It's not hard to figure out the appeal of E3. Or of a Computer Game Developers Conference. People go to the former for a chance to see and/or show off the latest and greatest in the worlds of electronic entertainment. People go to the latter for the chance to network with other game developers and to learn about the latest and greatest tools and technologies.

　　The SXSW Interactive Festival, however, isn't so easy to figure out.

　　Conference organizers advertise that their event is "geared towards new media developers and those that follow the business of new technology." Conference attendees seemed a collection of hopeful college students wanting to network and perhaps slip important somebodies their resume, eccentric artist types, hard-nosed business types, and jaded computer game and web site developers.

　　Still, what brought them all here?

　　Sure, I knew why I was there. I had come to moderate a panel - an Ultima Online case study - and to report on the conference for GameSpot. I had spent a couple years as the tech culture and computer gaming correspondent for the daily newspaper in Austin, Texas, and was always happy for a chance to return to what I still thought of as my "home town."

　　But I couldn't put my finger on the raison d'etre for this conference. Why were other people attending? Everybody had their own reasons, I am sure.

　　"People have told me a lot about Austin, and I always wanted to see it for myself," said Andrew Nelson, formerly with Cyberflix (makers of the newly hot Titanic game) and now heading up his own web-based entertainment company, Storybox. "It wasn't so much the conference as the town itself that brought me here."

　　"I'm looking for cities to expand my business to," said Kristin Knight of Creative Assets, a Seattle-based staffing firm for digital artists. "I wanted to scout Austin as a place to possibly expand to. But I don't think it would work. The multimedia community here is too small."

　　In past years, it has been pretty easy to pin a tag on what the SXSW Interactive Festival "was all about" - a few years ago, the big excitement was CD-ROM development, the year after found all the people burned by their CD-ROM development efforts jazzed about the potentials of the Web, in the year after that it was a sense of world-weary acceptance of the fact that it was proving as hard to make money on the Web as it had been on CD-ROM development or perhaps excitement about the potential of a CD-ROM-Web hybrid.

　　Maybe as this conference - and its big brother music conference - have matured, they've become less the opportunity to grab for the golden ring and more of a chance to conduct business as usual. If nothing else, the conference is a good excuse to visit Austin in the spring. And a good chance to score some free beer.

　　To be sure, the main activity in the SXSW trade show floor seemed to be walking from booth to booth to try to find out where the free beer would start flowing later that night.

　　The Internet has achieved increased focus at SXSW Interactive as the years have gone by, and despite a professed desire to focus on computer gaming this year, the Net seemed to be garnering the lion's share of the attention at the conference.

　　Even on the gaming panels.

　　One of the panels specifically focused on online gaming. Ken Demarest of Titanic Entertainment sat on that panel, talking about his experiences in the initial stages of designing Ultima Online and about the thinking that went into the creation of his company's online multiplayer game Netstorm.

　　Bob Huntly of Dwango also sat on that panel, talking about business models for online gaming. And Tim Nye of Sunshine Interactive talked about his company's "all-media property," Vanishing Point, "an online documentary that presents over 200 hours of streaming audio, more than 500 original works of art, and dozens of journals and letters."

　　Nye and his compatriots had developed Vanishing Point with an eye towards bringing it to radio, television, and print, as well as the Web. It wasn't what most people would consider an online game. At least not in the way Dwango or Titanic Entertainment would approach the concept.

　　Neither is Clicking Anastasia, the "online adventure" created by Andrew Nelson and his compatriots at Storybox. (Nelson talked on the "Games for Grown-Ups" panel.) A search for the hidden treasure of the Romanovs and incorporating historical photographs of the last Tsar and his family, Andrew describes this experience as "a search for a needle in the haystack," a sequence of numbers hidden in the photographs that reveals the location of the treasure. The experience unfolds via e-mail and visits to the Clicking Anastasia site; it's designed to be completed with three ten-minute visits to the site. That, says Nelson, takes advantage of the way people use the Web - for surfing, not extended visits. But that again, doesn't sound like the Ultima Online-Diablo-Command & Conquer model for online gaming.

　　What Steve Zehngut of Zeek Interactive is doing is more recognizable as a traditional game. (Zehngut spoke on the "Gaming Sites" panel.) His company, which he calls a multimedia design firm, has, among other things, designed small Shockwave, arcade- and puzzle-type games for a variety of clients. These games have a click-and-response action more familiar to players of games like Quake or even Tetris, but still, they're designed to be played in short bursts, more desktop diversion than immersive experience.

　　As far as traditional games go, the games that got the most attention at SXSW Interactive were Barbie Fashion Designer and Deer Hunter - those games that appealed to a nontraditional gaming audience, the success of which caught traditional game designers by surprise.

　　Barbie, the consensus seemed to be, opened retailers', publishers', and developers' eyes to the fact that there was a viable market in games for girls. The success of Barbie - and of properties like Lego Island and even the Star Wars titles - continues to impress upon developers the benefit that having a brand name on your game can bring - especially with the casual gamer. Not that that brand name necessarily means you've got a good game on your hands.

　　Deer Hunter, a title developed by a GT Interactive affiliate upon the suggestion of one of its buyers at Wal-Mart, was noted for its sales success, not its gameplay. But its success too can be attributed to its acceptance (and purchase) by the nontraditional gamer.

　　What this means for traditional game developers is unclear. Traditional game developers got into game development because they like playing games like Quake and Command & Conquer. They're not likely to be happy designing games they don't want to play.

　　"Are we going to make games for anyone other than the hard-core gamer?" author and New York Times columnist J.C. Herz asked on the "Games for Grown-Ups" panel. "Do we want to make games for 250 million people instead of 250,000?"

　　"But our market is a very successful one," replied Mike Wilson of g.o.d., sitting on the same panel.

　　The message seemed to be - if other people want to design games for the "mainstream," let them. The people designing games for the hard-core audience (those that buy one or two games a month rather than one or two a year) are designing the games they want to design.

　　Such finger pointing and rhetorical questions are the stuff of interactive conferences, it seems. At least they fill the time during the day before the beer starts freely flowing.