In our latest round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Volition, Namco and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted in each market area this week include:

All this week, Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra and casual site Gamezebo have brought you keynote and panel coverage from Seattle's Casual Connect event, which covered a number of angles regarding 'casual games' today.

Some of the notable lectures from this conference included PopCap decrying cynically focused casual games in favor of wider-ranging, 'core'/casual crossover titles, and Nintendo and Facebook discussing their platforms.

The jointly covered Casual Connect lectures comprise the following notable write-ups:

Top 12 Social Gaming Trends
What are the past year's 12 most interesting and ground-breaking trends in social games? Playdom's Steve Meretzky and David Rohrl, plus Hit Detection's N'Gai Croal, gave a round-up.

Building Strong Brands In A Storm Of Competition
Developers can survive increasing competition and falling prices in the casual space by building strong brands, not by cranking out volumes of low-quality titles, says Last Day of Work's Arthur Humphrey.

The Fatal Flaws Of Flash Game Design
Flash game portal Kongregate's CEO Jim Greer and Developer Relations Manager Greg McClanahan discussed tips on what to do -- and what not to do -- in Flash game design.

What's the most important trends in social gaming today? Playdom VP of Game Design Steve Meretzky and Executive Producer David Rohrl, along with Hit Detection founder N'Gai Croal tried to answer this.

In their Casual Connect panel in Seattle, the trio presented a survey of the 12 most interesting and ground-breaking trends in social games to emerge over the past year.

Trend 1: Virtual Worlds

"Last year, the discussion centered around whether virtual worlds would work at all in social games, and whether there was room for avatar-based games on the platform," said Rohrl.

"The first folks to address this was an app called YoVille from Zynga, which was very much patterned on Habbo Hotel. You could have furniture in your home, an avatar, and so on. Apps like Pet Society followed."

Trend 2: Customization and Personalization

"If you think about the success of the Nintendo Wii, one of the first things that happened when people had friends over was that you would either put the remote in their hand and say go play tennis, or have them create a Mii avatar," said Croal.

[Sulake's Sulka Haro (Habbo) is one of the more thoughtful minds in social games today, and Gamasutra quizzes him about exceeding user expectations, child rearing, and quality of life in the Finnish game industry.]

Habbo Hotel is immensely popular worldwide, with over 90 million Habbo characters for the graphically-based social space created as of 2008.

Sulka Haro is lead concept designer for the game/service, and helps guide facilitate user experience in both predictive and reactive ways. Haro is always thinking about the industry, other titles, and what can be done for the service, in a very deep level, almost academic way.

Atop the Hotel Torni in Helsinki, one of the tallest buildings in Finland, we continued a discussion that began on a nature hike by his father’s cabin (Haro is also an amateur nature photographer). It unfortunately leads to some rather baiting questions on my part, but which brings about a number of excellent points.

In this interview, we discuss social dynamics and style in MMOs, local markets versus foreign expansion, single- versus multiple-sharded environments, and how to predict where your game is to go, when all major play content is essentially player-driven.

Prepaid card company InComm and Cartoon Network announced an agreement to distribute prepaid cards for the latter's browser-based MMO game FusionFall.

The cards are already available at several of InComm's retail partners, such as WalMart, Toys”R”Us, and FYE, and will show up at GameStop locations starting next week. With the partnership, the FusionFall prepaid cards will eventually be available at over 17,000 retail locations.

Launched in January, FusionFall has players working with each other and other Cartoon Network characters to explore more than 60 areas and defend their universe from an alien invasion. Available with both free-to-play and subscription options, the MMO has so far picked up over five million registered accounts.

"Partnering with InComm is a key component of our strategy to offer as many opportunities as possible for our audience to enjoy the full benefits of FusionFall, Cartoon Network's biggest game to date," says Paul Condolora, senior vice president, digital for Turner’s Animated Young Adults and Kids Media group. "Combining InComm's robust relationships with the top U.S. retailers with our dynamic MMOG will be a big win for us."

Live Gamer, which works with publishers to serve player-to-player microtransactions in online games, has acquired Korean microtransactions company N-Cash, and will add its platform to its offering.

According to Live Gamer, the deal means the company now has a complete e-commerce solution for publishers, offering multiple integration options. The company asserts its advantage lies in being able to provide several services on its own that would normally require a few different partnerships.

The company offers support to companies launching real money transaction platforms within their games and aims to help games generate higher average revenues per users, improved conversion rates and player-to-player trading.

The Asian microtransactions market is up to over $4 billion a year, according to Live Gamer, and growing at a rate of almost 30 percent per year. Says chairman and CEO Mitchell Davis: "With N-Cash, we’ve acquired a secure, scalable and proven commerce platform which has completed 150 million micro-transactions and is currently handling 56 million registered users."

The Chinese Ministry of Culture banned websites from featuring online mafia-styled games, saying such virtual entertainment is a threat to Chinese culture and a bad influence on the nation's youth.

The government organization said that websites face "severe punishment" if they run, publish, or link to online games with a mafia theme in violation of the ban, the Xinhua news service reported Tuesday.

Players of mafia games interact with other members of the online community as members of families or gangs. The Ministry of Culture said such interactions "encourage people to deceive, loot and kill, and glorify gangster life. They are a bad influence on youngsters."

Some of the games that reportedly went offline following the ban were Godfather, Jianghu ("Gangster Community"), and the ferociously-titled Guhuozai ("young and dangerous guys").

Around 200 million internet users in China play online games, or about 64 percent of total web users in the country, representing double-digit growth from a year ago, according to a new survey by the China Internet Network Information Center.

The figures measure internet usage in China as of June 30, 2009, and place online gaming as the sixth most-used application for the web, analysts at Stern Agee reported, citing the survey. Online game usage is up 16 percent year-on-year.

"This may explain why the average number of hours spent per internet user per week went up to 18 hours from 16.6 hours at year-end 2008", Stern Agee analysts said.

According to the survey, Chinese web users use the internet primarily for music, followed by news, instant messaging, search, video, gaming, email, blogs, forums, and shopping, in that order.

Driving this increased internet usage in China is greater internet penetration in homes, and a younger demographic that is web-savvy. Sixty-four percent of internet users in China are between the ages of 10 and 30 years.

Research firm Magid and Associates posted data from a new study showing that 12 percent of Americans bought virtual goods in the last 12 months.

Sponsored by digital marketplace PlaySpan, the study, titled "A Closer Look At Virtual Worlds, Virtual Goods, Microtransactions & Downloadable Content", surveyed 1,927 people aged 12 to 64 last April, with gender, ethnicity, and age range samples modeled after U.S. census numbers.

The study describes virtual goods as both simple (e.g. virtual points, music) and complex items (avatars) that are purchased and exchanged online in games, virtual worlds, and social networks.

51 percent of virtual goods purchasers couldn't recall how much they spent in the past 12 months, but those who could reported spending an average of $30. 27 percent of those who could remember their purchases said they spent less than $50, while 15 percent spent over $100.

"The fact that lots of people are reaching into their pocket to buy virtual goods is impressive," says Magid and Associates, "but it is even more impressive that some of those consumers are spending considerable dollars.

The firm continues, "As this market grows, if consumers continue to spend $50 or more on virtual goods, this will be a multi-billion dollar market."

GDC Austin organizers are reminding 2008 Alumni that they can save up to 40% on All Access and Main Conference passes by registering by midnight on July 30th.

For those who previously attended the online gaming-centric event, the Main Conference pass is available at a major discount until midnight tonight.

GDC Austin, to be held September 15th-18th, 2009 at the Austin Convention Center in Texas, now includes six online-centric 'tracks' for the Main Conference, which takes place Wednesday 16th to Friday 18th. More than 120 sessions will be available covering online games, MMOs and social networking games, from business through technical to design and beyond.

In addition, access to the major GDC Austin Indie, iPhone, Writing, and Audio Summits -- which take place on Tuesday 15th and Wednesday 16th -- are also available for those alumni wanting to purchase All-Access passes or Summits & Tutorials passes.

More information on the overall 2009 GDC Austin event -- which recently added a Blizzard duo discussing World Of Warcraft as a keynote, and is still to announce a number of major lectures and roundtables -- is available on the official GDC Austin homepage.

Social gaming -- the phenomenon of games played via social networks, e.g. Facebook -- has gotten very big, very fast. Millions of users play these games every day.

One of the most successful companies in the space is Zynga, which operates Mafia Wars, FarmVille, YoVille!, and Texas Hold'Em, all of which have audiences in the millions today.

This year, social gaming has become particularly attractive to individuals with traditional game development backgrounds. Zynga has been attracting a lot of talent with RTS experience, in particular -- EALA's general manager Mike Verdu, as well as Big Huge Games' Brian Reynolds, and EALA's Mark Skaggs, who now serves as a studio GM and executive producer in social RTS development.

In this in-depth interview, Gamasutra talks to Skaggs about the rise of social gaming and what he thinks makes it interesting and relevant to the game industry today:

Activision Blizzard's World of Warcraft has been down for weeks in China, as the hugely popular MMORPG switches operators from The9 to NetEase -- though it has just relaunched to existing users in free, 'closed beta' form.

But Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian said in a Friday research note that the financial impact on Activision Blizzard from the downtime will be "modest," partly because Asia makes up just 6 percent of total worldwide World of Warcraft revenues, he estimated.

"While Asia accounts for roughly 50 percent of global users, we estimate the region contributes less than 10 percent of total WoW revenues, due to the licensing structure and timecard model," he wrote.

A March report from PC Gaming Alliance estimated that total worldwide WoW revenues are around $1 billion yearly. In the West, players pay a monthly subscription of around $15 per month for the game. In Asia, players instead access accounts using time cards, which are depleted as players log in and play WoW.

In our latest employment-tastic round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from 2K Boston, Sony Santa Monica, and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted in our main market area this week include:

Three key staffers from Sony Online Entertainment Seattle, the studio behind the upcoming spy MMO The Agency, left SOE to form the social and mobile game studio Detonator Games.

The company formed on July 4, 2009, according to Detonator's website. Matt Wilson, former director of development at SOE Seattle, is Detonator's creative director. He was also often the face of The Agency, speaking with the media and the gaming community about the game's progress.

Detonator co-founder and art director Corey Dangel was also the art director for The Agency. John Smith, former senior producer and technical director at SOE Seattle, is now Detonator's technical director.

Wilson and Smith founded Seattle-based FireAnt, whose team SOE acquired 2005 to form SOE Seattle. Wilson confirmed with website Eurogamer that he and Dangel no longer work for SOE. "There were a variety of factors into making this decision, but we wish SOE and The Agency the best success," he said.

As for the future of The Agency, SOE denied rumors that the game would undergo an extensive reboot in the wake of the departures. "The Agency is not undergoing a reboot of any sorts - that is incorrect," a rep told Eurogamer, adding that development on the game is continuing normally.

The Agency is slated for a 2010 release, and is in development for PC and PlayStation 3.

Heatwave Interactive announced it is developing Platinum Life, a free-to-play massively multplayer online role-playing game title built with rapper, actor, and self-described "rubber band man" T.I., born Clifford Harris Jr.

In the game, players take on the role of an artist seeking to make it big in the hip-hop industry. They establish themselves by engaging in rap battles, building an entourage made up of computer-controlled players, selling mixtapes, and performing popular hip-hop songs at small shows (with Guitar Hero-style minigames). Eventually, players can even open for T.I. at a concert.

Heatwave emphasizes that Platinum Life will lack the over-the-top themes of violence many attribute to rappers and their music -- while the game will feature player versus player combat, opponents settle their differences with "shout outs" and "yo mama jokes", instead of with firearms like the unregistered machine guns and silencers T.I. was arrested for three years ago.

Founded in 2007 and based in Austin, Heatwave recently raised $7.5 million from Syndicated Communications Venture Partners. The studio's president and co-founder Anthony Castoro has worked in the games industry since 1993, working at companies such as Sony Online Entertainment, Electronic Arts, and Codemasters.

"Most hip-hop games are about thug life," Castoro told USA Today, forgetting the light-hearted rhymes and experiences provided by one PaRappa the Rapper. He added, "We wanted to do something that is positive about hip-hop and is broader."