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.

Getting very excited about being able to get on with the first monthly event out of GCHQ, and particularly excited that the brilliant Hello Games are coming up to launch the season with us. I think this series of shows is going to act as a really useful prototyping ground for some of the things that we want to try out at the festival later this year, and also at other events throughout the year. We’ve been threatening to roll these out for years now, every autumn they’re written into the plan and invariably by new year we’re already too suffocated in festival detail to actually deliver them. It’s nice that as well as being able to get them up and running, they kind of also act as a marker that we’re getting a little more formalised (and possibly even better?) at rolling the work out. It’s a big transitional year ahead, which is already moving ahead quicker than we’d planned, so having a monthly public pulse to the development will really help to keep the festival moving. We’re really going to need it this year.

We’ve been having lots of meeting about the show. I mean, lots. I’m not really a big meeting lover so usually this would be particularly difficult. This last few weeks though, have been fantastic as a whole lot of new names have entered my address book. This week alone there’s been stadiums, olympics, design, editors and much fun. One of the recurrent questions in the conversations about the show however, and often posed by people on a first meeting, has been, “what are you going to do for the anniversary?”

Honestly, it hadn’t even occurred to me.

The project is going to be five years old this year. Just thinking of the stress, new friends, risks, amazing talks, stupid mistakes and general adventure makes me come over a little nostalgic and slightly sick. I think what’s surprising me most is that it doesn’t feel five years old at all – not just in a “we’re so young and fresh” kind of way – but in a “we still don’t really understand *exactly* what it is” kind of way. We’re getting a lot closer, but there are still a lot of elements of the show that remain wilfully, stubbornly obscure and long may they remain so. Which isn’t to say we’re not trying to formulate parts of it…
I sat down with Allen this morning for breakfast to start to try and model what a more robust, transferable foundation for the show might be. Not terms of the spirit & feelings it might inspire, I think we more or less have that down, but in terms of how we make the right structure to allow others to play too. Every year the event has grown more and more complex, and whilst it hasn’t felt especially bigger in scale (from my perspective, anyway) the challenges have kept shifting with every new invention.
So, over coffee we started sketching out how we could best create easier ways for third parties to use the show if they wanted to – be they audience, developers, students, parents, whoever… What would an a.p.i. for a festival look like?

Notes.

T-shirts are interesting.

Don’t ever, ever, ever write work emails late at night.

Lee has pretty much captured the key tapes from GC4 now, and there now resides hours – possibly even days – of footage from the show on the studio drobo. One of the plans we’ve been chipping away at for months now is the gradual release of all of the archive material, and it seems like we’re finally about to make some real progress with it. More about this at gchq in the next few days, but it does seem like we’re suddenly able to move. We’ve got to find better, clearer, easier ways of thinking and talking about the show to others – and hopefully engaging them in it.

Meanwhile, things are progressing at an inspirationally swift pace with my favourite project. We’re assembling an amazing team for this, and to be honest I’m staggered that they’re being as generous as they are. Last Monday we met and looked through the new design work that Keita had dropboxed – with a view to feedback on feasibilities for potential build. Tomorrow morning, we’re meeting again to explore when such a potential build might be – sooner, rather than later it seems…
After the meeting, as usual, I wrote up progress and sent it over to Namco (with a gTranslated set of minutes to Keita, who can seems to be amused by translation…) who fed back again with wholly positive and supportive comments. I need to make more detailed notes about this, as it’s the minutiae of the thing that I forget – but the optimism being shown by Namco Bandai in this is just amazing.

Anyway. Christmas.

Notes:

You know more about building playgrounds than you think you do.

Plan overdubs at least a little before recording.

Ask nicely.

Things are suddenly, rapidly coming into focus. Following the show, we spend a lot of time gathering feedback, anecdote, praise, complaint – and then try and order it into something we can learn from. More often than not, the complaints tend to be the same ones that we would levy against ourselves. This year in particular, some of the operational challenges were a bit *too* challenging – but these are of course the easiest things to fix too. These complaints are really helpful elements of audit, but I guess the things I’m find most challenging and exciting are the broader kinds of feedback

One of the biggest problems we have with the interrogation any feedback data associated with something like a festival, is the absence of data about the user themselves. GameCity this year was a number of different events, and criticism about Wednesday may be entirely irrelevant to Saturday etc.. Depending on where you stood, and who you were – this was either one of its greatest charms, or its biggest problem.

Just sitting down to start work on the planning for what might become GCV, ploughing through spreadsheets, recollections, anecdotes, reviews and trying to make some sense of it all…

Notes:

Feedback needs *much* more information on context & provider at the point of capture

Opinions mature, develop, change. Need to differentiate methodologies. Snapshots and conversations require different efforts and analysis.

With the show done and most of the mess cleared up, I’m just about back to staying up late and tinkering with this site. GameCity Squared is all done, and the work of thinking about GameCity Next is already well underway. I’m going to try and get some thoughts down about it here before I forget them, as the delineation between this place and the project site are now a lot clearer.

Lots to think about, lots to do. It’s only December tomorrow, and it feels like New Year already.

Yesterday, I learnt the sad and shocking news that Rob Holdstock had passed away – almost a month to the day after I met him for the first time at the show. In the series of conversations I had with him leading up to the Elite 25 event, in which he was reading from his novella ‘The Dark Wheel’ he was a disarmingly open, generous and lovely bloke. Rob was one of the first to get involved in the whole project, and waded in enthusiastically to celebrating this project with us. He was concerned to do the best job he could and sweetly chastised us for the excess of getting him a first class train ticket to Nottingham from London. It’s refreshing, humbling and invigorating to come across people like him, and disorientating, unfair and utterly sad when they’re taken away. Rest in peace, Robert Holdstock.

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…

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.