We announced our new project this week, which we’ve been working on for months. The GameCity Prize is something we’ve been considering for about three years now, but the time didn’t seem quite right. The festival wasn’t really established enough and we probably hadn’t done enough work in translating our motivations and values to the industry.

The Prize project seems like the obvious next step for us, following the festival, the nva, GameCityNights – we’re hoping this feels like an invitation to as many people as possible to get involved in thinking about videogames and their place in the World.

The response has been largely positive, which is reassuring.

Some nice initial discussions broke out over at Nintendo Life

Similarly at Destructoid, where a mis-attribution of Frances’ quote to me has led to some jury-criteria-discussion

We even managed to make HuffPo :)

David Thompson, though – was less pleased.  He’s got me bang-to-rights on the phraseology I’ve been using to talk about the prize. It’s true, our hope is that the Prize will occupy the same kind of cultural space as the Turner / Booker / Mercury – but in making those aspirational analogies I honestly hadn’t thought through what those prizes also are – celebrations of British talent.

So, on that basis, he’s 100% right.

But that’s not the heart of what he’s really pissed off about. It’s another missed opportunity for the British industry to celebrate itself. As he says, UKIE and TIGA spend all their time bigging the UK up, but then BAFTA or GameCity don’t seize the platform to actually deliver on that in event terms.

Whoaaaa there…

That was the part that really hit me. You see UKIE, TIGA and BAFTA are all either industry trade bodies, or funded by the industry. GameCity is an independent project with no particular constitutional responsibility at all to the UK (or any other) video game sector. We do what we do for lots of reasons to do with Univerisity research, developing the cultural profile of the city, economic development – but mostly because we think it’s interesting and can add some entertainment, education and value to folks’ lives.

It’s exciting / flattering and alarming to me that we’d even be mentioned in the same breath as those institutions – but my perception of what we do and our responsibilities (and thus values) are very different.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting for a moment that David is wrong – and I’m completely behind his view that the trade bodies should do more to participate in broader culture and celebrate the UK industry more. It just had never occurred to me that we were part of that establishment and shared in the responsibility to do so.

Maybe he’s right?

Footnote/

(Of course, making that leap that we perhaps should just focus on UK videogames in the Prize throws up a whole load of other questions – not least what a UK video game actually is, but that’s for another discussion…)