RasterWeb!Just got an email from Ken Rheingans, letting us know that BarCampMadison is all set, and will happen March 3rd & 4th, 2007 in Madison Wisconsin at the Inn on the Park Hotel.
Also, a big thanks to Stratagem for being the location sponsor and covering half of the net connection fees.
Expect a planning meeting in the beginning of January, and after that promotion and planning will go into full swing. Let’s make this as awesome (if not more awesome) than BarCampMilwaukee.
Since just before BarCampMilwaukee, I talked with a few people about what I call the “casual gamer” which is pretty much the opposite of the “hardcore gamer” in terms of behavior.
Now that the Wii and the PlayStation 3 have (more or less) arrived, I’ll give you my thoughts on this, but remember, this is the view from a casual gamer, not someone who is completely obsessed with gaming, just someone who plays once in a while and/or wants a fun system for the whole family to play.
First of all, the casual gamer cares about bang for the buck, not about the lastest and greatest. For instance, we can often find GameCube games used for anywhere between $5 and $20. Brand new games for the GameCube seem to run about $20 to $40. Keep in mind that a year ago you could get a new GameCube with Mario Kart: Double Dash and 4 controllers for about $200, and today you can pick up a brand new GameCube for $99. So like I said, bang for the buck takes effect, and you could put together a complete gaming system for the whole family for well under $300.
Now, the Nintendo Wii appears to be priced at $250, and is backwards compatible with the GameCube games, so if I was buying today, this is what I would get. It would make sense to “move up” to the Wii from the GameCube. I’m also influenced by the Nintendo titles, which are more kid & family friendly. (I have two daughters who love gaming, and the GameCube is perfect for them.) As for the PlayStation 3, it comes in priced at $500, twice the price. Now, it does have some impressive technology in it, but for the casual gamer, this is lost. The new games for the PlayStation 3 seem to be priced at about $60, and the used (well, used PlayStation & PlayStation 2 games) seem to be priced cheap, well under $20.
Jus the other day I was taking with a friend of mine, and found out he too was a casual gamer (he has 3 kids) and I told him how we pick up used titles for cheap, and he said he’s gotten some good deals on ebay, like 10 games for $30. I think Nintendo realizes that there is a place for the casual gamer, and they’re looking to serve that market.
Thoughts…?
Back in July I wasn’t too sure how easy it would be to pull of BarCampMilwaukee, but we did it. It was hard work, but totally doable…
BarCampMadison is currently being planned for February 2007, and I’m sure that will go fine. Plenty of people involved in BarCampMilwaukee will also be involved in BarCampMadison, in one way or another.
But those Madison folks, they just had to raise the bar… they’ve announced BarCampUSA, which will be a 4 day event at the Jefferson County Fair Park in August 2007. The site says:
We are expecting 5000+ participants (our location can accommodate 20,000+)
Now that’s crazy… But more power to them! I hope they (we?) can pull it off. (Advice: you’re gonna need one hell of an internet connection to satisfy that many geeks!)
One of the coolest things that happened at BarCampMilwaukee was that, during the introductions, Dustin Dupree said he wasn’t leading any sessions, but if anyone wanted to know about Flash, they should ask him. Someone yelled out “Lead a session!” and sure enough, a session on Flash happened later, led by Dustin. I’m glad that Dustin felt like embracing the idea of “you are an expert at your own experience” and sharing what he knows about Flash. To me, this is the spirit of BarCamp, and I was glad to see it happen.
I was sorry I missed that session (Scott seemed to enjoy it) because people keep telling me that there are open-source tools for Flash, but every time I dig through osflash.org I just get confused and can’t seem to find any sort of Mac OS X development tools that look appealing to me.
Cory Zimmerman of Z2 Marketing + Design presented a session at BarCampMilwaukee titled “How to not think and succeed – Starting and running a firm.”
I thought the basic idea was somewhat similar to the 37Signals idea of "Getting Real", where you can’t let planning and over-thinking get in the way of actually doing something. I’ve been involved in businesses before where grand schemes were discussed over and over and never acted upon. It’s the whole “ideas are useless, execution matters” thing.
From what I’ve seen, Cory and his partner Deb have made Z2 successful by doing the right amount of planning, just enough to keep from flying by the seat of their pants, and then executing on their ideas. Yes, they’ve dealt with failure, but Cory didn’t think it was due to a lack of thinking or planning.
I’ve tried to adopt similar ideas for 2XL Networks, focusing more on doing and less on thinking, or over-thinking, as it were. Maybe a good deal of this is based on previous experience, but if that is the case, then people starting out might do well to focus on doing as well, to actually gain that experience…