I saw Mike Tyson at SXSW. Partied with the Angry Birds Crew. And found IDEO’s Birth Control talk to be the best session I went to… And that was day 1!
This blog title could also have been “Swoop, poop, Zappos, and Fugaboo”… The most quoted phrase by speakers referred to executives that ‘swoop’ into projects, ‘poop’ on design, and then ‘swoop’ away again. Most hilarious use was Jason Putorti (former lead designer of Mint.com) against Aaron Patzer (Mint.com founder) in a panel about designers vs. developers.
I’m a big fan of learning about and hoping to have great culture in the work place. So it was quite a treat to be handed the book Delivering Happiness from the man himself, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (who’s name I just spelled correctly for the first time ever without having to look it up! do I win a prize?).
And in classic SXSW fashion, perhaps the most interesting conversation I had was sitting at a burger stand, chomping on some fries, and meeting the founders of Fugaboo. They’re trying to bring more ‘neighbor’ into neighborhoods by bringing to digital life all those pegboards and stapled light posts about local activities and ways to get more involved with those who live around you. Their ‘Facebook’ for neighborhoods will be available soon, and if I have my guesses right, could be something you’ll be using soon yourself!
What else did I learn? Do not go to a wedding in New Orleans before SXSW. Unless you are Charlie Sheen. Simply too much of too much. It was hard to keep up with all the networking night life of SXSW.
Lastly, what do I think of SXSW? I think it’s quite possibly where we’ll take the whole company to next year for our annual All Hands. We had just finished this year’s in our San Francisco office. After my 1st trip to SXSW, what better conference/fiesta to take the whole company to?! We’re still small enough to even think of such a thing. And better do it soon before SXSW consumes itself like an over-heated sun into a black hole. Such a huge, amazing conference.
And I haven’t even mentioned the ‘more geebees twins’ or Beardyman or Hugh MacLeod or Das Racist or my new YouTube tube socks!
May you all avoid swoop and poop.
It’s almost as if the speakers and panelists at South by South West 2010 had all prepared together beforehand. Time and again, no matter what the topic of the panel, the same theme came up again and again:
Gaming is where it’s at.
From the more obvious cases, like Dennis Crowley’s location-based Foursquare app (effectively a multi-player game replete with rewards and badges), to the more esoteric, like crowd-source astrology platform GalaxyZoo, more and more examples of game-based platforms are popping up.
While it’s clear that certain web-based services can benefit from a game-like component given that typical incentive structures simply aren’t there (like the social need to be recognized as a “local”, represented in Foursquare as becoming “Mayor” of a particular place), it gets really interesting if/when applied to other examples. Like tacking on a game component to a hospital’s internal report tracking system to encourage nurse diligence, or rewarding taxi cab drivers for picking up fares on time, or rewarding kids for reading newspaper articles online – the list is endless, which I have to admit is slightly scary.
In the Augmenting Maps with Reality panel, one of the audience members asked what the endgame (pun intended) of this “life as a game” is meant to be: will every part of our lives be represented as a game? Will I be competing – with myself or others – when I go shopping for groceries (10 points for buying kale!), buy a drink at the bar (minus 5 points for the carbs), or meet 3 new people in one day (You’ve received the social butterfly badge!)?
The panelists’ answers were mixed: Dennis Crowley thought it was totally fine that social interactions are rewarded through a game platform, while Flickr information architect Kellan Elliott-McCrea felt that games are an intermediate step – that a world where we need such explicit, constant incentives to do basic activities is likely the poorer for it. Casey Stengel’s quote, “Most games are lost, not won” comes to mind, along with apocalyptic visions of our Pacman-like future.
Thoughts? Is gaming here to stay, and if so, is it a good thing?
