The Virtual Worlds Forum in London this week brought together a bunch of business people, technologists, entrepreneurs and marketers to network and exchange ideas around virtual worlds. I had wondered if there was enough activity in the UK for a conference like this to make sense in the UK, but more than 400 people showed up and it felt to me as though it caught the wave just about right.

There were lots of the early-stage discussions you get at this sort of event, and noble attempts to define the different elements that make up the virtual universe. For me it breaks down into social worlds for children like Club Penguin, social worlds for teenagers like Habbo Hotel, and adult social worlds such as Second Life. However, the big tent properties are the game worlds, such as World of Warcraft.

There were some impressive numbers bandied about, in terms of the audiences that these worlds are now attracting, the amount of time their very passionate users spend in them and the amount of money that has been invested in the sector over the last year. I spoke to the European head of Habbo, who said that many of their users log in four or five times a week, for up to 45 minutes a session. They’ve created more than 80 million avatars, or game characters. As he pointed out, these are usage statistics traditional media would die for. There’s clearly plenty more where this came from – one of the venture capitalists I spoke to said that 95 per cent of the business plans he sees at the moment seem to have virtual worlds in them.

Is there a Google or Facebook among those new start-ups? I think a lot of people have a sense that there may be a new player that will emerge and make everyone stand up and take notice about virtual worlds in a new way, beyond even the relentless media focus on Second Life. They wonder if there’s a company that will start to dominate virtual worlds in the way that Google dominates search, or one that captures the popular imagination in a way that Facebook has.

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These games can get really big. World of Warcraft has more than nine million paying subscribers. There are even bigger games operating in China and Korea: games like Lineage, which millions play, mean that we’ve already seen the concept proven on a massive scale. One game in China currently supports more than a million simultaneous users. It remains to be seen whether the European market, which doesn’t have the networks of internet cafes with high-spec PCs which support games in China and Korea, will evolve in the same way.

As you would expect, Second Life came up a lot at the conference. I have huge enthusiasm for Linden Labs as a company and for Second Life as both a world and a platform, but it’s hard not to imagine some challenge to Second Life over the next five to ten years, in the form of a more open and scaleable free form social space. However, any competitor will face formidable hurdles, and will have a lot of catching up to do, so it’s far too early to write off Second Life, as some of its harsher critics have already done. Meanwhile, despite its many challenges, it keeps on growing.

What about over the long haul, say the next ten years? Over that period, I see a great alignment between what businesses want – a controlled environment which is one click away from a transaction – and what virtual worlds can provide. I see convergence between the virtual 2D world of the web and 3D spaces and very successful commercial environments in the style of Second Life. I also see great convergence between other forms of entertainment and virtual spaces – it seems to me that books, movies, and games will increasingly gain another life around shared worlds, so that you will be able to experience the world of say, Star Wars, in all forms of media, including virtual ones. It’s simply another way to enter into the imaginative live of a world you like.

Whenever a new medium comes along, whether it’s print, radio, TV, comic books, or the web, there is a familiar pattern, similar to that shown by any form of change, summed up by the acronym S.A.R.A: shock, anger, rejection and acceptance. So we go from amazement that you can have moving pictures, anger that our children and servants are wasting their time at the penny dreadfuls, attempts to bring the whole thing under control through classifications and censorship such as the Hays code of 1930s, to acceptance: film actors as the ultimate celebrities.

The politicians wheeled out at the beginning of the conference, Lord Puttnam and Lord Triesman had moved on from shock and anger, and were talking about intellectual property rights and the educational agenda. I was impressed by how evolved Lord Puttnam and Lord Triesman were in their understanding of the scale, scope, and importance of this new medium. Lord Puttnam reminded the audience of how long it had taken to get Bafta to take video games seriously: this year saw the second Bafta video games awards. How long before Bafta does virtual world awards? It sounds daft, but think of how daft Bafta for Bioshock would have sounded a decade ago. Things change.

I agree with Tim Guest in his book Second Lives that many, many people in the developed world are going to emigrate with their minds and spend a lot more time in virtual spaces, adding virtual worlds to the legion of other digital distractions that already drive much of the entertainment spending of the affluent world: books, television, music, games, and films. This will creates problems as well as opportunities: Lord Puttnam will want to ensure that there is some cultural value in these worlds and that they’re not just online shopping malls, and Lord Triesman will want to ensure that intellectual property rights are protected. And I suspect that Revenue and Customs will be keen to make sure it gets its piece of the action.

What do you see happening in and around the virtual worlds of the future? Get in touch: I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk