SXSW was pretty damn crazy this year. Even bigger than last year, and this time with 500% more overlapping parties. Unfortunately that meant less time hanging out w/ old friends and having interesting conversations, and absolutely nowhere for Boggle-playing (although I did play a bit of Set for the first time – I think I would have gotten better at it if I hadn’t had so many drinks earlier…)

Also, some good sessions. My faves:

• Will Wright Keynote – this is the third time I’ve seen him speak (Spore demos don’t count and pale by comparison) and he’s bar none the best presenter of game structure/form. What’s great is that he takes you on a real intellectual journey when he speaks – you hang on as he zips through and there’s so much good stuff that you really want to go back and explore – that sounds like that’d be a fun game. Anyway, really hoping a good recording pops up
• Henry Jenkins – I’ve been a huge fan of Jenkins’ written work since my first readings back in visual literacy class in my undergrad days. And, it turns out he’s just as insightful and engaging in interview as he is in writing. Hooray! If I ever live in Boston I’m gonna crash all his classes.
• Bruce Sterling – as a speaker, Sterling rarely disappoints. You’re guaranteed at least a handful of clever bon mots, some novel insights, and a few incendiary things tossed in that you suspect is there just to get a rise out of people. There was a bit more of the latter this time. Aside: the commonality of all the three sessions mentioned so far is that they’re talks where can engage you in intellectual dialogue, even as a domain expert (this, unfortunately, is rarer than you’d hope – for years, I’ve been pretty dissatisfied w/ a lot of SXSW sessions because they often made me feel like I was wasting my time, but I had a lot less of that this year – partly by better panel selection (topics, knowing the speakers, skipping time slots), and partly by sheer luck I think).
• Phil Torrone and Limor Fried – I’ve seen this talk a fair number of times, but it doesn’t get boring – there’re always new gadgets and the conversation does keep evolving (I like the DIY business tangent, and I’d appreciate even deeper discussion about the more serious/cultural implications of Maker Culture and the coming of the Fab Labs…)
• Beautiful Algorithms – this was everything I wanted out of the session. A soothing discussion about various maths accompanied by great visual animations of said algorithms. Take a look at cove.org for some of those. (Hilbert Curves btw are quite useful for collapsing multi-dimensional data)

I’m really looking forward to catching some of the podcasts of sessions. Here are the ones I wish I didn’t miss:

• Mobile Design – Kevin moderated this one, and apparently Matt Jones was quite on. This unfortunately overlapped w/ the Jenkins session, so I really didn’t have much of a choice on that one
• Pervasive Gaming – I almost made it to that 10AM session, but blinking led to a 1hr snooze…
• WoW w/ Joi and Justin – I heard good things about this, and yes, it turns out that this is really good. Joi, Justin, and Ben are great complements for each other and the conversation is lively and touches on all kinds of relevant issues… highly recommended
• Field Guide To Design Inspiration – haven’t listened to this yet, have heard it’s worthwhile – but come on, no slides?

Slide