That’s the case made by Susan Wu, a venture capitalist with Charles Rivers, and when Susan talks, you should listen. A rare synthesis of VC and hardcore techie/gamer (she was both the CMO for the Apache Software Foundation and a competitive Quake player), Susan was a leading force in putting together funding for Areae, Raph Koster’s new MMO-meets-Web 2.0 start-up. I’m at South by Southwest in Austin, where I’ll be hosting Susan, along with Electronic Arts’ Robin Hunicke and Net bon vivant Robert Scoble, for my own panel, but she spoke at another SXSW panel yesterday called “Virtual Worlds and Virtual Humans: NPCs and Avatars“. She had the courtesy to transform her speaking notes into a readable summary on her blog, and if you want to make sense of the explosion of virtual world business news, and get a handle on where it’s going, you’d do well to take a note from Wu. As she argues:

I think most folks generally regard avatars as being fairly disposable today. I think this attitude will change. From an investment perspective, I am actively looking for interesting projects in this space. For any web property/community, the avatar is the single most valuable piece of real estate. It’s the focal point of greatest emotional connectivity with the user, across all environments and pervasive across all my interactions.

The most interesting question put to the panel, Susan tells me, “[W]as about how we felt about identity tourism— did we feel it was good or bad? Identity tourism is the act of playing an identity that is not your own online— for example, a female playing a male character or a single suburbanite playing a married urbanite. My feeling is that identity tourism has a lot of positive potential— in the same way that studies have shown that people who travel quite a bit demonstrate more empathy for others. The act of exploring other people’s lives and walking in their shoes can lead to greater empathy. But I would caution that there doesn’t exist a lot of infrastructure to facilitate this productively today. From an avatar perspective, an overwhelming majority of our interaction with other avatars in online environments is physical violence.”

That’s just a taste of Susan’s talk. Read all her summary here, merging several threads that describe where we’re going as a culture, and subsequently, where the smart money is going first. And if you’re lucky enough to be in Austin, come over to the Convention Center at 10am today, to chat with us in person.