Sitting at Justin Hall’s presentation at the ScreenBurn sessions at SXSW, which is a track specifically focused on though-provocation from industry insiders.
Justin was one of (if not) the first bloggers online back in the early 1990s.
Highlights from his presentation (note: I arrived late…which seems to be an unfortunate trend):
- keeping up with blogging is a positive social interaction, but many people burn out (and "retire") within 18 months
- NOT keeping up with email is a negative social interaction; Justin showed how he has thousands of unanswered email (note: my current Yahoo! mail inbox shows 654 unread messages; my current Outlook box shows 1108 unread emails!)
- flickr started out as an attempt to create a browser-based video game and has actually succeeded by creating a game out of reality in that people are organizing themselves aroud things that they otherwise would not have even thought about
- "my ware" is the opposite of spy ware: last.fm, del.icio.us, siteshuffle help me show off my profile to everyone (ok, I’ll share. Here are mine: last.fm, del.icio.us, flickr)
- "what is my location in webland?" he wants to be able to play along on the web with other people. key actions online: "arrive, share data, find friends"
- key verbs that the web should inspire: "play, share, connect, experiment, understand"
- Games should not be isolated. All of the interactions that users make online should feed into a meta game online to enable. Playing in isolation (single player games) is a masturbatory experience but by building interactivity into gaming we enable people to interrelate online. But there is a question about how much should be shared. We are ok sharing flickr, del.icio.us, etc. But do we want to share the fact that in Warcraft we spent last night going around cutting the heads off of chickens? How do our actual social interactions in games change the way we view actively sharing data and information publically, even though much of this information is already public, just not aggregated. What other bits of aggregated data do we want to avoid? Do we want to share the purchases we made at Safeway that are tracked by our frequent buyer card?
- Justin spent 11 years "overly sharing personal info" online, but is currently experimenting with "secrecy" by developing a personal video game (in opposition to everything he is currently speaking about but in order to allow for escape)
- "I’ve given up on books. I love books but I can’t sit still long enough to read them." (I am certainly suffering from this same issue. Confession: I’ve been reading the same book since December…)
- Terranova is a website about multiplayer games that college professors write to in order to help them justify their obsessions with online game. Example, college professor’s kids ask them what they do when gaming and they must explain why he embodies himself as a three-horned demon who eats goats.
- "Only good girls keep diaries, the bad ones never have time" is a quote from Tallulah Bankhead that Justin references in response to Greg‘s question about whether new social media has helped solve the Victorian Writer’s dilemma about whether to eloquently write about the world or whether to go out and experience it
For more about Justin, I highly recommend reading his site links.net.
This was a high-paced session…if anyone has corrections to my notes, please add them below.
Technorati Tags: SXSW, SXSW06, SXSWi06, justinhall, Austin, gaming
