These practices are hard to ignore in especially high-stakes, risk-adverse software development environments. Thus our first biq question, can game software development as it is now conducted scale in the face of advances in hardware, appetite for content, and capped costs?

Our story now migrates to *objects*. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us. It was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations.

After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers. And there are huge gaps in what we don't know. Where is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from it. I hope the audience did as well.

But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown). And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companies.

Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet. If you have a hurry using of WOW Gold, you may come here and Buy Warhammer Gold. The importance you will acknowledge when you have no Cheap WOW Gold. If Code is the Law in our realm, then the modern conceptualization of code (see Footnote [1]) often aspires to be object-based. The craft of software objects is then Object Oriented Programming, even if it is only sometimes realized. By and large, software object-oriented design has been a cultural touchstone for nearly a generation of software developers and designers - objects provide a convenient and intuitive means of partitioning/ decomposing problems and mapping them onto code building blocks. Challenges emerge, however, when one scales interactions from small numbers of objects to large sets of objects. Throw in parallel threads of computation and all hell breaks loose. Why the concern with large numbers of objects? Well, that is arguably where gameplay simulation is heading.

This is where Tim's slides enters our stage. They worry a particularly difficult and central problem: how to have large numbers of objects interacting across many threads of computation.

So let's be agnostic about this, and go with a smorgasbord of rankings, according to player type:

Role players and other valiant defenders of the magic circle may go with the PPP rankings, which place the virtual world economy 134th among the planet's 185 national economies, right between Benin ($7.49 billion) and Malta ($7.04 billion).

Farmers, powergamers, and other dedicated breakers of immersion should use the exchange-rate rankings, which move things up to 101st place, between Jamaica ($7.88 billion) and Estonia ($7.28 billion).

And finally, IGE fanbois, whoever you are, should feel free to plug Steve Salyer's numbers into the formula, for a total GDP of $11.88 billion and an exchange-rate ranking of 86th place - not quite as good as Panama ($12.127 billion) but better than Côte d'Ivoire ($11.12 billion) and, for that matter, over half of the world's sovereign nations. You go!