Join us for the Metanomics Community Forum Thursday, October 1 at 12:00 PST as we discuss the challenges of selling virtual worlds to enterprise. The forum takes place at the Metanomics Main Stage and is video simulcast to this page.

At the recent 3DTLC conference at the Engage Expo there was a lot of discussion of how to best convince business, schools, and other enterprises to give virtual worlds a try: whether for training, a conference, or collaboration. Some of the discussion centered on whether the term ‘virtual worlds’ creates a negative impact when used with decision makers. Alternate names include immersive media or the immersive Internet.

On this week’s Metanomics, Robert Bloomfield will weigh in with his own thoughts on the subject.

Dusan Writer (Doug Thompson) will host this discussion. He commented at length at his own blog:

There’s this growing consensus of a few hard truths about virtual worlds for business:

- We can’t call them virtual worlds anymore, it sounds frivolous, it reminds everyone of furries and ‘goofing off’. – We can’t ever ever use the “game” word. Talking about games or play is like giving a corporate mandate to employees that they can play solitaire all afternoon (or, the modern equivalent, watch youTube videos when the boss isn’t looking). – We need to scrub our language of terms like ‘creative cacophony’ or ‘fun’ and use things like ‘increase ROI’ or ‘improve learning retention’ and we need to be talking about things like enterprise-level integration with Sametime or SCORM-compliant LMS systems or other blah blahs.

…(But) these are new WORLDS as much as we might label them applications or platforms. And these new worlds hold a key, although not the ONLY key, to how our collective futures might unfold: with companies who succeed not because they launch a Zune, but because they launch an iPod. Where we might be able to go to work and find that we have the tools to liberate our creative impulse, where the word ‘play’ or ‘game’ is part of a broader value proposition which includes innovation and design thinking and human-centered product development. Where goofing off is a REQUIREMENT for remaining flexible in our thinking, transparent and trustworthy in our actions, and resistant to dogma.

So do we need a new name for virtual worlds? Is the term too limiting? What other barriers can we overcome by ‘redefining’ how we describe or how we name these emerging technologies.