Sorry about this. After making a solemn pledge to start trying to document the events which happen around the festival and general adventures, the rolling out of the new GC site caused a good deal of confusion with where I was putting those.
Currently, we’re in an insane crunch with the impending launch of the show for this year. A series of careless comments, delivered with sincerity - if not due diligence - has led to us making another world record attempt on Wednesday. This is all happening at the *same time* as the launch event itself, which is - if we’re being brutally honest - the thing that we’re supposed to be focussing on. No matter - it’s going to be a fascinating evening. I’m keen to learn how long it *really* takes to do these things. We’re so lucky in that we’re finding ourselves suddenly in a position where the new partners we have are pro-active, supportive and have a totally different sphere of influence to us - one which we really need to access.
If you’re around - come along to Play the City, the GameCity Squared launch event. 4pm, Old Market Square, Nottingham - 1st July.
In other news - Jimmy and I are talking about Saving Videogames @ Develop next month, of which more soon…
The last months have been a bit of a relentless string of talks, meetings, developments and - thankfully - progress with the show for this year and the NVA. A few weeks ago Matt pushed the button (or threw the lever, as he would have it) on the first release of the new site and suddenly everything about the festival gathers pace.
There’s something especially liberating about committing to dates, getting the first meaningful piece of news out there always tends to accelerate progress.
We’re trying something a little different with the GC site this year, in that we’re making a conspicuous attempt to document the process and progress of the project. Partially this is a matter of record, something we’ve always been less than brilliant at maintaining - but more it’s about trying to tangibly make good on some of the promise of the whole exercise. The homespun openness which has characterised previous events we’re trying to make real in involving people in more practical ways. Hence, most of the comment about GameCity is likely to be moved to that site - unless it’s so horrendously off-message as to be inappropriate.
In other news - delivered a workshop on festival production to 20-odd young people last week where a couple of memorable things happened.
#1 : During showing some retrospective piccies of previous events, for the first-time *ever* someone shouting out in recognition at seeing an image of Abe from Oddworld.
#2 : During an exercise where they were tasked with rapidly identifying the hallmarks of a brilliant festival, one of them wrote down - “unbelievable”. This is a sound aim and something I’ve now added to the top of our aspirations for this year.
The NVA continues to motor on at an alarmingly splendid pace, but more of that later…
Very much enjoyed my trip down to London-town last week, meeting with BAFTA and the lovely Mr Dave - before gatecrashing a London IGDA chapter and meeting splendid Siobhan and Andy - before finally being guided across town via the upstairs rooms of several bars en-route to Thoughtworks HQ for their Geeknight, at which I was one of the speakers.
So, this was a change in format from the previous gigs - which I hadn’t wholly prepared for - happily however, it was a really fun one. The Geeknight crew are a friendly, but rigorous audience and little gets past them without a demand for clarification or a general challenging of the idea being presented. As was pointed out on a twitter response, what was perhaps most fun was having an evening where cultural studies and computer science collided.
In terms of presentation, we really need to thin down the core STV gig in terms of ideas and modularise the whole thing more to respond to the crowd. Whereas the National Archive audience were very engaged by the high-level view of the project, including the background narrative - Geeknight London was provoked very early on in the talk into an argument about our supersession assumptions. The same thing happened later on with Cosplay and to some extent with emulation - we really need a kind of flashcard version of the whole show. There’s just too many ideas to cover in a talk without it seeming random and slight, for me anyway.
In other news, this weekend I’m moving into my first Blackberry. Splendid, maybe.
Last week, Dr Jimmy, Tom from the NMM and myself travelled down to Kew, having been invited to deliver a talk there about our work on the National Videogame Archive, which is one of the core projects we’re working on at present. The whole thing was organised by the brilliant people at the National Archives, which is an awe inspiring operation the scope of which I truly didn’t appreciate. Seriously, folks - you should go there. I always had a sense that there must be a National Archive, but actually visiting it is both surprising - in the extent of its scale and accessibility, humbling in how it brings our efforts into perspective and utterly terrifying when considering that our efforts are part of that ecosystem. It’s one thing to talk about videogames as part of our cultural heritage (not that we do a lot of that at all, actually) but another entirely to begin to visualise them as part of a continuum of history.
The talk was an adaptation of the Save the Videogame presentation we’d done in Manchester, mostly with the jokes removed and delivered wearing suits. As with all talks about games, the access points are seldom shared across the whole audience. One corner of the room delivered moans of warm nostalgia when Elite was mentioned, but remained coldly silent about Horace goes Skiing - happily that kind of segmentation serves to illustrate one of our key points.
Anyway, more on the ongoing campaign very soon - coupled with our steady realisation of the magnitude of the task. For now, a gentle image of myself and Dr J outside the archive.
We’re about to make a few leaps with one of the projects I work on, and I’m nervous and excited about the outcome. As part of the thinking about the new site offer and having spent Christmas reading a really interesting book, we’re gearing up to see what might happen if we start making the show happen in a different way.
Whilst in the past we’ve tinkered with the structure and context which frames the content a lot (to various levels of success), the means by which we’ve found and made content has remained largely the same. This is possibly the first time we’ve put the framework in place for us to spend the development time developing content and experience - rather than responding to content as opportunities arise. Having really enjoyed the support that the City has begun to offer over the last few months, and feeling buoyed up by the initiatives that they’re starting to put in place, it’s a natural step to start to open out the way we operate the show. We’ve enjoyed some very generous input from a lot of folks much cleverer than I over the last months and I can’t wait to start implementing.
I’m going to talk about some of these ideas at the Connected Nottingham bash on the 26th, to which you’re invited - and then following that at our own GameCity 3.1 bash - details and location t.b.a. very soon. ‘twould be splendid if you can come along…
Someone asked for the contact address of a friend yesterday as they wanted to talk to him about his new company. After a few minutes searching I realised that I knew where his office was, and his phone number - but the only other ways I’d talked to him were in person, on Twitter and inside Facebook.
Happily, his fb chat popped up on Adium which I had on in the background, so I requisitioned his email address and forwarded it to the gentlemen in question - who had no interest in Twitter, although he might well have a Facebook profile. It simply didn’t occur to me to ask.
After I’d done that, I had some lunch.
I might email the bloke and ask how they got on. I have all his contact details on the card he gave me when we first met at an event I was talking at. I hope they manage to talk to each other.
I’m always surprised when anyone ever asks me for advice or directions.
Anyway - last week a nice bloke very politely asked me for some thoughts about a book they were working on, which sounded like a brilliant project and clearly something which should be published - the problem of course, is that the subject matter is videogames. There’s a popularly held idea that videogames are in some way ‘mainstream’. This is a popularly held myth, mostly perpetuated by my colleagues in the videogame selling industry. In wider consumer culture however, whilst the collective term of ‘videogames’ is recognised as just that - a collective term - any deeper analysis or critical interest is severely limited. I don’t mean that to sound as sniffy as that - this isn’t just about the absence of some kind of developed literacy as an academic college-boy cultural studies problem, but the barriers to participation at a domestic level that such an absence creates.
Thinking back through my conversations with various commissioning editors over the last few years, I wince remembering some of the pitches I’ve made as the editor perfectly reasonably asks who would buy such a book? The fact remains that whilst the consumption of videogames is on the rise, the public understanding around them - and appetite for content about them is still lagging behind. It’s growing - and that’s brilliant, but just because scenes featuring people playing Wii have started appearing in TV shows that doesn’t mean people want to read about them, or think about them when they’re not playing. I’m still convinced that a lot of this is being driven by the absence of any discernible humanity being shown by the games industry. Until it begins exposing its artists to the world it’s going to remain in a state of cultural participation which is alarmingly retarded considering its age.
At the Save the Videogame show last week (more about this later) this topic came up again - not just are ‘they’ ‘mainstream’, but more importantly, how we will tell? It was a short discussion and the only hallmark we could agree on was that you would know where to go in the book store to find titles about games. Selfishly, this would also really help next time I’m pitching a book.
Every year, I forget to make any note at all of the GameCity development process, then we get caught up in the mania of the show and all of the amazing things that happen simply fly by. I can’t remember anything anymore on account of my brain being sub-optimal, so this year I’m resolved to start making some notes on here. It’s wholly likely that when the re-tooled online affairs of the festival and associated projects get sorted out (a process which is just beginning), and something not dissimilar to this will get moved onto there, but in lieu of that happening I wanted to make a start.
We’re in the middle of a major rethink of a lot of the GameCity activities from last year, which was something of a watershed for us. It’s always been a tricky project, not so much walking a line between niche and mainstream - but rather straddling an insanely wide set of possible audiences. GC3 was largely constructed to tease some of the more obvious audiences apart, and was wholly successful in doing so. That wasn’t however, necessarily desirable - turns out everyone wants to play together.
This year, it’s going to be a lot more playful - which seems appropriate.
It’s becoming ever more apparent that GameCity works best when it frees itself form its own expectations and concentrates on being a happening, in the participatory art sense of the word. Certainly a lot of the events that have worked best have hopefully had something of the interventionalist about them. It really feels like the whole event can start to shape up after some of the strategic misfires of last year.
Speaking of happenings - don’t forget to come along to Save the Videogame if you’re in Manchester on Thursday night. We’re quite literally working quite hard on it.
More dates to be announced veeeeery soon.
