This Friday I’ll be flying down to Austin to attend SXSW. I’m really excited to be going, it looks like its going to be a lot of fun. There’s going to be a ton of people that I know, there, and I’m looking forward to meeting them.

I won’t be presenting this time around, I’m looking forward to just soaking in the area and talking with people. You’ll most likely be able to find me at the Mozilla booth (in case, my cell # is 585-615-5287) and making at least one stop to the Apress booth. (I hear they’ll have a bunch of my books on hand – let me know if you want one signed, ha!)

Side Events

Three events that I’m looking forward to (in addition to the main conference) are:

BarCamp Austin: I’ll confess, I love BarCamps. Ever since attending the first BarCamp NYC, during January of last year, I’ve gone to all the camps that I’ve been able to make. This one is no exception. (I’m also looking forward to going to BarCamp Boston 2 later this month.)

Avalonstar Bowling: I’m part of Team JavaScript Ninjas, which includes: Andrew Dupont (Prototype Core), Aaron Gustafson (Co-Author of Web Design in a Nutshell, Speaker, A List Apart), and Dan Webb (Prototype Core, author of UJS for Rails). And no, we’re not better at bowling than we are at JavaScript.

Breakfast with Dustin: Dustin Diaz is having a late night breakfast for all of those who’ve opted to fly out on the 14th (as opposed to taking a red-eye).

Games + Work = ?

One thing that you might notice from my itinerary: I’m currently planning on attending very few JavaScript-centric or Entrepreneurship-centric talks. I could say that I’m burnt out, but in reality I’m just much more interested in the number of game-centric talks. For example, these all sound very interesting to me:

• ARG! The Attack of the Alternate Reality Games
• Your Web Application as a Text Adventure
• Serious Games: Can Learning Be Hard Fun?
• Virtual Worlds and Virtual Humans: NPCs and Avatars
• Advergames: Making Your Brand More Fun
• Online Games: Beyond Play and Fantasy with Joi Ito and Justin Hall
• Will Wright Keynote Speech (You’d be crazy not to go!)

I love the topic of integration of games and reality. Mixing user interfaces and games, work with games; treating real-life like a game. It fascinates me, I can’t get enough. It definitely looks like SXSW will satiate that desire.

I’m sure I’ll talk about it more at some point, but there’s a fundamental core buried inside gaming. Work becomes enjoyable, interfaces and input become simple – I’m very interested in how those concepts can be extracted and applied to real-life applications and user interfaces.

Rough Itinerary

Note: If you’re reading this in a feed reader, then you’ll probably see no agenda below this line – please visit the blog post to view the full thing.

So yeah, if you’re going to be at SXSW, let me know – I’d love to talk with you!

Update: I just signed up for Conferenceer, you can look at my full schedule (and connect with me) on my profile there.