Guardian Unlimited Gamesblog asks a panel of industry figures to discuss whether video games are "the new pub"--that is, have they become a dominant social meeting point in our lives? The roundtable is made up of Jeff Pabst from Microsoft, Jeremy Gaffney from NCSoft, Philip Rosedal from Linden Lab, and Sampo Karjalainen from Sulake Corporation.

At the EIEF last Thursday, a panel of leaders in the online game space got together to debate the sociability of interactive entertainment. It was an enlightening talk, and the overall contention was that the future of computer games is reliant upon, well, sociability. The aim of the game is to become the modern "third place", to replace the pub in our lives.