South by Southwest Screenburn

Hi,

I put online pictures from South by Southwest in Austin, TX. They have a video game show as part of it called Screenburn, which is free to the public. Pretty sweet stuff!

http://jamestroberts.com/sxsw.php

Oh, and I set it up so you can click on the pictures and they blow up, and I put on some captions in a little more detail what they are. Basically lots of video games (mostly shoot em ups), lots of LAN setups where you could play multiplayer, cute girls, and a totally SWEET gaming rig from Alienware. I think it runs about $20,000. I also particularly liked it when the pros played Starcraft II and LoL on the big screen on stage and they had sports announcers emceeing it. It was totally awesome if you're into gaming, although maybe not so much if you're into turn based strategy.

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I'd love to hear any stories you have from Sxsw if you have a moment. My wife and I are considering attending next year. Thx for the post!

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Are you coming from, like, Dallas? That would make sense. My favorite part of SXSW is the film festival (that's just OT for this forum). It's a lot like Sundance. Lots of indy films, but the famous stars still show up. And after the film, the directors will step up on stage and take questions regarding how they filmed it--you're sitting among a bunch of other cinematographers, actors, pros and the like. I've watched Woody Harrelson and Bruce Willis step up on stage and talk after the show before. Another time, the film was a documentary about this guy committing suicide. At the end, he kills himself...and then after the film, the dead guy walks up on stage and talks about it. Oh! It wasn't real! OMG that freaked me out. Which is the other thing: the films at SXSW *consistently* freak me out. Big-time. They open up the films to the public at $10 apiece, but really it's best just to get a badge if you can afford it. Those run $500 or $1000 a person (which most people just expense it to their companies). The badge will get you into the film festival and SXSW Interactive and to several Video Game developer presentations. But the interactive and game portions are getting really blurry now: they're mixing social media with gaming a lot. This year, there were a lot of "we're hiring" signs everywhere. Twitter and Foursquare got their big break at SXSW.

IMHO Stardock might want to have a presence there, but they would need to change their genre a little bit. Screenburn was more about shoot 'em ups and social media. Obviously there were exceptions though: the LoL and SC2 tournaments, for example. Those are RTS. All of Stardock's WinCustomize tools would fit nicely in SXSW Interactive, but they're not really social media. If SD was in Houston I'd be here asking, "Why the h*** is Stardock not at SXSW?"; but since they're way up in Michigan and they've got some other gamers' show in Seattle the week before, I'm not.

I know very little about the SXSW Music portion, even though that's how SXSW got started. That's certainly far and away the biggest part of SXSW, bringing in over 100,000 people. But at this point, SXSW Interactive has PLENTY of stuff. I go, and I've never gone to a single concert. And it looks like as of this year the video gaming part is in the mix (and free). In previous years the video gaming was free, but it wasn't that big a deal. This year it sure was.

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