Raph Koster, a game designer and writer, blogged last week about Studiocom, the agency that developed BarbieGirls.com. I enjoyed Raph's book A Theory of Fun, and I keep an eye on his blog. I appreciate his perspective on virtual worlds because it comes from a more experienced and critical position without being the shrill hyperbole of pieces on ValleyWag.

BarbieGirls.com is a virtual world for fans of Barbie, Mattel's cultural icon for little girls. There are a multitude of these virtual worlds, but this one is special because it attracted a lot of users really quickly. Aside from the success, the story is interesting because Studiocom is self-described as an agency.

You'd expect to find something like BarbieGirls invented by a division of Mattel dedicated to building games. It was developed by a marketing agency that happens to understand virtual worlds really well. It made me a little jealous. We're doing amazing work at Clear Ink, but an assignment like that would be off the scale. And I know we would totally nail an assignment like that.

Virtual worlds are the ultimate platform for engagement. Instead of a flat stack of words, you interface with your customers in an entire universe you've designed for them--or you've designed with them. In small ways, Clear Ink builds these experiences all the time. Of course, we've got the process of building properties and applications inside Second Life. We also develop rich experiences for the Web, such as interactive screencasts.

The immense challenge of developing a virtual world is that it's not just a technical exercise. Electronic Arts does that kind of thing all the time, but they ask their customers to pay up front. It's also not just a marketing exercise. How many ad agencies can you think of that understand the complexity of building an MMOG, not to mention the capacity to get the software development done?

Allow me to take Raph's point a step further. The technology for building virtual worlds is getting easier. This tends to shift the work of building them from the experts in the technology to the experts in the communication. Marketing agencies are the experts in designing communication with customers. Game designers are experts in designing entertaining interactive experiences. We're headed toward a future where marketing agencies have game designers on staff.