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.