re: iain simons

Currently most of my waking hours are spent in the final stages of the GameCity festival preparations for this year and planning a number of follow-on events and projects.
Regular tech and game blogging is picking up pace over at CultureTech.

In other news, this November 21st I’m taking part in a London GeekNight, talking working environments – a lot of the material that was cut from Inside Game Design (and still, I think, a book in the waiting…)

Back from Develop, which was brilliant. Hugely refreshing to go to a conference that was free of the usual patchiness.

More about it later – but my overriding memory of it is over on CultureTech for your perusal.

Jonathan Coulton, nerd-bard of Brooklyn is coming over to GameCity this year. Brilliant.

Things are moving astonishingly quickly this year, and whilst this particular event has been some time in the making – the issues surrounding it are rapidly clearing. We’ve been frantically tweeting and facebooking this the last hour or so since JoCo announced the gig on his blog – but the good news is that this isn’t even the whole story.

This year the run of games events in the last few weeks has pretty much prevented us from announcing any of our treasures, but we will be able to soon. Then you’ll be sorry.

This wednesday sees the return of Never Mind the Polygons to the Develop conference in Brighton – where I’m going to be all week.

If you’re around on Wednesday evening, do come along and see me, Margaret, Jonathan, Mark Rein and Nate Wells arguing about everything.

Bobbie and Aleks from the Guardian are hosting the inaugural Guardian GameCamp event on May 3rd. Built around the BarCamp model of the audience making the content on the day with drop-in drop-out sessions, it looks like it’s going to be great fun. As they describe it themselves, “..The objective is simple: to talk informally with like-minded people and get excited about stuff involving games of all kinds.” Sounds like my idea of fun. Not sure yet how often this is happening, and perhaps that might be measured to some extent by the amount of people who register for the limited amount of tickets available from 21st April at theupcoming page. We shouldn’t forget of course, that it’s also wonderful to see more national newspapers adopting mash-word CamelCase in their event titles.

I’m going to be talking at the Gamehorizon Conference in June, in the illustrious company of some gaming folk of rather more importance than myself. Having not been to Gamehorizon before (this is the first year), but having been bought lunch by its organisers, I can testify that they’re almost impossible to actually see, such is their enthusiasm for their work. Carri and Nina have pulled together a great programme, with no need to add any kind of ‘for a first year’ caveat. I guess I’m a little concerned about my contribution, which is to the ‘media’ strand on the second day. As this is an industry-facing conference, I’m almost doubly paranoid about getting involved in another polarised group psychotherapy session where everyone moans about how *badly* games are treated by the mainstream media etc.. repeat to fade… My position possibly isn’t quite as pro-games industry apologist as is traditional for discussions such as this. I don’t know who else is going to be in the this strand yet, but it would be great for us to be able to make some actually progressive steps towards new strategies for engaging with the broader media. Just a *little* nuance would be lovely.Anyway – see you there?

Margaret’s post just reminded me that I should mention this too. I’m also a juror for the 2008 indiecade festival, which came over to visit us at GameCity last year and will be returning this autumn. Indiecade 2008 is currently accepting submissions for the 2008 festival, but you need to hurry up – as the opportunity closes on April 11th.What excites me most about the indiecade project (other than the work featured in it) are the people running it. It’s so refreshing to see something of this nature being run wholly independently, and with a progressively diverse advisory board. They’re a little like GameCity, but with – y’know, governance and structure :)

 The second sequel that is the next GameCity festival has started in churn into action. Things are already going splendidly, if a little frantically. Every year we attempt to get more organised and every year some new variable is thrown up to prevent us being *quite* as organised as we’d like to be. Anyway – some great attendees and events already lined up, we’re going to start talking about it to the public next week. In the meantime, the essential FaceBook groupand Twitter narrative can be subscribed to for the full GameCity 3 socially networked experience…