We’ve been toying with the idea for a while of creating a process / research blog for the GameCity project for a while now, and finally we’re having a crack at it.

The lovely team at GCHQ are ticking the main sites over very nicely now, so there’s actually very little writing input I have into the day-to-day operation. Honestly, the parts that I’m most interested in increasingly are the festival and activities themselves. In particular, how and why they’re done, how the videogame industry does / doesn’t play well with other parts of culture and public life – some of the internal motivators for the whole project and how it develops. We talk a lot about what we’re doing, and in particular what we’re about to do – but not a lot about the broader context of it.

So, the CityHall blog is an attempt to capture something of the process of developing the GameCity project to allow us to better evaluate it, understand the landscape in which it operates and to help me remember the things that actually happen before they disappear into the haze of approaching middle-age. It’d be really lovely if it also becomes a place for conversation, an extension of the user-group events we used to run, so we can really get to grips with what people might want this thing to become.

Anyway, here it is. Places, software, culture, videogames, culture, ideas, successes, failures and GameCity – all playing out at (Game)CityHall.

Hope you enjoy it.