We’ve got a lot of highly skilled and enthusiastic gamers around here, but we need to set our sights on the big leagues: top-tier competitive gamers are now attracting major brand sponsors. The New York Times’ Stephanie Clifford recently highlighted Dr Pepper’s plans to place a professional gamer on bottles that will be distributed nationwide. The player in question is Tom Taylor, a 21-year-old who has a three-year, $250,000 contract to play video games, particularly Halo 3. Taylor, aka Tsquared, will appear on about 175 million bottles from January to April. “Dr Pepper struck the deal with Major League Gaming, a New York City company that organizes teams and competitions.

This year, the league has 50 professional teams, each specializing in one of five multiplayer games, including Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4.” Taylor is one of several players with these increasingly lucrative deals.

OK, here’s what I mean by this:

Have you ever gotten a Facebook email that someone sent that you only discovered 3 months after the fact?  I have, and I often wonder, “Did they really want to speak to me, and if so, why didn’t they call on the phone”?

But I am also guilty here, though usually with a good degree of calculation.  For example, I try to think about what my goal is, what the other person is doing and how to best communicate without wasting time.  While still enjoying the other person (this is important, or we’d stop phoning or having meals together).

So here goes — my list, ranked in order from Most Intimate to Least Intimate

1.  Face-to-Face (this works even better if the faces are being fed food)

2.  Synchronous Video Chat like Skype

3. Asynchronous Video Chat like Seesmic

3.  Realistic Virtual World with Avatar that Resembles You in Real Life

4. Facebook private conversations

5.  Textual Microblog Social Networks like Twitter

6. Fantasy - oriented Virtual Worlds where you do not resemble yourself

7.  Social Network public conversations (not including Twitter, Pownce and other microblogging)

8. Blog Comments

9. SMS

10. ESP

What do you think?

We’ll soon be moving across the hall from our current Sausalito headquarters into a much larger space. One of Reuben’s dreams has always been to have enough space to both run the company while also having a “Lab”, populated with a diverse mix of experts, entrepreneurs and practitioners from social media, virtual worlds, video game development, film and graphic design.

To wit: we are making available a small number of workstations that we’re offering to our readers and their networks in the spirit of co-working. While these workspaces (and ours) will offer sufficient privacy for client work, it will also be open and flexible enough to allow for cross-pollination of ideas, jokes, and the like.

Our new Class-A space is within walking distance of the ferry dock, downtown Sausalito, multiple excellent restaurants, a beach, the Schoonmaker Point Marina, a FedEx/Kinko’s, and the Bay Model. We never run out of interesting walks and meal options for ourselves, our clients and our guests. Co-workers would share our twice-weekly cleaning service, a kitchen, good broadband, a conference room, and plenty of natural light. There is ample onsite parking and a Golden Gate Transit stop is nearby. Drop Aimee (aimee@millionsofus.com) a note if you’re interested in discussing a month-to-month rental arrangement for a slot.

Competition for social status is at the root of much human behavior; depending on the context, status can be measured in many ways, including income, popularity, skill, or indeed virtue. Status competition is central to gaming, and it can be harnessed for the common good. We recently worked with a noted expert on the effects of media, Stanford’s Byron Reeves, to develop a demo for an MMPOG that harnesses gaming principles to promote home energy efficiency, challenging neighbors to compete with one another. The online game shows consumers the financial and environmental impact of energy choices and encourages conservation with competitive status rewards and recognition. This is achieved by linking smart meter-equipped homes to the internet and thus to the game, where decisions to run appliances at off-peak hours or turn down the thermostat, among others, are rewarded in a competitive context. This harnesses the do-gooding - but fun - discipline seen, for example, among Prius drivers, who enthusiastically monitor their real-time mpg readouts like avid gamers. Our demo showed how energy efficiency performance could be competitively measured and managed by an MMPOG at the individual, neighborhood and city level. The concept was presented and well-received in November at the Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference in Sacramento. Dr Reeves, who co-founded Stanford’s Media X program, hopes to develop the game in conjunction with utilities and government agencies as a fun, forward-thinking and easily promoted conservation tool.

I am so excited about this news from our sister company Virtual Greats for a number of reasons.  First and foremost, it is the first time we’ve extended premium virtual goods into virtual worlds running within the world’s largest social networks.

For those of you not up to speed, Super Pets is a virtual pet experience that allows you to adopt a pet, train it and battle it against your friends’ pets.  Within Facebook, Super Pets has 417, 000 monthly Active Users and within Myspace, it has 4.5 million monthly Active Users.  One of the challenges brands had in being sucessful in Second Life was that while the monthly active population was large (and the time per user, enormous), there was no good way to get in front of all those users.  Well, in Facebook with Superpets we’re now in front of an audience half as large as Second Life, and in Myspace, in front of one 4.5 times bigger than Second Life.

As for what we’re selling, we’re starting simple with items like winter hoodies for your pet that say Snoop’s cathcphrase, “Drop It Like it’s Hot” (you can see one on my avatar below, styled as a raccoon as a nod of the hat to my man Loic LeMeur and his Seesmic Logo.

Snoop Virtual Goods in Facebook with Rockyou Super Pets

Already this year, we’ve started to see the unfortunate fallout of the global financial meltdown.  Companies laying off workers, regular Americans losing their homes and regular people beginning to move to tent cities.  Additionally, with taxes shrinking, local governments are struggling to meet their increased obligations of unemployment insurance checks and social services that rise in times like these:  homelessness and mental health.  To put it bluntly, there a precious few positive side effects of a global recession.

Unfortunately, I’m an extrovert.  What that means is that I feed off  the energy of others.  Therefore, when people are happy, I feel happy and when they’re bummed out and hopeless, I feel a strong motivation to cheer them up.  I’m also an optimist because it’s the only outlook that has ever made sense to me.  This is a blog post about good things that I see that will emerge from the Recession. Perhaps these observations are just glib words — on the other hand, we’re equipped with all the tools to turn ideas into action.   I recently heard Desmond Tutu say, “Language creates the reality it seeks to describe.” If you agree with my ideas here,  please forward this to a friend so we can collectively create a better reality.

We have all watched the business press cover sales trends for the holidays and seen firsthand the deep discounting going on at retailers.  What I found more fascinating were the changes in attitude and behavior that took place around me this year.  One of the parents at my son’s pre-school offered us a few boxes of books and clothes that his children had outgrown.  At first, I politely refused, largely out of pride.  When my wife heard the story, she chastised me and when we saw the parent next, we accepted.  This might be an isolated example except for the fact that it made a deep impression on us.  And we realized that we also have boxes of beautiful clothes in the basement and friends that could use them.

Perhaps more importantly, we altered our attitude on Hannukah and Christmas gifts.  While we still overbought, you could see everyone making an effort to be more thoughtful in their purchases.  This really stood out for me as a healthy move away from a trend of spending to convey love while simultaneously showering more and more people with less and less attention (I’m not only talking about Twitter here. . . .)

If our behavior is any indicator of national trends, we’re going to see disappointing Holiday sales figures released soon.  But here’s why this may not be all bad.

What is the Economy?  At it’s simplest (meaning when we’re not double hedging Mortgage Derivatives), it is simply the way we keep score.  Of what?  Theoretically, the economy keeps score of the value we create (spending and savings) relative to the value we take (spending and debt).  So what does that mean?

Well, for me it means that there’s going to be a lot of bad news in the days and months to come.  And most of it will be in areas that you and I cannot control, which can really make you feel hopeless and powerless.  But we’re not — we’re powerful and more so, the more we have hope and trust in eachother.  Because the economy is a reflection of us all — how well we create value and help eachother.

Which leads me, I think to my point.  One thing we can control, is how we each behave.  The behavior that I saw this Holiday season is stuff that won’t show up on the economic report card,   We spent less, but hopefully, we paid more attention to the people around us, and valued them more.  The two concepts, spending and supporting, are interrelated but not equivalent.  So lets create value and support eachother.  Inspire eachother.  Invest in eachother.    That’s the way value has and always will be created.  And we need it now, more than ever.