ScreenBurn: Day 1
Somewhere in the labyrinth that is the Austin Convention Center there is a third floor, but if you want to find it you’ll have to work for it. Elevators that only go to floors 2 and 4, escalators that take you straight from the bottom to the top, and signs that point diagonally (just, you know…float up that way, dude) are not your friends, ScreenBurn attendees (all of the panels seem to take place on the third floor).
Somewhere far off GDC is still going on, which may be the reason why ScreenBurn’s halls were barren and the panelists were far from heavy hitters. I’m just glad to be lectured about video games rather than being lectured about rock history, film, Japan, and the Internet at school, for a week—I get a sense that this reflects negatively on me on some level.
SXSW Interactive is a swell crowd filled with awkward geeks, attractive girls, and tech hipsters who are keeping on the lookout for a Facebook employee (Twitter feeds lit up around 2pm: FACEBOOK IS HIRING FOR AUSTIN CENTER!!!!!) It’s awfully nice though to be away from the music & film crowd, and the wide hallways of the center make sure you won’t be annoyed at whoever you are stuck behind for too long.
Random observation: pregnant women + Twitter = slow, obnoxious person.
You can read more about the panels I attended on the next couple pages, but here are a couple random highlights: spotted a hippie, had a chat about the woeful state of Jackie Chan’s career with a visual effects producer for Book of Eli, and ate some crepes. Two, okay? That’s not much in US-to-France food conversion. Let me remind you: 3 crepes = 1 Chipotle burrito.
[Keep an eye on my soon to launch site, Playthroughs.com, for an expanded post that includes coverage of non-game related SXSWi coverage and a "Spotted @ SXSW" series where I talk to random tech and game icons about what they are looking forward to at SXSW. Here's the bad news: site isn't launching until next week…so, BOOKMARK IT, DUMMY!]
Game On: Funding Game Start-Ups in a Recession
Kicking off the series of panels at ScreenBurn that will last until Tuesday evening, Micheal Cubbage, who co-founded Bigfoot Networks after spending half a decade at Dell, advised a small audience of indie developers on how to get their projects off the ground, financially.
“Barrier of entry for big budget games has become huge-the top 30 video games of last year had the top 30 highest marketing budgets–but the barrier of entry for Facebook games has become very easy. You can hype up a good idea very easily,” Cubbage said.
The problem is that there aren’t that many good ideas left. More often than not, Cubbage was warning current and prospective developers of how competitive a market social gaming has become, not to mention that the major studios now represent 50s era Hollywood putting bigger budgets toward fewer titles. If you think you have that one spectacular idea that will set the world on fire, don’t hold back and listen up!
“Farmville is 18 months old and has 79 million users. They made the game in 5 weeks and can update the game massively in 2 days,” Cubbage said. “The barriers to being successful in gaming have gone down dramatically in the past 3 years. Don’t let anyone tell you there isn’t a huge market out there.”
The audience, consisting of some CEOs and developers who have struggled to create a breakthrough title for up to a decade, were understandably bitter and a “Farmville did it. So can you!” speech wasn’t going to be enough; luckily, Cubbage didn’t stop there.
“Half-million dollar ideas do exist but only from two types of people,” Cubbage said. “People who have had great success in the past—this makes it 10 times easier—and those who have a prototype that is further along.”
Just like any struggling band investing a summer on an EP or a aspiring filmmaker spending a fortune on a short film, indie developers are going to dedicate more than just a week’s pay and a month’s time if they expect to separate themselves from the competition, not to mention the Playfish and PopCap of the world who crank out a new game a month.
Here’s a rundown of Cabbage’s major points:
- Learn from your failures (“Your first shot misses 80 percent of the time; you get a lot of information off that.”)
- Brand yourself at social events (“We had a guy who wore a top hat and he’d always get attention at these fund raisers. They’d say, ‘that’s the guy with the top hat!’”)
- Put on a good presentation (“Don’t get too technical. You can bore these guys pretty quickly”)
- You ARE the high school cheerleader! (“They hate missing deals in their own town. If they find out 3 of their buddies saw a deal that they didn’t it will drive them to you.”)
- Use the Internet, dummy! (“GamesBeat will tell you about all the latest deals, how much they raised, basically anything you want to see in trends.”)
- Be realistic (“You need to compare yourself to things that exist and pitch stepping stones—‘we’re going to be doing this, this, and this during the first three years.’ Hang a carrot up for them in years 4 and 5, because they aren’t going to remember them anyway.”)
Most of Cubbage’s advice went over this non-MDA holding journalism major's head, but he offered some concrete advice that could serve me well (and you too, invisible reader) if I ever come up with that half million dollar game idea. Good thing I took notes, right?
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: The Future of Video Games
[w/ Tiffany Barnes, Anne McLaughlin, Amos Zeeberg, James Bower, and Lucy Bradshaw]
Not many have used the “greatpowergreatresponsibility” hash tag at SXSW, partly due to the obscenely long title. Then again, it might have worked if panelist James Bower’s (neurobiologist, CVO of Numedon Inc.) make-believe Twitter that consist of 160 character messages existed—to be fair, panel moderator and Discovermagazine.com editor, Amos Zeeberg corrected him.
The rest of the panelists (Tiffany Barnes, Anne McLaughlin, Lucy Bradshaw) all shared two things in common: they are all female and interested in the study of how games can help children and the disabled learn and socialize.
“Play is a space where you can experiment and learn from trial-and-error. I think play is a natural place to go for learning experiences,” said Bradshaw.
I wonder where the bully who always stole the ball at recess lands in this argument. I guess, you can just substitute ‘play for ‘cheating’. McLaughlin, an assistant professor of psychology at North Carolina State University, took the focus off learning itself and onto the drive to learn.
“When I’m looking at games’ potential benefits it’s the reward structure that makes them unique. You can go out and do a mental exercise, but who does that?” she said.
She went on to ask who had learned an instrument or language in the past year; two people raised their hands. She then asked who had earned an achievement in Farmville in the past year and half the room raised their hands. Seems kind of like a loaded question; She should have asked, “Who has achieved a triple-S rank on Giant Bomb for a multiplatform game last year?” Probably no one would have raised their hand for that. Yet the amount of time and repetition would have been far more akin to that of learning an instrument, but being far less meaningful and rewarding.
There seemed to be little focus in the panel, whose discussion ranged from why social hierarchy in a virtual setting can be good/bad to Bower’s diatribes on Susan Greenfield (up next: why holocaust deniers MIGHT be wrong!)
Here are some highlights:
- Barnes discusses a student game that teaches basic computer science (“What we focus on is taking an abstract computer science concept and making it concrete in a game world. It ends any misconceptions students have about how a computer does things.”)
- Bradshaw claims there is a larger game surrounding games now (“In this meta-game, games and players teach other players how to play or modify things. Games now extend beyond the box. When I came to Maxis, I hired a kid who had a SimCity building website.”)
- Bower’s research finds that children need more than gameplay for them to invest (“Games that are built assuming humans have a 2 minute attention span stay there for 2 minutes. Games that are played longer expect you are intelligent and will put in the time to play them. In the stats we look at for 12 year olds, the virtual worlds for them, like Barbie.com, that don’t have much learning…their eyes don’t stay on them too long.”
Instead of showing statistics, going into detail with their research, or providing answers, the panelists seemed to spend most of their time passively speculating about the future and reassuring the audience that games are important learning tools. Perhaps they held back, imaging the audience a bunch of man-babies who would cry if they were told games have their limits in providing significant social benefits, or just didn’t anything to contribute beyond the meandering thoughts that fill up “new games journalism” blogs every day.
But, hey, at least this panel talked about video games!