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.