Where Facebook and social networks are for keeping up with friends, virtual worlds are more like the traditional MMOs, they're about having fun and making new friends.

The difference between a massively multiplayer game like World of Warcraft and a casual world like Club Penguin is that players either can't or don't want to spend their time leveling up. Casual worlds pull back those traditional MMO dynamics in order to create a game anyone can play.

As casual world developers since 1999 we've found that while virtual worlds are accessible to everyone, by removing those traditional MMO game dynamics we loose the addiction and immersion characterized by titles like World of Warcraft.

The key to engaging a mainstream audience is a great story or great narrative. Much like a good book the player becomes immersed in the narrative, cares about the characters, and wants to know how the story ends.

Indeed, we like to think of virtual worlds as interactive cartoons. A cartoon that the player can take part in, and effect the ending.

To make all this possible we invented GAML; the HTML for virtual worlds. GAML is a simple language that almost anyone can use to create great quests, conversations, collectables and in world narratives. Because we believe the best virtual worlds will come out of the hands of writers, dramatists, and creatives, not programmers.