April 2008

he bespoke peripheral, and in particular looking at Wii Fit. It’s interesting to write for a magazine so ..er..’design’ centred, particularly because it start to question any assumptions you might have as to any shared understanding of what ‘design’ even means. Looking forward to writing more for DW, and in particular working hard to understand not so much where videogames as a whole might fit into their editorial mandate - but which facet of them. As for Wii Fit itself - it’s a really remarkable package. Catching a view of the UK television campaign a few nights ago, you see just how wonderfully considered Wii’s strategy is. 90 seconds about a balance board, with an almost incidental ‘by the way, you can purchase Wii Fit for this amazing peripheral’ tacked on the end. I’m already more excited about forthcoming balance board titles than anything else. I can’t really see me getting excited about GTA IV until there’s a Wii version where I can properly run around the city. The promise of the little beige box is really just starting to become visible.

Bobbie and Aleks from the Guardian are hosting the inaugural Guardian GameCamp event on May 3rd. Built around the BarCamp model of the audience making the content on the day with drop-in drop-out sessions, it looks like it’s going to be great fun. As they describe it themselves, “..The objective is simple: to talk informally with like-minded people and get excited about stuff involving games of all kinds.” Sounds like my idea of fun. Not sure yet how often this is happening, and perhaps that might be measured to some extent by the amount of people who register for the limited amount of tickets available from 21st April at theupcoming page. We shouldn’t forget of course, that it’s also wonderful to see more national newspapers adopting mash-word CamelCase in their event titles.

I’m going to be talking at the Gamehorizon Conference in June, in the illustrious company of some gaming folk of rather more importance than myself. Having not been to Gamehorizon before (this is the first year), but having been bought lunch by its organisers, I can testify that they’re almost impossible to actually see, such is their enthusiasm for their work. Carri and Nina have pulled together a great programme, with no need to add any kind of ‘for a first year’ caveat. I guess I’m a little concerned about my contribution, which is to the ‘media’ strand on the second day. As this is an industry-facing conference, I’m almost doubly paranoid about getting involved in another polarised group psychotherapy session where everyone moans about how *badly* games are treated by the mainstream media etc.. repeat to fade… My position possibly isn’t quite as pro-games industry apologist as is traditional for discussions such as this. I don’t know who else is going to be in the this strand yet, but it would be great for us to be able to make some actually progressive steps towards new strategies for engaging with the broader media. Just a *little* nuance would be lovely.Anyway - see you there?

Margaret’s post just reminded me that I should mention this too. I’m also a juror for the 2008 indiecade festival, which came over to visit us at GameCity last year and will be returning this autumn. Indiecade 2008 is currently accepting submissions for the 2008 festival, but you need to hurry up - as the opportunity closes on April 11th.What excites me most about the indiecade project (other than the work featured in it) are the people running it. It’s so refreshing to see something of this nature being run wholly independently, and with a progressively diverse advisory board. They’re a little like GameCity, but with - y’know, governance and structure

 The second sequel that is the next GameCity festival has started in churn into action. Things are already going splendidly, if a little frantically. Every year we attempt to get more organised and every year some new variable is thrown up to prevent us being *quite* as organised as we’d like to be. Anyway - some great attendees and events already lined up, we’re going to start talking about it to the public next week. In the meantime, the essential FaceBook groupand Twitter narrative can be subscribed to for the full GameCity 3 socially networked experience…