re: iain simons

Found via a Google Alerts for gamecity.org links…

“…He also discusses how to achieve games and job content much edible to non-gamer audience…”

“…illustrator and smouldering events coordinator of Nottingham’s GameCity Fete..”

“…an collect of primal to actual gritty artifacts and record…”

“..In the instruction of conversation nearly the celebration, which grew out of and evolved from initially author unrhetorical alcohol- and curry-fueled get-togethers, Iain speaks passionately roughly varied subjects such as the personation of scheme advocates as apologists of the occupation, the deficiency of a earthborn play to the games business..”

Not sure what this is or how it got here, but I’m very pleased with how the Babelfish is working today.

Upon clearing my N95 , I find an image of Coulton leading the GameCity zombie chorus. Moments later, I was counting Zombies with the Mayor and Sheriff.

The longest single conversation I have (which is still in progress) is about workflow. I always have it with the same person, James Newman, who is similarly obsessive about such matters – and finally, in a cruel ironic twist, it never gets resolved, consequently eating hours out of my potential and finite hours available to implement such a workflow. I dream of a day when one day everything will fall into place, a perfect union of system and software will take place and I’ll disappear into a supernova of productivity. Hmmm.

Until then, here’s the problem(s).

1. How do I capture, store and organise the research materials I find on the web. This is the primary source of my research, although I also need to store and organise audio / video interviews – of which I also do a lot.

2. How do I share and sync everything gathered in (1) across multiple machines is a transparent and TOTALLY stable way.

3. How do share and sync the library created in (1) across two machines and allow the potential for joint annotation.

4. How do I share the library created in (1) and allow the joint annotation enabled in (3) AND create an environment for shared authorship. 

5. All the above must allow for the possibility for offline working. 

With respect to point 1, it’s recently been announced that Devon Technologies are about to launch the public-beta of the next iteration of their popular knowledge management app. DevonThink. DT is one of the apps that both James and I have spent some time with, but to date have singularly failed to ‘get’*. Despite having some high-profile endorsements neither of us have managed to comfortably live with it for more than a week.

Having just flattened my two main working machines, I’m hoping DT might provide an early Christmas present. 

*It is possible, of course, that we do *get* it entirely – it just doesn’t do what we want.

“Ironically the official number could have been even higher but the organisers actually ran out of wristbands to register everyone.”

Google alerts just popped up a nice link about the zombie part of the show, which is as amusing as it is alarming to see the photo’s back. Last week we also got the first look at a rough-cut of a promo, also featuring crane-footage of the zombie mass. My main irk at the moment is that there’s been little footage to surface so far of JoCo leading the zombie chorus, which for me remains one of the highlights of both GameCity 3 and my thirties. (That said, there has been *some*…)

Next week: we nail down more decisions about a potential next event, make boxee work on AppleTV, do more work on logic, rationalise back-ups & coss-mac syncing and spend more time in the shed.

Having shipped GameCity 3 and learnt a huge amount about accessibility, informal learning and what the whole festival is really about, I’m of a mind to move quickly into new projects, not least of which is what we do with GameCity… Unusually, the future of the event has come into focus incredibly quickly this year. Having tried some radical restructuring of the show this year the lessons from doing so have been swift and clear. So much so that we’ve already started to put the foundations of the next stages in place, something we’ve never even been close to considering at this point previously. I’m going to return to discussing this shortly, just as I’m going to be returning to this blog again very shortly. It’s taken some time to work out the function of this and how to organise it into my worklife – but it does seem like it might finally have some degree of utility, if only for me.

In other work, the National Videogame Archive project is now well underway. We’ve been having a lot of fun with a campaign which was instigated to both promote the work and emphasise the emotional/human value of the technology (and culture) we’re looking to preserve. Save the Videogame is planning to grow rapidly over the next year, but not before it’s caught up with the first unexpected flush of popularity. For those of you yet to receive your badges, we apologise and promise to get them to you before Christmas.*

CultureTech is starting to gather pace again, following a slightly tricky period over the festival. Being close to the editorial team of a site like New Statesman is hugely illuminating for me, particularly to bear witness to some of its problems. I’ve been thinking a lot about sociality online of late and in particular solitude and how it can be created, preserved and treated not as an either/or in design terms, but as a state which can be moved in and out of. Erik Huggers’ Screen Digest quote has really stayed with me for the last few weeks, not just because of its indication of the beeb marching toward further social-networking – but because of the sheer poignancy of his words. C”mon Erik, cheer up. It’s nearly Christmas.

*probably.