re: iain simons

A month of talking…

Spent a great day last Saturday at mediacampnottingham 2 talking about the festival, and more specifically our current schemes to open it up and make both the production and the participation immeasurably easier. Martin Wright did a generous write-up of the session over at his blog. MCN2 was a really exciting day for me, which left me inspired, curious and frustrated in equal measure. It’s put on by some of the folks behind Creative Nottingham, where you can also catch Susi’s liveblog of the day.

8th April
Dr Jimmy and I are going to be at the Bridport Film Festival talking about Bond and videogames.

24th April
GameCity are collaborating on an event with the awesome ScreenLit festival at midday. I’m going to be onstage from midday with Sam Lake, writer of the Max Payne series and the forthcoming Alan Wake at Remedy, talking about his work as a writer in the games industry. This is the first UK public event for Sam and we’re hugely excited to be producing it. GET TICKETS HERE!

You should also note that ScreenLit has some amazing events this year, NG1 once again punching well above its weight.

29th April
GameCityNights Episode 3 will be kicking off at Antenna at around 7.00pm. It’ll be an awesome line-up, but we can’t tell you what yet.

Jimmy and I are talking at the Bridport* page to Screen festival next month delivering “..a cocktail of music, action and cultural
theory.”

Details can be found here.

*Long time followers of poorly attended fringe theatre may recall my last performance at the Bridport Arts Centre back in the late 90′s. This time, no-one will be dressed as a dog.

A strange meeting yesterday, in which some Consultants presented their findings from an initial research exercise examining the state of Digital Inclusion in Nottingham and how it can be improved.

To begin with, they presented a context statement laying the a broad definition of Digital Inclusion / exclusion and what it could mean to the national / regional / local economy were people more engaged. Hmmm. This was all robust, if unsurprising stuff, streams of various percentages flew by causing eyebrows to raise and small amounts of breath to be inhaled sharply. Things began to get more difficult, as they usually do, when the infographics were broken out. A breathtakingly confusing diagram hurt many of us bad. Extraordinary, malformed, mis-shapen rectangles (and hexagons, stars, triangles…) circled the screen with small title text placed within them. The consultant apologised that the big arrow, which he implied would instantly decode the crazy paving of his boxes, was missing from the centre of the screen for some – probably technical – reason. I’m working really hard to understand this but it’s in vain, I’m hopelessly excluded. Writing this now, I remember that I’ve been looking for an opportunity to use the word ‘befuddled’, which Margaret used in conversation a few months ago. I’m momentarily elated to be able to do that now. I was brutally befuddled.

Having presented their feedback and observations, some of which was very supportive, some of which critical, none of which was particularly insightful – there was time for questions. My mate D, called out the lead researcher on his criticism of the social media strategies used by the Council. This rapidly escalated into a questioning of the veracity of the research itself, which the presenter roundly failed to defend. Largely it seemed, the results were coming from the ‘toolkit’. The ‘toolkit’, I believe, is some software into which the interview results were fed. The ‘toolkit’, by an undisclosed metric, then spits out its findings over which the experts ‘overlay their experience’. It’s like NHS direct but without the promise of feeling better by the end of the process.

Whilst National policy clearly drives mass-awareness of this issue and one would hope will illuminate awareness of the opportunities on a mass level, Digital Inclusion is surely a local issue, contingent on local cultures, behaviours and community groups. What was great and encouraging about the meeting was meeting lot of groups together in a room and engaged in discussing this stuff. From a festival point of view, meeting the people involved who can really help give some meaning to technology in peoples lives was incredibly helpful.

Digital Inclusion clearly and obviously makes fiscal sense from a public spend perspective, but needs to make social / cultural sense for the citizen user – some tangible translation. E-Government might be successful in reducing transaction costs for people paying their council tax, parking fines or other punitive costs – but clearly needs to amount to something richer than simply streamlining a payment process. Running up to a general election this is surely a great opportunity to engage folks – and more specifically to not just measure their engagement, but to understand and codify it – and as a result rethink what Digital Inclusion actually means. It’s not just access and education we all need to become included, it’s meaning – and through that, motivation.

Notes.

There is a toolkit somewhere.

There’s a Central Government initiative called ‘Total Place’. Liverpool is becoming one.

Last week, Jimmy and I went to West Bromwich to attend a Digital Archiving conference organised by the lovely Screen WM people. Excellent event, with truly inspirational talks from Tony Ageh, the Home of Metal project and the National Fairground Archive. Perhaps most encouraging was the realisation that many of the activities we’re currently engaged in, both with the NVA and GameCity, are already forming some of the more progressive outputs of other archival projects. We’re currently failing to fully understand the potential significance and draw the right frame around much of what we do- number one in a relatively short list of things to urgently fix in 2010.

The venue for the day was the extraordinary ‘Public‘ arts space, situated at the edge of the West Brom shopping centre, which has not been without its share of well-documented problems(incidentally, Vaizey – depite his apparent hostility to the building, opened the whole day). It’s one of the strangest, emptiest, biggest, pinkest,most confusing buildings I’ve ever seen. As Jimmy remarked, it’s like being battered with a hammer made of air. Anyway, after walking round the venue we made our way to the summit where we came upon a fun animation installation/ tool which a nice bloke insisted on explaining to us. The Public is a strange, probably ill-advised building – but the stewards within it are very friendly.

Notes:

The local Express & Star was leading with a story about a dog that is a hero.

West Bromwich has no train station, but is easily accessible via tram.

Sorry about this. After making a solemn pledge to start trying to document the events which happen around the festival and general adventures, the rolling out of the new GC site caused a good deal of confusion with where I was putting those.
Currently, we’re in an insane crunch with the impending launch of the show for this year. A series of careless comments, delivered with sincerity – if not due diligence – has led to us making another world record attempt on Wednesday. This is all happening at the *same time* as the launch event itself, which is – if we’re being brutally honest – the thing that we’re supposed to be focussing on. No matter – it’s going to be a fascinating evening. I’m keen to learn how long it *really* takes to do these things. We’re so lucky in that we’re finding ourselves suddenly in a position where the new partners we have are pro-active, supportive and have a totally different sphere of influence to us – one which we really need to access.

If you’re around – come along to Play the City, the GameCity Squared launch event. 4pm, Old Market Square, Nottingham – 1st July.

In other news – Jimmy and I are talking about Saving Videogames @ Develop next month, of which more soon…

The last months have been a bit of a relentless string of talks, meetings, developments and – thankfully – progress with the show for this year and the NVA. A few weeks ago Matt pushed the button (or threw the lever, as he would have it) on the first release of the new site and suddenly everything about the festival gathers pace.
There’s something especially liberating about committing to dates, getting the first meaningful piece of news out there always tends to accelerate progress.
We’re trying something a little different with the GC site this year, in that we’re making a conspicuous attempt to document the process and progress of the project. Partially this is a matter of record, something we’ve always been less than brilliant at maintaining – but more it’s about trying to tangibly make good on some of the promise of the whole exercise. The homespun openness which has characterised previous events we’re trying to make real in involving people in more practical ways. Hence, most of the comment about GameCity is likely to be moved to that site – unless it’s so horrendously off-message as to be inappropriate.

In other news – delivered a workshop on festival production to 20-odd young people last week where a couple of memorable things happened.

#1 : During showing some retrospective piccies of previous events, for the first-time *ever* someone shouting out in recognition at seeing an image of Abe from Oddworld.

#2 : During an exercise where they were tasked with rapidly identifying the hallmarks of a brilliant festival, one of them wrote down – “unbelievable”. This is a sound aim and something I’ve now added to the top of our aspirations for this year.

The NVA continues to motor on at an alarmingly splendid pace, but more of that later…

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.

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…

Every year, I forget to make any note at all of the GameCity development process, then we get caught up in the mania of the show and all of the amazing things that happen simply fly by. I can’t remember anything anymore on account of my brain being sub-optimal, so this year I’m resolved to start making some notes on here. It’s wholly likely that when the re-tooled online affairs of the festival and associated projects get sorted out (a process which is just beginning), and something not dissimilar to this will get moved onto there, but in lieu of that happening I wanted to make a start. 

We’re in the middle of a major rethink of a lot of the GameCity activities from last year, which was something of a watershed for us. It’s always been a tricky project, not so much walking a line between niche and mainstream – but rather straddling an insanely wide set of possible audiences. GC3 was largely constructed to tease some of the more obvious audiences apart, and was wholly successful in doing so. That wasn’t however, necessarily desirable – turns out everyone wants to play together. 

This year, it’s going to be a lot more playful – which seems appropriate.

It’s becoming ever more apparent that GameCity works best when it frees itself form its own expectations and concentrates on being a happening, in the participatory art sense of the word. Certainly a lot of the events that have worked best have hopefully had something of the interventionalist about them. It really feels like the whole event can start to shape up after some of the strategic misfires of last year.

Speaking of happenings – don’t forget to come along to Save the Videogame if you’re in Manchester on Thursday night. We’re quite literally working quite hard on it.

More dates to be announced veeeeery soon.

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.