Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar

As a race? [Laughs.] There's a couple of possible things that could happen with Ents. The vehicles we have in there, that allow you to play as high-end Troll or Ranger for a session - session play is a vehicle available to us if we wanted you to go in and be an Ent, for example. With anything, it would have to be a question of why, what's the right circumstance. Why is it rewarding, how does it fit into the lore.

We have partners in China and Korea - in Korea it's NHN. NHN's site has half of the population of Korea registered for one of their MMOs - 21 million people. It's insane. We'll be launching closed beta over there soon, we're really excited about that. ChinaDotCom will be launching LOTRO later this year, with a similarly huge audience, and different business models. It'll be huge. Customer service, business models and how you monetize the game are all changing over there. The more things we do with monster play, the more exciting for them. They love being the monsters.

I love EVE Online. If I didn't have a life... I've specifically resisted playing it since beta, as it's such a time-consuming experience. I love space, I love the genre, and they've been really successful making that work for a certain part of the market. It's not an easy thing to do, many have tried. It's got just enough metastructure to make it work.

I spent some time at There.com and the learning from that was all about structure- it was too much of a sandbox. Only when we got closer to launch did we realise that you needed some structure, otherwise the emergent gameplay we were all excited about doesn't happen. You get a bunch of frustrated lost people wandering around going, "how cool, I can do anything I want... um..."

You're going to hear a lot about this in the next 6 to 10 months from Turbine. Even the early stuff like the Lorebook is built around a conversation between the game and the web. We're building out the infrastructure so the data of the game is transparent to any platform, and wherever users are they're going to be getting at it. We've got a team of people working on this specifically, and they talk about turning the game inside out, thinking of the web as a platform extension itself, like you would mobile or console. So the short answer is "yes." There's a lot of opportunity for things like that, but it's dependent on the people who own the platforms and what they're willing to open things up to. That's why the Xbox Live infrastructure is interesting, because they've spent as much time working on that as the hardware.