re: iain simons

• DAYTUM

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…