Super Sweet Interactive Panels 2011

Looking over the list of interactive panels for SXSW so far, there were quite a few that caught my eye; on the whole, it looks to be a pretty exciting event. The two that stood out in particular for me were:

Geppetto's Army: Creating International Incidents with Twitter Bots

The description for this panel painted a pretty interesting picture; a virtual "puppetmaster" sets up hundreds of Twitter Bots, gives them some time to develop a following of sorts, and then unleash a carefully crafted fake news story upon the world. Citing the "balloon boy" incident as an example of a made-up story being picked up and circulated rapidly, the whole thing has echoes of Hearst's involvement in the Spanish-American War.



"Please. You supply the tweets, I'll supply the war."

A little dramatic, maybe, but it does raise some interesting questions about the international news infrastructure and the way some news agencies handle certain things.

Game Publishing Evolution From Traditional To Digital Distribution

Naturally I zeroed in on one of the big gaming-related panels. There's been an increasing amount of buzz in the gaming industry over the last few years regarding digital distribution, thanks in no small part to Apple's masterful digital delivery system. The big developers have taken several steps towards digital distribution--some small, like offering classic games for download on your new systems, and some big, like Sony's terribly misguided decision to release a DD-only model PSP, the PSPGo.



There's really no way to put a positive spin on the fact that
your high-end handheld device is selling exponentially worse
than even the ten year-old PS2, but Sony is sure as hell trying.

Given the failure of the PSPGo, I'm curious to see what ideas this panel has about making digital distribution on mainstream videogame platforms a success. I've only got so much shelf space, after all, and those cases are starting to pile up.