlds in Motion summit track, which made "standing room only" seem extremely spacious -- most of the sessions were packed to the gills and then some. It seems like more than a few industry types are interested in the intersections between gaming and virtual worlds. Case in point, the following session we've paraphrased (hopefully not too liberally!) from Reuben Steiger, CEO of Milllions of Us, a company that builds marketing campaigns and content for virtual worlds.

Reuben: Storytelling is the bedrock of human culture. (Looking at a slide with a real campfire on the left and a user-created campfire in Second Life on the right) -- users in virtual worlds are recreating this storytelling tradition. I'm going to make a contention: the internet has failed as a storytelling medium. Instead, the norm is bathroom humor and ridiculous jokes.

So virtual worlds: are they games or not? What defines a game -- linguists and semioticians get real worked up about it. The audience might say "virtual worlds are games without rules, competition, goals or fun." And it's hard to blame them. Extreme openness has defined virtual worlds, where fun can be in a way you define as opposed to what some game developer feels is fun. But the appeal of virtual worlds is that we can tell stories on a broader and less walled playing field.

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