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Cinemassively: Stroker Serpentine Interview
(Given the fact that this is a morning show, language, nudity, and anything potentially offensive is missing.)When I first met Stroker Serpentine, the king of adult products in Second Life, at SLCC 2006, I was expecting someone creepy. However, he was one of the kindest people I've ever met. He was supposed to speak at SXSW last week, but ended up cancelling due to this CBS Early Show interview.In the video, Tracey Smith asked Stroker some candid questions about his profession in SL. What struck me most is that they portrayed it objectively, instead of sensationally. They even featured viewpoints from escorts and a cyber law expert!
Multiverse co-founder describes new virtual world order
Multiverse's Corey Bridges spoke at the SXSW conference about the effects digital distribution and the democratization of advanced development tools will have on the industries of gaming, social networks, and virtual worlds.Gamasutra put together a great summary of the talk. The thesis: just as they are stripping the entrenched establishments of the music and film industries of much of their oligarchical power, new technologies will transform online gaming and virtual worlds. According to Bridges, virtual worlds are just getting started. "WoW is not a fad," he said, "it's a harbinger." Furthermore, the virtual worlds will be in the hands of indies, not the major conglomerates, and they'll be synergized with social networks.Bridges also touched on the notion of a more splintered industry made up of smaller projects catering to lots of niche tastes, as opposed to the huge Hollywood-budget productions we see today. A while back someone said that it would take at least a $1 billion super project to take on World of Warcraft. But maybe, as it was with the Roman Empire, the wolves at Blizzard's gate will be countless smaller tribes made up of the so-called unwashed hordes.
SXSW08: ScreenBurn Arcade in pictures
Despite being the centerpiece of SXSW Interactive's game-focused ScreenBurn Festival, the ScreenBurn Arcade has yet to achieve the expansive grandeur of other conventions' expo floors. The entire floor was enclosed within less than half of the Austin Convention Center's convention space. Most of the real estate in there was taken up by just a few exhibitors. The Championship Gaming Series held a draft at ScreenBurn, and had a large, flashy area of their own on one side of the floor, with constant bouts of Dead or Alive 4, Forza 2 and other games taking place. Wizards of the Coast had one of the largest installations directly in the middle of the floor, with space to play board, card, and miniature games -- as well as, of course, space to buy said games. The relative size of the booth actually made it seem more important, and almost drove me to buy some Magic cards or something.Many of the booths were playing popular released games -- GameTap, of course, had a selection of classics, and Guitar Hero III and Rock Band were mainstays. The only booth I could find that was demonstrating any pre-release games was Gamecock, who brought the demos of Pirates Vs. Ninjas Dodgeball, Hail to the Chimp, Insecticide, and Legendary from EIEIO, as well as Dementium.The most popular booth in the Arcade was not really game-related: Austin Laser Art offered laser etching of cellphones and other items, and had conventiongoers waiting over an hour for the chance to burn their expensive stuff.ScreenBurn is just in its second year, and we're certain that the festival and the Arcade will continue to grow in size and popularity. This year, however, it was a great place to play some Rock Band and lose at Dead or Alive 4.%Gallery-18104%
SXSW08: Virtual worlds and indie games to dethrone publishers
Multiverse cofounder Corey Bridges' talk at SXSW Interactive may have had the title "Virtual World and Game Development: Rise of the Indies," but it soon became clear that "Rise of the Indies" was a nicer spin on "Fall of Publishers." The talk turned out to be surprisingly inflammatory as Bridges predicted the death of the traditional video game industry in favor of near-universal adoption of virtual worlds. "Video game publishers are dead. They're walking corpses. They just don't know it."Bridges has the track record to back up wild predictions, having been right about things like graphical web browsing, online mail-order DVD rental, and, uh, computer security (by association, as in he was involved with each of these early on). To see this person attached to an MMO development platform is basically troubling for people who would like to continue ignoring MMOs.
SXSW08: Inside Austin's Developerscape
In this panel, a group of Austin-based game developers set out to discuss the unique Austin game development community, moderated by journalist (and Joystiq contributor) N. Evan Van Zelfden. In the course of the discussion, a bit of neuropsychology and hilarious anti-MMO (and pro-MMO) vitriol also came out, along with a lot of reminiscence. According to Junction Point's Warren Spector and NCSoft's Dallas Snell, the Austin game development scene, as well as its current MMO focus, have their origins in, uh, Origin. The Ultima developer moved in Austin in 1986 from New Hampshire, and many companies spun off from ex-Origin personnel. Spector was hired at the company after time spent teaching at UT and working at Steve Jackson Games, and then a stint in Wisconsin at TSR. Snell was at Origin during the 1986 move.
SXSW08: The Female Takedown of Casual Gaming
A panel of game publishers, analysts, and investors met at this SXSW presentation to discuss the numbers and trends involving the female audience for casual games. For this talk, "casual games" comprises mostly web games and downloadable shareware games, and not, say, Wii party games or console downloads.Parks Associates' Michael Cai began with some charts. According to the data, female gamers heavily prefer computers to consoles: female gamers spend an average of 70% of their gaming time on computers, versus male gamers' 56%. Female gamers make up 62% of the casual game audience, and this group, especially those age 13-17, play more sessions per month. There is less diversity among genres for female gamers as well: across age groups, puzzle and card games are the most popular casual games.
SXSW08: GameTap party lets the free games flow
Augmenting their usual Internet-based strategy of giving people free games to lure them into a subscription service, GameTap treated SXSW attendees to a party at Austin's Parkside restaurant Saturday night. Along with the laptops set up for free play of a selection of classics, partygoers were treated to fancy hors d'oeuvres (ceviche, croquettes, uh, tiny hamburgers), drinks, and excellent DJ-provided music. Also, projected logos that only shone directly into my eyes a couple of times.It should be noted that these pictures were taken soon after the beginning of the party. It was already picking up as I left. There were still plenty of people in Parkside enjoying the crowd, the food, the beer, and the Metal Slug. If more parties had Metal Slug stations, well, I'd go to parties.%Gallery-17995%
SXSW08: Booth Hero
What's better for attracting people to your booth than a fake guitar? Apparently nothing! Walking around SXSW's ScreenBurn Arcade, I began to notice that I was seeing a lot of Guitar Hero III and Rock Band setups. The guitars and drums are a lot showier than most game controllers, and are thus a lot better at getting attention than other games. I understood the power of these two games.But that doesn't mean I didn't find it a little weird that groups who had basically nothing to do with Guitar Hero III or Rock Band were featuring it at their booths. I was also amused by the number of booths that featured guitar games, compared to the total number of booths in the ScreenBurn Arcade. It almost seemed like these two games outnumbered not-music games.%Gallery-17993%
'Overheard' @ SXSW: What does green mean to you?
I didn't actually need to hear anything to get the story here. The interview crew were wearing shirts featuring the title question (which I really thought would show up in the picture, but just trust me), and they cornered this Spartan from the 405th Infantry Division. What does green mean to you, guy dressed like the Master Chief? I felt very lucky to witness this convergence. Such a perfect meeting is like a lol-ar eclipse.
SXSW08: How gamers are adopting the wiki way
One of the many excellent sessions in the ScreenBurn track at SXSW Interactive this year, the "How Gamers Are Adopting the Wiki Way" panel featured George Pribul (lead admin of WoWWiki.com), April "CuppaJo" Burba (Community Manager for NCsoft's Tabula Rasa), Angelique Shelton (GM of Wikia Gaming at Wikia Inc), and Jake McKee (Principal at Ant's Eye View) talking about the symbiotic relationship between gamers and wikis. Interesting factoid: WoWWiki is now the second largest English-language wiki in the world behind Wikipedia. At 3 million unique users per month, a full half of English-speaking WoW players visit WoWWiki every month. Head on over to our MMO-besotted sister site Massively for the complete writeup.
SXSW08: Edit Me! How Gamers Are Adopting the Wiki Way
With such a strange and specialized topic, I couldn't help but stop into this SXSW panel with speakers Jake McKee (Ant's Eye View), April Burba (NCSoft), Angelique Shelton (Wikia) and George Pribul (WoWWiki, the second largest English-language wiki in the world by traffic, according to the panel). The basic topic: the state of gaming wikis, particularly those built around MMO games. The panel began with a call out to the audience to determine what people wanted out of the presentation. One attendee wanted to better serve business clients with a wiki; another wanted to get a sense of the wiki world beyond Wikipedia; another wanted to use wikis for science education. It wasn't an entirely game-focused crowd, but the emphasis was on emergent information organization anyway, and not necessarily any one game.
SXSW08: SXSWag
My first task upon entering the Austin Convention Center was ... well, it was to challenge the Labyrinth of Press Registration (instead of a minotaur at the end, there is a nice-but-flustered volunteer). But after that! I went for the swag bag. I just wasn't carrying enough stuff! It's stuff. How could I resist? SXSW Interactive is not strictly about video games, and the free stuff in this bag is similarly focused on interactive technology in general. Microsoft is promoting their Flash-like Silverlight browser plugin, Opera's pushing, uh, Opera (via koozie!) and Fuze is putting their marketing effort behind their thirst-quenching technology. By far the most enjoyable bit of swag was Adobe's ad-filled fortune cookies. Or, as I like to call them, breakfast. I am literally a consumer of their ad material!I laid out everything that wasn't an advertising flier and took pictures to provide you with the immersive SXSW swag bag experience. Check our gallery and imagine what it must feel like to have things from a convention!%Gallery-17911%
