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

Thanks to everyone who helped make this year’s SXSW Interactive + ScreenBurn Festival a success! As always, we welcome your feedback and we want your ideas about how we can make next year’s festival even better. Make sure to check the Interactive site for audio and video highlights from this year’s event and to find out about our 2009 Panel Picker. See you in 2009, everybody.

It was a busy weekend here at this year’s ScreenBurn Arcade. Free and open to the public, SB Arcade was THE place to be for gamers at Interactive this year–badge or no badge. Wizards of the Coast, GameCock and GameTap had product demos and representatives out in full force, while the Championship Gaming Series arena gave the Arcade a perpetual “finale-of-The Wizard” feel. Speaking of vintage gaming, GameTap kept the Capcom revelry raging inside their Arcade booth. You could practically smell the year 1991!

Wizards of the Coast’s exhibit had tables where you could bust out Magic: The Gathering cards, as well as reps on hand to talk about their Dungeons and Dragons MMO and still-in-alpha social networking/RPG site Gleemax. Who knows how social networking/online worlds would have evolved without Dungeons and Dragons? After all, pointed out WOTC’s Jeremiah Isgur, “Dungeons and Dragons was the original user-generated game. Lots of MMOs are based on the rules of D&D.” (RIP, Gygax.)

Concentration abounded in the Championship Gaming arena.

Who says gaming’s not a spectator sport?

The FragDolls always have their game face on.

And so did this guy. There was never a quiet moment at the Guitar Hero and Rock Band booths.

At the Hewlett-Packard Blackbird 002 Gaming PC booth.

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the ScreenBurn Arcade. See you at ScreenBurn ‘09!

You might not know it yet, but Jane McGonigal has been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work towards your future happiness. Not only is she a pioneer in the field of Alternate Reality Games (a genre that, she explains, can do a lot for your personal sense of well-being) but as a senior researcher/”future forecaster” at Bay Area think tank The Institute for the Future, she’s a front-runner in improving “quality of life” through game-think. Her SXSWi closing keynote panel today was a fascinating look into McGonigal’s work and research as both a game designer and a future forecaster. “Instead of trying to make games more realistic–more powerful graphics, better AI–I’m trying to make the real world more like games,” she explained. “We need the real world to be better designed so it functions more like a game.” While that might sound like a lofty statement, especially to a non-gamer, McGonigal’s logic is simple: Happiness doesn’t mean what it used to. “Happiness is not a warm puppy,” she asserted. Now, happiness as we (and our future selves) know it is increasingly more about “quality of life,” drawn from “satisfying work to do, the experience of being good at something, time spent with people we like, and the chance to be a part of something bigger.” And–you guessed it–”Nothing gives you these four qualities in higher quantity than games. Multiplayer games gives you chance to be with people you like and be a part of something bigger. Multiplayer games are the ultimate happiness engine.” Fresh from her SXSW Web Awards win for World Without Oil, the first socially conscious ARG tackling a real-life problem, she spoke of the importance of using gaming models to foster social change: “I want to make sure a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032.” Closing out her speech with an impromptu Soulja Boy dance routine per audience request, McGonigal truly appeared to have the “quality of life” algorithm figured out.

On Saturday the 8th, DorkBot descended on Brush Square Park. What is DorkBot? It’s a science fair powered by “free beer, electricity, tomfoolery, mayhem, makers and music to form one exquisite geek talent show,” sponsored by Make Magazine, SXSW Interactive, the International Game Developers Association of Austin and Amaze Entertainment.

The unbridled geek thrills at DorkBot: touching lives.

Bleep Labs’ Thingamagoops made lots of people happy.

I, DorkBot: These adorable little guys are actually analog synthesizers.

Next stop: frog design’s megabash at the sculptural new Mexican-American Cultural Center.

Nothing bespeaks “interactive good times” quite like glowing green lights.

Grupo Fantasma, Austin’s finest funk/cumbia outfit (and Prince’s personal backing band!) powered the dance party.

The view from inside the MACC.

The party (and the neon glow) continued late into the night at GameTap’s event at club Parkside. Drinks, hors d’oeuvres, DJs and old-school Capcom games stoked the festivities.

The dancefloor: it got PWNED. Thanks to everyone who came out!

All images: Erin Sanders

I Can Has Cheezburger? stayed true to their name and founding ethos at their SXSW Interactve appearance, providing post-panel cheesburgers for attendees. To which we said: nom nom nom nom kthxbai!!1

Image: Molly McCommons

“Oh hai,” greeted I Can Has Cheezburger? co-founder Eric Nakagawa (aka Cheeseburger) at today’s completely packed SXSW Interactive panel LOLWUT? Why Do I Keep Coming Back to This Website?. In undoubtedly the most lulz-filled panel at this year’s Interactive, Nakagawa and I Can Has Cheezburger? CEO Ben Huh expounded on the intricacies, pitfalls and unique thrills of creating an unexpected web phenomenon “despite a shitty design, $0 spent on market, and an impossible-to-spell URL.” Upon receiving this now-infamous picture from co-founder-to-be Tofuburger, self-taught programmer Nakagawa did “what everybody on the Internet does when they find something funny” and bought the domain name icanhascheezburger.com the next morning. Just one year later, I Can Has Cheezburger? has grown into a company with nine salaried employees toiling to ensure that you may enjoy daily procrastinatory LOLcats at work. As Nakagawa attests, it was a rocky surge to the top, full of innumerable server crashes, piles of exceeded bandwidth, death threats (”from people who just don’t like cats”) and skyrocketing cholesterol levels (”Really, after looking at and thinking about them all day at work, I ate so many cheeseburgers.”) Now, that ICHCB? boasts 1.5 million page views a day and Nakagawa has quit his day job, what’s next for Nakagawa? First, he made sure there was a LOLpage for dog lovers, I Has A Hot Dog. And since ICHCB? receives hundreds of political macros every day, he’s providing a service for political bloggers to “spice up” their pages with LOLpoliticians. And watch out for a super-secret upcoming non-caption site: “We can’t give you the URL yet, but I hope someone will send it to you and you’ll find out about it that way.”

Image: Molly McCommons

In front of a throng of fans assembled under the klieg lights of the Austin Convention Center, Dallas Venom selected Forza player Justin “Muffinman” Anderson for the first pick announced in the Championship Gaming Series 08 Draft. “It feels awesome to get everything out of the way–all the pressure’s off. Now it’s just time to perform,” said a beaming Anderson. “I think the Dallas Venom will have a big chance from last year. We’ve got a solid team, so look for us at the top.” Teams Los Angeles Complexity, New Yord 3D, San Francisco Optx, Carolina Core, and Chicago Chimera also announced their picks for the 2008 North American season, which starts in June. Congratulations to all the draftees! If you missed live coverage of the draft on DirecTV, check out the CGS site for a liveblog of the event along with complete draft results.

Image courtesy Championship Gaming Site

ScreenBurn is bigger and badder than ever this year, and so is the ScreenBurn Arcade! Free and open to the public, it’s ground zero for all the hottest new games and developments in the gaming industry.

It’s a melee of swag bags, screens, demos, gawkers, hawkers, gamers, and, um, more screens.

The FragDolls competed on a custom-made gaming stage. Seagate Technology is sponsoring tournaments throughout the two-day Arcade for ScreenBurn attendees who want to challenge a FragDoll for a change to win a Seagate Maxtor 1-Touch hard drive.

And where FragDolls go, audiences follow.

The Championship Gaming Series has set up a formidably eye-popping competition area. Tomorrow (Sunday, March 9) Championship Game Series 2008 Pro Gamer Draft picks will be announced from the Austin Convention Center–look for the event on DirecTV.

No matter your gaming preference, there’s something for everyone, from supercute…

…to not so cute.

Amiable Second Skin director Juan Carlos Piñeiro Escoriaza took in the Arcade scene. Second Skin’s unflinchingly intimate look at MMO players who live most of their lives in two dimensions has been garnering great reviews. Does the director play MMOs? “I’m more of a console player. Looking forward to the new Smash Brothers.”

Is big videogame publishing destined for the same change-or-die creeping irrelevance that now plagues the music, film and publishing industries? Multiverse executive producer Corey Bridges held forth on this question and more in this morning’s SB/Interactive panel The Future of Virtual Worlds & Game Development: Rise of the Indies. After noting the well-documented floundering of the music industry due to downloading (”The RIAA has lost its mind. It’s spazzing. It’s now illegal to copy your own CD onto your own hard drive“), the deflation of movie theater revenue, and the struggles that even the most established newspapers now face to stay afloat in the digital age, Bridges forecasted that videogame publishing as we know it will be next on the chopping block. Though triumphant headlines (and numbers) from the past year have touted gaming as an unstoppable industry, Bridges asserted that traditional game development is already feeling tremors. The current game publishing model calls for at least $10 million (often twice that) in development costs to create a blockbuster–and the possibility of a Matrix Online-style flop with a $20 million price tag has made publishers risk-averse and forced into conservative choices. Meanwhile? The advance of broadband, the rise of middleware–especially indie-geared platforms for noncommercial use–and the growth of the virtual world industry stand to take a huge bite out of the videogame industry in its current incarnation. Noting the trend at this year’s GDC of stalwart publishers like EA following the lead of indies into Facebook-application development, Bridges predicted the next year will see a major merging of virtual worlds and social networks–and that “everybody will have an avatar in the next few years.” As new technology decreases the cost of making games, opening up opportunities (Xbox, anyone?) for more indie development and more genres, the results, said Bridges, will be “better design, fewer publishers and more millionaires.”
Image: Erin Sanders

SXSW Interactive’s Pro Gamers: New Extreme Athletes of the 21st Century panel brought together catalysts from the burgeoning world of e-sports this afternoon to pontificate on the current state of professional gaming. Xfire’s Adam Boyden moderated discussion between LA compleXity founder Richard Lake, Team Pandemic founder Chris Lemley, Team 3D/E Sports Entertainment founder Craig Levine, and FIFA Interactive champion Matija “Jevrej” Biljeskovic. So ARE pro gamers really the new extreme athletes of the 21st century? Most everybody on the panel concurred that as American life becomes more and more wedded to technology, our digital age calls for a new digital sport. With the gaming industry’s well-documented meteoric rise over the past few years, an entire generation of kids now truly turn to gaming for entertainment rather than traditional organized sports, pointed out Lemley: “We’re going to pass on videogaming to them like we passed on football and baseball. This is our generation’s sport, this is what we have to offer, and it’s only going to change and grow.” Though gaming has made the breakthrough to TV on SpikeTV, ESPN and the Championship Gaming Series on DirectTV, the next few years will be a make-or-break time for that aforementioned change and growth, since key corporate advertisers with sufficient dollars to advance the sport “just don’t know what to do with it” yet, said Levine. Generally speaking, “people who play games aren’t watching TV and people who watch TV don’t play games, so if you put something on tv about gaming, who’s watching it?” But the puzzle of watchability might just be trumped by videogames’ all-consuming popularity, according to Lake: “Television advertisers are begging for a new medium, and gaming is that medium. This generation does not watch television. Gaming is the best way to hit this generation.” While the pioneers of pro gaming push to establish their leagues, their visibility and their livelihoods, at least they know they can look forward to a bright future if Asia’s embrace of pro gaming is any indication: “I need to hire security for my gamers when we go to Asia,” said Lake. “They wanna rip their shirts off like a pro basketball player or a rock star.”

Image: Erin Sanders