On 26. September, the DCC research group at HIIT organised a mini-seminar under the topic “Massively multi-user services and the item payment revenue model”. A keynote speech was delivered by our visitor from Korea, professor Leo Sang-Min Whang of Yonsei University. Prof. Whang is a leading researcher of the psychology of MMORPGs and virtual items in Korea. Download his presentation here (5.8 M).

Other speakers were Sulka Haro, Lead Concept Designer at Sulake Corporation, creators of the popular teenage virtual world Habbo Hotel; and Taneli Tikka, CEO of Dynamoid, the company behind Finland’s top community site IRC-Galleria and WoW-players’ picture community Dark Portal. Both of these successful companies are applying the item payment revenue model.

You can download a video recording (MPEG4/MPEG-audio) of the seminar talks. It is more than three hours long, so the file is large (788 M). Picture quality is not great, but the audio track is well audible. Some of the content of the talks is reported in the blog post Virtual trinkets and advertising combine in IRC-Galleria.

Update: On the same trip, professor Whang also made an appearance at the Games & Storytelling lecture series, discussing similar themes. Video stream and lecture slides available here.