Barbie Rules in Austin

AUSTIN, TX - The big news in Austin in March is South by Southwest (or SXSW as it is commonly abbreviated).

But when people talk about SXSW, they are more likely talking about the SXSW Music Festival - a major draw for bands and music label reps and tourists by the thousands.

It's not just a music festival anymore. Under the SXSW banner are also film and multimedia conferences.

Despite an effort under way to declare a section of downtown Austin a multimedia haven, the SWSX Interactive Festival doesn't attract the attention the other two festivals do. Of course, Austin had been promoting itself as "the music capital of the world" for years before multimedia was a twinkle in any bureaucrat's eye, so perhaps that's not so terribly unexpected.

Gaming was one of four "tracks" to the Interactive Festival (Money and Marketing, Web Publishing, and Music 2000 being the other three), and the conference did provide a good opportunity for cyber-celebrity spotting: Author Howard Rheingold was the keynote speaker, while Steven Johnson, editor in chief of the lauded webzine Feed, and Richard Grimes, executive producer of Cool Site of the Day, were featured speakers.

And stars of the computer gaming world were on hand, or at least scheduled to be. Origin's Richard Garriott and Starr Long had been tapped to provide an Ultima Online case study, but, owing to the class action suit filed against Origin over that game, the two had taken their lawyers' advice to keep their expertise to themselves - they chose not to appear and their panel was cancelled. But Mike Wilson and some of his confederates from g.o.d. did put in an appearance. And representatives from Chris Roberts' Digital Anvil were scheduled to give a presentation on "Transforming Games to Films" on Tuesday.

J.C. Herz, author of the book Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds, moderated the Games for Girls panel on Sunday - which seemed to touch on one of the trends most commonly referred to at the conference's many gaming panels, that of tapping into the market of girl gamers.

As one panel participant put it, "All of our industry's growth last year was due to Barbie and Deer Hunter - games for the casual gamers, which accounted for 20 percent of the industry's sales last year. And that's how big the industry grew last year as well."

Jackie Moss of Austin's Human Code said, "Barbie Fashion Designer showed that there was a market for games for girls. That title opened the market up."

And publishers such as Hasbro Interactive (with two titles specifically aimed at girls on the slate for 1998 - My Little Pony CD-ROM and Girl Talk) and smaller companies such as Her Interactive (with a Nancy Drew mystery title on the boards for 1998) and Girl Games are producing titles for that market. The coming years will see that market niche explored even further.

Frustration with the deals handed to developers was expressed by more than one panelist - with fingers pointing at mismarketing of titles, or lack of marketing support given to titles that deserved it.

"Representatives from our publishers would pay visits to us, and I would ask myself if they had ever played the game," said Jeff Smith of Terminal Reality, one of the developers that has signed with g.o.d. "They don't understand our games, and they don't know how to market them."

So far, Wilson has signed six developers to his g.o.d. group. And it seemed - from the vitriol directed at publishers from developers in panel audiences - he could easily have signed up another half dozen on the spot. (g.o.d. is not looking to sign up any more developers, Wilson says. The company is about as big as he wants it to get.)

Still, the path that g.o.d. walks is fraught with dangers.

"When I was hired at Origin as employee 26, or something like that," said Warren Spector, who produced games such as System Shock and Wings of Glory for Origin and is now with ION Storm, "we were going to try to publish and distribute our own titles. And we spent the next three years struggling to find shelf space. In a more forgiving market than exists today, we couldn't do it . There were 2,000 or fewer titles published in those days. Last year, there were between 6,000 and 10,000 things on CD that call themselves games. And CompUSA has only something like 200 slots on their shelves. EA offered Origin a better deal - it was that simple."

The prospect of getting his company's titles into stores didn't seem to faze Wilson. "When I was at id, we worked part-time developing relationships with all the major retailers. With our proven talent, we won't have any problem getting on the store shelves."

The Interactive Festival's biggest attractions were perhaps the post-conference parties. And the SXSW Film Festival is going on at the same time so there were Indy films aplenty screening all around town. And if the publisher-bashing and constant talk of Barbie gets you down, there's always the Music Conference that gets under way on Wednesday.