Daily Screens - The Austin Chronicle (2024)

Endless lines of people that wrap around the building, cyber geeks of every shape and form, and 30-pound bags full of marketing trash – the madness has begun.

I jump-started this year but hitting events back to back, wasting no time waiting in the halls, verbalizing my résumé to strangers or punching random buttons on my cell phone like I have someone important to call. The first event I attended was at 3pm, Book Reading: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design with Jason Beaird. I expected to pick up some new-age technology tips of designing our online commercialism, but it was nothing of the sort.

Poetry slams and rap battles are soooo OS9. All the cool kids are throwin' down with battledecks, the hardest version of a Powerpoint presentation ever. Competitors have five minutes to put together a presentation to a series of random slides. And random means screengrabs of Digg, scaleable horses, charts of pudding versus skin, and massive Amy Winehouses. The results are judged on conviction, jargon, interpretive dance, Husker Du references and how disgusting your fund is.

SXSW regional Battledecks champion Anil Dash of Six Apart Ltd. put his success down to "Passion. No, I like to have a good time and I'm pretty comfortable with crowds." He also, he admitted, got lucky with the slides, saying, "I thought there would be a Winehouse, and I was thinking a lot about what I would do if she turned up." But he puts his final victory down to a brief video clip of Rick Astley. This would have thrown a lesser battler, but not Dash. "Throw in a Rick Roll and you can't go wrong, that's just magic in a box."

TODAY'S EVENTS

Veiled Aristocrats and Ten Minutes to Live at AFS Cinema

Paper Lei Making w/ Austin History Center at Windsor Park Branch Library

MUSIC | MOVIES | ARTS | COMMUNITY

Down at the Edit Me! How Gamers are Adopting the Wiki Way panel: The big question. Why do people wiki?

After all, for games this used to be the stuff of expensive printed game guides (official and unofficial) done for profit. Angelique Shelton of Wikia Inc. uses the basketball analogy: "Have you ever played ball in the street? Well, there's people in the NBA who get paid to do that."

NCSoft community manager April Burba has a pretty good idea who these volunteer encyclopedia builders are: "The users of wikis are people that are into producing documentation." They serve a double purpose for developers: not only do they keep the discussion going and get more people involved, they keep players playing.

"You have to collaborate in development." That's the simple message from Tim Langdell (appearing as a SXSW Interactive panelist at Redrum in the Rue Morgue': Collaboration in International Communities, Saturday at 3:30pm in room 6 at the Austin Convention Center). He should know. He's helped build the industry for three decades.

"I'm incredibly interested and excited by the direction the game industry is taking," said Langdell, "which is back to the vibe of the early 80s, for the independent game developer to have a voice." Co-founder in 1979 of UK-based EDGE Games (one of the world's oldest computer games firms and for many years effectively SEGA and EA's European divisions), Langdell also helped establish the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, and wrote and taught the first games entertainment curriculum for USC film school. He's now head of the videogaming department at National University in California, the first academic institution in the US to offer an MFA in videogame production. Increasingly, his interests have turned towards building collaboration into games and game development.

I've always been fascinated by the left-field ascent of a trend, a movement, even just a turn of phrase, as when snark … the word … went from non sequitur to ubiquity to backlash in the blink of an eye, or when that Hasidic reggae rapper starting popping up everywhere. And while we're at it … there's the increase in the arbitrary insertion of a period to create a sort of oh-so-clever stopgap, followed by a sentence fragment.

Which totally drives me crazy.

Start the tally.

Not that it's a contest or anything, but put one notch on my party belt. Local video-game publisher Gameco*ck Media hosted their second annual EIEIO pre-SXSW party. Low temps and turnout made for a less than crazy party vibe, but it wasn't for lack of trying on Gameco*ck's part.

PHOTO GALLERIES