Returning to work on a brisk Halifax morning after 8 days in Austin for SXSW Interactive and Music is like waking up from a dream. Drinks, food and live music are no longer free and all of the amazing characters I met and hung out with have disappeared. And now my coworkers and friends look at me in disbelief when I tell them stories about being a part of Devo’s focus group to name their next album, being handed free bacon on the street by a small child, meeting the dad from David After the Dentist, or being encouraged to ride a mechanical bull by my boss.
Last week already feels like a distant memory, and it is difficult making sense of everything that happened in Austin, or even what I was doing there, but I will attempt a quick recap of some of the lessons of my SXSW experience.
* Buttons are an under appreciated technology. – Try and imagine how your grandparents reacted the first time they were able to light a room by touching a button. Now a toddler can navigate an iPhone touchscreen more gracefully then they can feed themselves. Bill DeRouchey of Ziba Design gave a fascinating talk about the evolution of levers to buttons to touchscreens and predicts that fluid screens where tactile buttons appear and disappear will be the next phase.
* Interactive producers need to learn more from video game producers. - The theme of quite a few panels this year was how new media producers are adopting elements of gaming culture to make work and social media more addictive and rewarding. With Foursquare and Gowalla ever present at the festival this year, it is obvious that giving out badges or turning a night out on the town into a mission is catching on in a big way. Naveen Selvadurai of FourSquare pointed out that the best gaming hook from a social media site is the LinkedIn status bar. Getting that progress bar to 100% is a challenge that forces users to utilize LinkedIn’s services to the fullest. Even the anonymous messageboard 4chan was discussed in gaming metaphors in an insightful chat by Moot and Jason Scott. Trolls in 4chan compete with each other in a surreal RPG that mounts a quest every 30 seconds (i.e. hacking a Time Magazine poll to name Moot the most influential man of 2009). When I talked to gamers at the conference about how their culture was being adopted by new media, the typical response was “What took you so long?”.
* Writers should stop being lazy. – Andrea Philips gave a great talk on the relationship between females and gaming culture in her discussion ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette. She revealed some disturbing truths about how the marketing of games excludes women and how females are commonly portrayed as “the damsels in distress” in games. Besides being a wake up call for game producers to be more inclusive, Andrea’s talk served as a reminder that relying on cliches and stereotypes is just plain bad writing. Stories with richer and more fully formed characters are much more interesting than “saving a princess”. Steve Peters of No Mimes told me about some of the amazing work he did with Maureen McHugh on the ARG “Last Call Poker“. Hearing Steve and Maureen reminisce about a project with some incredible characters and how it generated strong emotional reactions from users helped renew my faith that truly great storytellers can build games than connect with an audience.
* I actually enjoyed a panel that used the buzz words: leverage and synergies. – Devo’s panel may have been nothing more than a meta-marketing tool to promote the fact that they are embracing marketing tools, but it was a hilarious send up on SXSW Interactive culture. Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale announced that they were selling out and adopting crowd-sourcing techniques to ensure that their music will be heard by as many demographics of people as possible. They showed examples of how they used focus groups to chose the colour of their domes and performed a live focus group to name their album. Here is the science behind the test I was involved in: stand if you’ve ever heard a Devo song; sit if Whip It is your favourite song; if you prefer bass over synthesizer, sit down; if you have blond hair, sit down; the people who remained standing voted on which album title they liked best: Fresh, Something For Everybody, Devolution, or Excuse Our Mess. Excuse Our Mess received the most votes. During the Q&A, the audience proved to be almost as clever as the panelists by playing up the cliches of internet marketing and making fun of some of the worst elements of Interactive conference culture. It was a nice note to end the festival on.
Here are some photos:
