Right. It does seem different, and I was wondering what you were thinking about really casual MMOs like Habbo Hotel.

JS: It's interesting. I have some experience in that stuff. I worked at There.com for a while, and so I've worked with mainstream audiences and virtual worlds. The word "casual," like everything, has complicated things, because what does that really mean? Does casual mean the amount of money I'm willing to spend, the amount of time I'm willing to invest, or how emotionally connected or committed I am to what I'm doing? Or how hardcore of a gamer I am, or how much complexity I want in the game that I'm playing?

People who are playing Habbo Hotel? They're not really casual, in that they spend lots and lots of time on the Internet doing that. People who play Second Life or There are anything but casual. One of the things I learned at there.com is that a 45-year-old mother of four can be just as maniacally zealous about coming into a virtual world that's mainstream and likes spending lots and lots of money buying new T-shirts for her avatar and a new buggy to park in front of her house or whatever. So there's nothing really casual about it. You don't actually want that.

In a business model like this where we're asking people to pay money for a premium, we don't want them to be casual. Someone who watches Lost or Heroes or whatever religiously every week and reads about it on the Net and can't wait for the next episode to come out -- they're not a casual consumer of content. They're core, because of how much time they're willing to commit and how exciting they are about it.

I think what we're really all talking about is complexity, and how much actual time and money people want to invest. I think there is an opportunity there for people to invest smaller chunks of time, and we try to accommodate that in this game as well, because you have monster play and session play -- ways for you to go in and very quickly play. If I only had thirty or forty minutes tonight to play, I can go in and play, get out, and not feel like...

AM: You don't feel like you have to put in ten or twenty hours a week in order to actually get value out of your experience. You have a great point about the casual. I think we're going to have to come up with a new phrase for it. It comes down to the accessibility of being able to go in and adapt to multiple peoples' lifestyles. Hardcore gamers who play -- and we've got them -- who play thirty or forty hours a week, which I can't even comprehend, and I work for a gaming company... they have a lot more time on their hands. Someone who has a job, family, kids, or is going to school has less time, but still wants the entertainment experience.

So does that make them more casual players? Probably not. But the idea that they can find content that's successful to them and to their lifestyle... I think the whole definition of "casual" became the antonym for "hardcore," and leaves out the idea of finding games that appeal to people and their lifestyles and still be entertainment. If the entertainment starts to take up 70 or 80 hours a week, is it entertainment, or is it your life? It's something we should explore more. It's an interesting topic.

JS: Back to the other question about Habbo Hotel... it's a natural extension in both directions, where the whole virtual world industry is going, versus where the whole Web 2.0 and social networking thing's going. The two things are starting to come together. We talk about it all the time, and people are like, "Web 2.0! The future's really about people being online, connection, and socializing with each other and sharing experiences!" And we're like, "Cool, we've been doing that for ten years! We're already there!" The only difference is, what are the barriers? Do I have to have a nice computer to play it? Do I have to play thirty to forty hours a week? Do I have to pay $15 a month?

There are a lot of MMOs and a lot of specifically fantasy-oriented MMOs out there. Are you worried that the market's oversaturated or that you have to compete with World of Warcraft?

JS: Those are two separate questions! The first question, there's really a couple parts to it. Are we worried that there's a lot of competitors out there? I think there's a list of maybe 80 MMOs that are supposedly coming out over the next several years. Don't worry about that. First of all, there's no point in it. Our job is to focus on doing what we do as great as it can possibly be. I can't control what other people are doing, and if I worry about that all day I'll go crazy. Any creative person -- like people who make movies or record albums -- will say the same thing.

I will say that what we do is really hard. It's really hard to the point where many of us wake up in the morning and question why we have decided to do the hardest possible thing you could do in the game industry in terms of making product. So it's not something you can just decide to do. It takes a lot of time, money, technology, experience, and expertise, and I think a lot of these companies are going to struggle with bringing these games to the market. In some respects, our job is just to stay ahead of the pack as much as we possibly can. So don't worry so much about that. Now as far as saturation of fantasy, you could say that every game we've ever made is fantasy. You could say it because it's true!

AM: You could also say that every game ever made is based on our fantasy IP, which is definitely true. When that question was asked before we came to market, the easy answer was like, "Dude, it's The Lord of the Rings!"

JS: But that's the ongoing question, right? Wouldn't science fiction be the way to go? Wouldn't cyberpunk be the way to go? Or westerns? Sure, and I think everybody's exploring different types of the genre, because it reaches out to different parts of the audience, but the fantasy audience, first of all, just in terms of fiction and entertainment, is gigantic. It always will be. It's really more a matter of... an RPG in general, any kind of role-playing game, for the most part, in any gaming genre or platform, tends to be focused around fantasy, because there's something fundamental about the way fantasy, as it's been defined, really supports that kind of gameplay. And it's fundamentally tied with everything that started with D&D and Tolkien and everything else, which is ironic -- the two games that we're driving right now.

But also it has to do with the look of those games. Fantasy has a very specific look, and I think that will start to diversify and look different. Even with Tolkien, we have an opportunity to look different. It doesn't look like that kind of high-fantasy look. It doesn't look hyper-real like it looks like if you go out to Golden Gate Park, but it looks like a place that could be real, and that's important.

The other thing is that fantasy is really just mythology. That's never going to go away. Fantasy is at the core of people, and fantasy is always going to be there. Saying, "People are tired of fantasy," is... I've said the same thing in the past, and have we all worried about it? Sure, we all have. "My God, there's too much fantasy! Fantasy's going to get old!" It's like saying the heroic journey is going to get old. "People are so tired of hearing about heroic journeys!" But every movie and every book you see, deep inside it somewhere -- even if it's an action movie or a drama -- is a heroic journey. It's fundamental, and it's not going to go away. I think fantasy's fundamental, so I don't worry about it that much. As far as the competition, I always worry about the competition. Who isn't worried about the competition?

AM: There's nothing you can do about that though, right? Just make the best game you can, and maybe not necessarily beat the competition, but push the envelope in terms of what kind of experiences we can, as an industry, deliver to people.

JS: And I don't think the genre is what attracts people at the beginning, but at this point, if someone's making a decision between whether they want to spend their time and money on WoW or whether they want to spend their time and money on Lord of the Rings, or both, it's not because of what genre it is. It's because they feel like the experience is sustainable, and there keeps being new, fresh stuff for them to do.