In our latest employment-specific 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 ArenaNet, Radical Entertainment, THQ 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 this week include:

ArenaNet Cinematics Producer
"ArenaNet is seeking a Cinematics Producer who will be responsible for ensuring the successful delivery of the in game cinematics and marketing videos to a high creative standard. The role will oversee the entire lifecycle of the cinematics production process from concept to delivery. The Producer will collaborate with the Cinematics Lead to execute a vision and provide the link and liaise between the Cinematics team and the art, design, programming and production teams."

Radical Entertainment/Activision Mission Scripter (Intermediate)
"Our 50,000+ square foot studio situated on the cusp of downtown Vancouver, overlooks the coastal mountains and offers a fully stocked kitchen, in-house gym, log cabin, ski lift tickets, art gallery passes and a wide variety of training, mentorship and career development initiatives. At Radical we’re here to create great games and learn and have fun doing it."

In a lecture at GDC China, NetEase's design director Yunfeng Lin discussed the fascinating gold farming bot-related issues in the company's massively popular Westward Journey Chinese online game series, and how it fixed them.

Lin started by noting: "We are very firm about bot programs.. we will spare no effort to crack down on them." With NetEase's games in this series having hundreds of thousands or even millions of simultaneous users, it's a major problem.

He explained that the company -- which now also runs World Of Warcraft in China -- started out by detecting bots -- which try to accumulate in-game wealth to sell it to other payers for financial gain -- by looking at their behavior.

The company's game began by using a number of basic 'check' devices before in-game fights, including a visual test ('Which character is facing left, when all the others are facing right?', as well as slightly more complex mathematical questions.

Playfish's Mack Growen (Restaurant City, Pet Society) delivered a speech about the current state of the social gaming market, in which he encouraged developers to abandon their passion for copying successful games, and talked of a coming shift towards high-level competition from well-moneyed players.

Growen, who is the GM of Playfish China, is positive that production values, while currently low, will only increase -- and infuence player choice in kind. Says Growen, "The consumer will always prefer higher production values if everything else is the same. The budgets are going to increase. It's important to build our organizations today to scale it in this way."

However, there is still massive potential, because social networking platform adoption is so speedy compared to hardware such as game consoles, says Growen. "Social games can grow faster than other platforms we've seen before, because we've always been waiting" for install base with previous platforms, "but the installed base is already mature." But increased competition also means that "we can expect the budgets to grow faster for social games than any platform we've seen before."

China's General Administration of Press and Publication and its National Copyright Administration have re-iterated and apparently strengthened their regulatory powers over online games operated out of China, requiring preapproval before any game can be launched, and completely forbidding any foreign investment in Chinese operators of online games.

Games must also be re-certified before they are updated or changed, or they risk decertification entirely, according to a Marbridge Daily report citing an official Chinese government statement.

Marbridge notes that the GAPP statement says that foreign companies "cannot control or participate in domestic game-operating businesses indirectly through another investment company, signed agreements or by supplying technical support. Foreign companies are neither allowed to covertly control or be involved in domestic gaming operations by means of joint networks for user registration, account supervision or game card systems."

These new rules are likely to make it significantly harder for overseas publishers to begin running new games in China -- without a joint partnership or agreement with a Chinese company, it may be difficult for newcomers to get a game running, but the new regulations prohibit such partnerships.

Nexon America VP Min Kim (MapleStory, Combat Arms) delivered a speech at GDC China in Shanghai on his company's successes and stumbling blocks in the U.S. market in an attempt to inspire Chinese creators to release their products in the West, and "come and help us start this market."

Kim opened his talk by talking about the shared heritage U.S. and Korean gamers have in the arcades of the past -- playing and enjoying Asian-developed games. "Games do have a history of making it over, and that's why I think there's a chance for developers," says Kim, who grew up in New York City but spent summers with his grandparents in South Korea.

"The point I'm trying to make is that we had a common ancestor. I grew up on both sides, and I think we were playing the same games, for the same reason. But our paths took on different evolutionary roads."

In a GDC China talk in Shanghai on Tuesday, XEODesign president Nicole Lazzaro, best known for her work on game usability, emotional reaction and interface design for companies like Electronic Arts and Playfirst, discussed her views on creating massively social online games and what she called "viral emotions".

Lazzaro discussed her research in "the choices that players make and the emotions that they feel", created from her background as a cognitive psychology graduate and programmer. She commented of the 'massively social game' trend, which she's been speaking about for a couple of years, suggesting that only in the past few months have Facebook titles started to fulfill that promise.

But there's further we can go. What would it take to make a game that would be played by 6 billion people? Lazzaro showed her research comparing MMOs like World Of Warcraft to 'MSOs' - which at the time were services like Twitter and Facebook, but are nowadays better showcased by Facebook games.

She pointed out that social media has zero barrier to entry, is incredibly viral, and full of 'social tokens', whereas bigger MMOs are a very immersive experience with high barriers to entry and sometimes limited themes.

Game engine company Trinigy said Tuesday that game development house Zed Group will use the Trinigy Vision Engine to develop an online PC game based on the upcoming Sony Pictures CG animated film, Planet 51.

The film, in which humans are the "aliens" invading a planet inhabited by green beings, is slated to release this November, alongside the release of Zed's Trinigy-powered online PC game and console versions of Planet 51.

Zed's director of product innovation Christopher Head said in a statement that Zed has worked with Trinigy for "many years on a wide range of projects." Trinigy said the Vision Engine will help "accelerate development" of Planet 51's online game world.

Zed Group's sister company is Madrid, Spain-based Ilion Animation Studios, which is producing the movie Planet 51. Ilion was formed by founders of video game developer Pyro Studios, developers of the Commando series of games.

Sega and Pyro announced a video game publishing deal for Planet 51 console games in February this year. Planet 51 is also in development for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, and DS.

[The preceding article by Kris Graft originally appeared on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Finishing up GDC China 2009 in Shanghai, Large Animal (Bumper Stars) art director Brad MacDonald talked about the social network and iPhone indie game developer's approach to making intriguing social games.

MacDonald's 15-20 person New York-based developer has a long history of PC indie and casual games such as RocketBowl, before shifting gears onto social and iPhone games in the last few months.

He started off by praising the idea of limitations, commenting simply: "Limitations are the creative person's friend", and said that tools that free developers up to be creative are much more important than tools that simply do flashy things.

He noted that his company's attitude to social games is all about "emulating the experience of tabletop games" such as Monopoly and Scrabble. The company exited the casual downloadable game market because "publishers and distributors resisted the idea... of the developer having a direct connection to the developer," MacDonald said.

Overall in the PC casual space, there's "relatively little money to be made in a clone-heavy market", and the company was having less control over their content. So to Facebook, MySpace, and iPhone they went.

In the second quarter of this year, China's online game revenues grew 39.5 percent year-on-year to $906 million, with online operator Tencent Holdings leading the charge ahead of competitors Shanda and World of Warcraft operator NetEase.

A Reuters report cited data from Analysys International, which said Tencent captured 20 percent of the overall Chinese online gaming market during the quarter. In addition to operating online games including Xunxian, Dungeon & Fighter, and QQ Huaxia, Tencent operates an instant messaging service, and other online businesses.

Shanda Games, which held an IPO in September, captured 20 percent of the market, operating games in the region such as Dungeons & Dragons Online, Ragnorok Online, and Company of Heroes Online.

In a meeting in San Francisco, Sony's Jack Buser, director of the PlayStation Home platform, described the service's transformation from social network to social gaming platform, outlining improvements and showcasing new areas and new types of content, saying "the vision of Home has evolved."

The Evolution of the Platform

"In the early days when we built Home, we really were building a social network for gamers... through that, over the last year, it's developed into a game platform, first and foremost," says Buser.

"Home is developed based on community feedback, and we've been very good about that," says Buser. When it comes to Home's transformation as a service, he also adds, "This happened organically. I'd like to say that 'this was all planned from the get-go,' but it's what happened."

The much-maligned Classification Board of Australia has made a small stride toward getting in step with global game ratings by applying an M rating to Blizzard's World of Warcraft.

Unlike most of its neighbors around the world, the Australian ratings system lacks a classification for mature titles, as the U.S. has with the ESRB's M rating -- which means titles that would fall into this category can't be rated, and are effectively banned without edits to objectionable content.

Australia's system, however, has long lacked any rating whatsoever for massively multiplayer online games; rather than barring them for sale, however, this ratings gap means MMOs are simply unrated on retail shelves.

According to consumer site GameSpot, however, Blizzard has attained what it hopes is progress through a rating for its explosively popular WoW, which will now carry an M rating for "fantasy violence." The game has been sold without classification in Australia since 2004, and Blizzard told the site it's worked to change this in the past.

Mixamo, a company that provides an online 3D character animation service, is supporting Autodesk 3ds Max software biped system control rigs with a collection of online character motions.

Mixamo allows game developers to access a library of ready-to-use production quality 3D character motions derived from motion capture data. Once customized, users can bake the motion data "directly onto their bipeds," increasing efficiency of the development process.

"Mixamo is the first online platform to enable the application of motion data onto 3ds Max biped characters," said Autodesk Games Group VP Marc Stevens. "Mixamo's expansive collection of high-quality motion data -- which can be customized in real-time and automatically retargeted -- will help to significantly boost productivity for 3ds Max biped users."

Mixamo said that once users have selected an animation, they "can customize the motion using director-level, slider-based controls in real-time," automatically retargeting the motion to a character. Following this customization, users can "download the motion directly into their production pipeline using the Autodesk FBX file format."

The Mixamo online service can be installed with Autodesk 3ds Max 2008 or later. Mixamo's statement also said that support for Autodesk Maya software control rigs is "forthcoming."

[The preceding article by Kris Graft originally appeared on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Electronic Arts COO John Schappert won't comment on media rumors that EA has quietly acquired social gaming giant Playfish -- or might be just about to -- for a stunning $250 million.

"I’m not going to speculate on rumors about our M&A strategy," Schappert tells Gamasutra today, and Playfish is equally hushed. "We don't comment on rumors. Full stop," the Pet Society and Restaurant City social network game creator told finance sites.

But Schappert is full of ideas on how the social gaming landscape may shape up, and his comments offer key clues as to EA's heightened level of interest in the space.

"We've seen some very creative developers move to social gaming and deliver experiences that are generating a lot of eyeballs on sites like Facebook and MySpace," he tells us. "The traffic has attracted a lot of attention -- and dollars -- from the investment community."

GDC China 2009 officially wrapped up this week, bringing to a close three days worth of sessions on topics such as indie game development, social game evolution, MMORPG issues, and how to take part in the emerging Asian marketplace.

For those who couldn't make the trip, here's our extensive coverage of GDC China 2009. Gamasutra (a part of Think Services, as is GDC China itself) was at the show for all three days, and links to many notable stories are presented below:

GDC China: Ngmoco's Yu Talks iPhone's Social Future
"In a talk at GDC China in Shanghai, Ngmoco VP Alan Yu discussed the formation of the iPhone-focused studio and the state of the App store, suggesting that social-focused, microtransaction based Apps are the way forward."

Social Gaming Evolution, According To Playfish
"Playfish's Mack Growen (Restaurant City, Pet Society) delivered a speech about the current state of the social gaming market, in which he encouraged developers to abandon their passion for copying successful games, and talked of a coming shift towards high-level competition from well-moneyed players."

Online game publisher Nexon America has posted strong financials for its third quarter, with revenues climbing over 36 percent year-over-year.

The company, which focuses on free-to-play PC games and is probably best known for 2D MMO MapleStory, had growth of over 30 percent in all three months of the July-to-September quarter, the strongest being September with a 44 percent revenue jump.

"We are on the verge of having a very strong year," said CEO Daniel Kim in a statement released alongside the revenue figures. "It's a testament to the quality and accessibility of our free-to-play games and the amount of new content we have been delivering to our customers. Our hard work has earned us a level of loyalty among our player base that cannot be matched."

Nexon said the results show that despite current economic difficulties, "customers are enthusiastic" about the company's offerings, the most recent of which is the Doobic Studios-developed Combat Arms, which launched late last year. Neople's Dungeon Fighter Online is currently in North American open beta.

[The preceding article originally appeared on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Social web analytics provider Sometrics closed a Series B round of financing led by Steamboat Ventures and added the VC firm's managing director Beau Laskey to its board of directors.

With the new financing, the company intends to grow its market presence by adding to its staff and increasing its marketing investments. Though Sometrics didn't disclose the amount of funding it secured, it did reveal that prior investors Mail Room Fund and Greycroft Partners participated in the round.

The firm's products are aimed at helping social game developers manage and analyze their ads, offers, and networks. Sometrics says its solutions enable companies to see which audience demographics respond to which offers, and then direct their traffic based on that data.

Last December, it launched a virtual currency platform designed to help publishers manage their different virtual currency monetization systems from multiple offer providers. Sometrics claims its "Offer Solution and Payment Manger" currently has a global reach with over 4,000 ads across its network.

The company also says its partners have on average experienced a 15 percent boost by using its products to manage third-party virtual currency offer providers and ad networks, adding that its solutions have achieved an average eCPM of more than $700.

"We gain a wealth of expertise and opportunities through this partnership with Steamboat Ventures," says Sometrics co-founder and CEO Ian Swanson. "Our solutions for optimizing virtual currency have been embraced by a range of companies that specialize in social gaming, free-to-play MMOs, virtual worlds and casual gaming. This latest infusion of resources will help us continue to expand the ways we can help our clients maximize revenue and customer engagement."

In our latest employment-specific 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 Realtime Worlds, A2M 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 this week include:

A2M (Artificial Mind and Movement) Lead Level Designer
"A new major action/adventure production is starting in Montreal. Still in early development, the project offers a chance to contribute to a new IP. We are looking for an innovator in level design to create truly engaging levels."

BioWare Austin Gameplay Programmer
"BioWare, the newest member of the incredible family of EA studios, has created some of the world's best-selling titles including the award-winning Baldur's Gate, the Neverwinter Nights series, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Original BioWare-created IPs include Jade Empire, the critically acclaimed Mass Effect and Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood for the Nintendo DS. BioWare is hard at work on the epic fantasy RPG Dragon Age; and Star Wars: The Old Republic, our massively multiplayer online game being developed at BioWare Austin. "