Monty Sharma gave a great talk this morning at DevCon5 about the current trends in games and what the rest of us can learn from them. He centers on three big ideas:

• Free-to-Play. Find a way to let dedicated users pay more to get more stuff, but offer free functionality to everybody who asks
• Compulsion Loops. Find ways to get people hooked into coming back to your software in order to satisfy some compulsion
• Engaged Communities. Give up some control to bring your users into a community with one another.

I was really interested in his retelling of the EVE Online community responding to something called GoonSwarm. I can’t quite follow the internal politics of the game, but I can see that thousands of users organized themselves into highly effective ad hoc groups in order to battle one another within the game. Are your users that passionate and engaged?