SXSW07
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SXSW: Getting Girls Into The Game: Designing and Marketing Games for Female Players
Boyfriends aren't the only ones facing dilemmas. Publishers and developers have been struggling to develop games that appeal to women, because they represent a huge demographic who haven't traditionally been associated with the video game market, and that translates to lost dollars. But how do you begin to approach making a game for girls, or is it even a mistake to set out to do that from the beginning, rather than just making a game that's fun?The panel first asked the question, "What constitutes a female gamer?" Jame Pinckard said, "Women aren't just this monolithic block of 'gamers', they all want different types of games. Just because a Barbie video is made for a 12 year old girl, doesn't mean a 26 year woman has to play it." Sheri Graner Ray took it a step further, adding "There is no definition of a female gamer, and trying to tack a label to them does a disservice. The female gamer is simply a female who plays games. She's just a diverse as any other market out there."
SXSW: Virtual Worlds and Virtual Humans: NPCs and Avatars
This panel discussed the rise of virtual worlds, the NPCs that frequently populate them and how games like World of Warcraft are much more populated with human players and their avatars. Although it devolved into a sort of "he said/she said" argument over user-created content and in-game behaviors, it did introduce us to a particular nasty bout of griefing in a WoW realm.Apparently a player who died in real life had a funeral procession on the server she played on, and tons of her guild members and other players turned out to honor her. Of course, it wasn't long until some funeral crashers showed up and pretty much slaughtered the entire funeral party. In a way, it's sort of fitting, don't you think? Check out the video after the jump. Yes, it's been around for eons, but it sort of brilliantly explains, in a visual sense, what this panel devolved into.After this, things sort of went awry and off-course. There was a lot of verbal jabbing, both good-natured and not, throughout the rest of the panel without it really going in a particular direction. We were too busy trying to find a good spot to grief from.
SXSW: Digital Distribution: The Way of the Future for Gaming
Almost everyone who has gone online with the computer or a game console has probably downloaded something at one time or another, whether it's been a song, a photo, a game, or a set of horse armor for their equine friend. But are digital downloads the wave of the future for full-on distribution? Developers are hoping so, because it will cut down tremendously on competing for shelf space at the local Mega-Lo-Mart, not to mention all those costs for printing games, manuals, boxes, shipping, and the like. The panel consisted of Craig Allen, CEO of Spark Unlimted one of the big "shelf" retailers, especially with their newly announced mega-game Turning Point: Fall of Liberty due this coming November. From the other end of things was Dan Conners, CEO of Telltale productions who is in the middle of releasing Sam & Max as an episodic game, before packaging everything up into a retail edition. In the middle (and sadly, without much to offer) was David Burks, the marketing manager for Seagate Technology. You gotta store the downloads somewhere, right? In all fairness, Seagate was one of the SXSW sponsors, and he probably felt a bit shoehorned into this panel.
SXSW: Serious Games: Can Learning Be Hard Fun?
When you combine the words "serious" "learning" and "hard" in the same sentence, chances are you're going to end up with something that gamers won't like. But that's what the Serious Games Initiative is all about, developing games for "non-entertainment" purposes. Of course, the problem is games for non-entertainment tend to scare people away faster than the phrase "edutainment."That's the main problem facing Serious Games, how do they make it seem like they aren't hiding the broccoli under the meatloaf? All of the games shown off were educational in one form or another, having to do with zapping cancer cells inside the human body, or how to interact with people in the workplace. Seriously, there is a game about the proper way to run a meeting, collaborate with coworkers, and generally function in an office. Too bad it's not running on the Unreal Engine. Zing!
SXSW: Joystiq live at the Will Wright keynote [Update 1]
We're live in Austin, front and center for the Will Wright keynote speech, where the attendees seem a lot more excited for this one than they did for the Dan Rather speech yesterday. I guess that might change if Dan Rather was actually working on a groundbreaking new game that has almost as much buzz around it as the Apple iPhone.Will Wright is wandering around visiting with peeps, and he his arm in a sling for some reason. As we find out, we'll let you know. Maybe he's been spending too much time Spore-ing.1:56pm: They've started playing celestial new-agey Yanni-type music and showing slides of the solar system. Maybe Will Wright has decided to become the new Carl Sagan. Now the music sounds like a twangy version of the Firefly theme song. Browncoats, FTW! The slides keep pulling farther back and showing beelyuns and beelyuns of galaxies and stars.2:06pm: Will Wright is sitting right in front of us and talking with a Tucker Carlson lookalike, complete with floppy hair and bow-tie. Wright is wearing a sort of muscle-shirt combo with the sling. It's very steampunk and aggro. We snuck a look at his XPS laptop on the stage .... no screensaver.%Gallery-2103%
SXSW: Game Perverts
At first glance that panel title sounds like a very special episode of Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator," but the subtitle makes it a bit clearer ... for some: "A Robot, a DS, and a dot-matrix printer menage a trois." This panel was all about hacking and homebrewing, and we saw some pretty cool stuff. Bob Sabiston's Nintendo DS animation project -- this is a homebrew kit that Bob began developing after sending Nintendo a letter explaining that he was a fairly decent programmer and engineer (he is - he wrote the rotoscoping software used for the animation in Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly) and they sent him a software development kit for the DS. His animation and painting program is one of the best apps we've ever seen on the DS, and even the artwork he's produced on it is very impressive. Rich LeGrand got into game robotics with the Game Boy Advance, because there is a fairly limitless supply of hardware available on eBay at around $20 a pop. He reverse-engineered a robotics tool for the GBA called the Xport, which he sells through his company Charmed Labs, that lets you program and build a robot around your handheld (most people use Lego for the robot exoskeleton). He has also very successfully not been sued by Nintendo. Paul Slocum took an old Epson LQ500 dot-matrix printer and reversed engineered a box that lets him program and play music through it by changing the speeds and strengths that the pins strike the paper. It really has to be heard to be believed (it's part of the song - former dot-matrix users will hear it right away). He also uses an Atari 2600 with a modified cartridge to generate drums and "bleep" sounds. Pretty impressive stuff. We lovingly retitled this panel "How to hack up your precious hardware," but now we're thinking about cracking something open and giving it a whirl. We just wish we'd kept those old dot-matrix printers.
SXSW: Games + Entertainment Brands: Five Top Trends In 2007
This panel brought together Robert Nashak, GM of Yahoo Games, Chris Charla, director of business development for Foundation 9, Charles Merrin from Real Networks, and Brian Ring, the GM of Interactive Content for Scope Seven. The purpose was to discuss the top five trends in 2007 in the realm of gaming and entertainment. When games meet entertainment brands, it's traditionally meant a game based on a movie that comes out a few weeks (or months) after the film has hit theaters. However, for the past few years games have started to be released concurrently with the films, or even before the movies come out. Hollywood studios now include video game development in the earliest stages of pre-production, and even involve game companies in the writing process.Games + Entertainment Brands also encompasses traditional board games, like Scrabble and Monopoly, being licensed for video games, and toys like Bratz and Barbie as well. We break down the top five trends that will be hitting games + entertainment brands in 2007 after the jump.
SXSW: The Inside Scoop - how to get a job in the game industry
For the most part, the "Inside Scoop" about getting a job in the gaming industry sounded like getting a job in pretty much any industry, except maybe trading decommissioned nuclear weapons on the black market. They hit the main points several times, which were as follows: Have a professional looking resume. Wear clean, washed (!) clothes to any meeting or interview. Be on time. Network. Network. Network. Like any industry you hope to break into, it's often not what you know, but who you know. Although panelist Bryan Stratton did add that he had a friend who he helped get a job in the field, and he ended up making a lot less money than he should have because of his lack of a higher education. So put down the controllers from time to time and read a book, ftw ... er, paycheck.Of particular note, one panelist mentioned that the two most important applications you can learn to help get a job in the industry are ... Microsoft Excel and email. Most of the time you are going to be coordinating assets and communicating with other people, so it's highly important that you know your way around a spreadsheet, and can organize your inbox and send/receive files and then know where they are.So if you can pwn in Excel as well as you do in Gears of War, then you're well on your way.
SXSW: ARG! The Attack of the Alternate Reality Games
Ever since the success of The Beast, the alternate reality game created to help pimp Spielberg's A.I. back in 2001, alternate reality games (ARGs) have been popping up left and right, most notably the I Love Bees ARG that was used to launch Halo 2. Based on what the panelists were telling us, there are a lot more coming down the pipeline.However, one of the problems was that the panel promised to help define the term "alternate reality game," but that never happened. Wikipedia calls it "an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions." Which is quite a mouthful. But that makes us wonder, does it have to use the web as a medium to be an ARG? When people used to play T.A.G. or Killer on college campuses, that was definitely an ARG ... but where did those games go?
SXSW: Joystiq is here!
We've arrived here in Austin, Texas where we'll be bringing you news from the enormous South by Southwest conference. SXSW started as a music festival, grew to include film, and now has an very substantial interactive portion. This year they've beefed interactive up with tons of video game related panels, speakers, and exhibitors. Oh, and nothing huge ... just Will Wright giving the keynote. Zing!We'll be bringing you coverage from the panels, photos from the show floor, visits to the ScreenBurn Arcade, stopping by to chat with PMS Clan / Frag Dolls, stories from Austin, and of course we'll be liveblogging Will Wright's keynote. With any luck, we'll also follow him to his car and demand a demo copy of Spore. So look for a report on that here, or a photo of us on TheSmokingGun.
