The 2008 ScreenBurn Festival
March 7 - 11, 2008
Austin, Texas

Just in time for Halloween, Bungie has announced its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “Playlist of the Living Dead,” featuring “Infection,” 27 hours of zombie-decimating matchmaking for your ghoulish enjoyment (a reprise some may remember from Halo 2.) Players can choose from three different versions of Infection until 3:00 AM PST on November 1st. After that, Bungie says they’re pulling the plug once again on the zombified playlist: “Infection a lot of fun when everyone is into it, but we don’t think it would make a good playlist long term, so it’s going to come and go. And if everyone has a good time, who knows? It may return, as the restless dead are known to do.” Meanwhile, Wired’s Game | Life has posted an extensive list of virtual-world Halloween events.

Photo via Flickr.

Will Wright, well-known Sim creator, and the wizard behind the curtain behind the much-awaited game release, Spore, confirms Nintendo Wii platform rumors in a recent interview with Guardian Unlimited, “We’re doing Spore on the Wii, and we did MySims. It takes significant re-thinking to work out how you’re going to do it. PS3 and Xbox 360 are similar enough that you can basically use the same system for both. So it comes down to what the interesting major platforms are and which markets we want to hit.” Regardless of which console or how many consoles Spore will be available on come delivery day, we’re all anxiously anticipating the release. Will Wright, a featured keynote at South By Southwest Interactive + ScreenBurn in March 2007, gave an exciting Spore demo that left the audience eager for more.

Photo of Will Wright keynote at SXSW Interactive + ScreenBurn 2007.

Stubbs Barbecue in Austin (801 Red River) hosts the Digital Media Council Celebration tonight from 5:30-8:00 pm. This group is involved with a number of tech-related activities in Central Texas, including Beta testing for leading local gaming companies. DMC also helps sponsor cool activities, like the Dorkbot event that entertained so many attendees at the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival. If you attend the party tonight, you will be eligible to win various door prizes such as FREE badge for the 2008 ScreenBurn / SXSW Interactive Festival or a FREE badge for the 2008 SXSW Film Conference. How cool is that!

The Library of Congress believes video games are just as integral to our cultural record as movies, literature and music, reports Kotaku. Because the Library of Congress houses the Copyright Office, the LoC has actually been collecting video games since the 80’s through copyright deposits. Now, they’re collaborating with major universities to begin a two-year initiative “with the sole intent of figuring out just how institutions can preserve video games for years to come, while making the content accessible for use and study.” The initiative will deal with the issues that will ultimately determine how videogame history is recorded–for instance, how much support commercial game publishers will be willing to offer the project, and the ethical implications of recording activity in virtual worlds. Brenda Gunn, of the University of Texas’ Videogame Archive, is quoted explaining the importance of commercial partnership for the initiative: “This is a significant point in that [LoC] is saying libraries and archives can’t do this alone; the funding simply is not there…the level of ongoing support for this videogame archive will have a direct impact on the what level of access [we] can provide.” UT also gets a nod from Kotaku for enlisting Warren Spector, NCSoft’s Richard Garriot, and “Fat Man” George Sanger to help build their videogame archive.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Nerd alert! The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin has announced that it will screen Nintendo’s 1989 video game epic (or infomercial, if you prefer) The Wizard, with director Todd Holland and actors Fred Savage and Luke Edwards (the titular Wizard himself) live in the theater. Following the story of three runaway kids trying to make it to the Video Game Armageddon in Hollywood to win the 50,000 jackpot, The Wizard not only features a spectrum of throwback Nintendo games (Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, Mega Man, Double Dragon, Zelda et al), it also fetishized Mattel’s NES Power Glove for an entire generation of gaming kids with the line “I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad!” The Wizard reunion will take place on Friday, December 7th, and tickets to the event go on sale Monday, November 5th at noon, so be sure to purchase yours early to ensure your spot in the nostalgia glow.

Renowned video game publisher, Ubisoft, announces the multi-platinum, album selling band, Korn, will debut their single alongside Ubisoft’s song-titled game release, “Haze,” states an article on gameindustrybiz.com. Ubisoft’s Worldwide Licensing Vice President, Christian Salomon advocates that the “Partnership with Korn is original in the video game industry in that the song will be released and promoted as a full-fledged single, and not just as a download with the video game. It is a testament to the synergy possibilities between music and video games, which often share the same audience.” Ubisoft debuted their Nintendo DS release, Jam Sessions, in the 2007 SXSW ScreenBurn Arcade. Jam Sessions enables players to play and save guitar riffs on the DS’s touch screen, allowing musicians to write and save songs on the fly. Ubisoft keeps rockin’ in the free world.

Photo courtesy of Ubisoft and Korn.

This weekend brings the first-ever Maker Faire Austin to the Travis County Expo Center. We are extremely excited about all the amazing geek-centric gadgets featured at this event, as well as all the cool people who are have come to town to attend the festivities. Speaking of surprises, check out the current issue of the Austin Chronicle for more information on the stealth Maker Faire promotion that has been organized by SXSW and ScreenBurn.

The SXSW Podcast Page contains a ton of great new content, including a recording of the “Pervasive Electronic Games” session from ScreenBurn 2007 (as pictured above). This panel discussed “experiences that move game play into the real world, outside of the usual venues in which electronic gaming occurs. Moving from sedentary venues (living room, video game parlors) into more quotidian spaces is made possible by the proliferation of mobile communications devices, ubiquitous network access, global position sensing and electronic location tagging.” Speakers for the session included (from lefte to right) Julian Bleecker (techkwondo.com), Aaron Meyers (USC Interactive Media) Kevin Slavin (Area / Code) and Dennis Crowley (denniscrowley.com). Another 2007 gaming-related panel recently added to the Podcast Page is “Austin, Massively Multiplayer Game Development Capital of the West?”. As always, we like to listen.

Sure, Sony’s Playstation 3 might be a little expensive. But thanks to its unique open platform, the PS3 has been moonlighting as a high-powered research tool. Dr. Gaurav Khanna, a computational astrophysics specialist at Dartmouth, now uses eight interlinked PS3s to study super-massive black holes and the theoretical gravity waves they set off in space-time, reports Wired. Khanna says his “gravity grid” is cheaper and more efficient than the costly supercomputers he used to rely on for his research–and that the eight-console PS3 cluster can tackle the work of 200 supercomputing nodes. “Basically, it’s almost like a replacement…I don’t have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing.”

Meanwhile, Kotaku reports that a team of UC Irvine students linked 3 PS3s together to mimic the brain algorithms that produce sight, thereby creating a robot with super-accurate visual processing–a breakthrough that may pave the way for future development of self-guided cars, computers and robots. The students won first place in IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine Professor University Challenge and their findings were showcased here in Austin as part of the 2007 Power Architecture Developer Conference.

Still no word yet on whether someone will capitalize on all this with “Algorithm Wars: The Cluster” for PS3.

Image via qubits cluster.

While Britain’s Academy of Film and Television Arts has crowned a game developer with its highest honor (or, rather, honour), Hollywood execs across the pond are sweating over abysmal October ticket sales that many blame on the mega-success of Halo 3, which went on sale September 26th (and sold $170 million worth of copies on that day alone.) In comparison, total film industry ticket sales for the weekend of October 5th were down 27% from last year, topping out at a lackluster $80 million, reports Advertising Age: “For Microsoft, it’s no wonder video games, and in particular Halo 3, are competing with blockbusters for opening weekends. ‘We marketed it like a film,’ said Josh Goldberg, a Halo 3 product manager at Microsoft, adding, ‘and now, we’re just as big or bigger than film.’ He said Halo 3 was marketed as an event film in terms of its partnerships, with beverage, automotive, fast feeders and mobile-phone companies all joining up.”