It’s a little disorientating, but nonetheless exhilarating to be hitting the ground like this so early in the year. If you’re not familiar with what the ‘nights shows are, I’ve just written a small intro up at CityHall.

Hope to see you there…!

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.

Mostly this year, people have been amazingly kind and the response to the prize has been nothing short of astonishing. We’re a very lucky festival…

Six.

Media Responses:

IGN : Zelda Fanfest

Keza Macdonald with some terrifying footage

GamaSutra : Videogames step deeper into the Cultural Conciousness

“By straddling the blockbuster and indie divide, shifting focus away from mere product onto the process and wider meaning of games, GameCity shines a light on an aspect of video games often missed by so many other specialist game shows. To see the festival act as a catalyst in propelling the gaming medium forward in cultural terms is both fitting and testament to the firm, clear vision of the organizers that has weathered the storm of changing fashions around it.”

Guardian : Six Highlights of GameCity

“Surprising, transfixing, inclusive, joyful… I always run out of superlatives on the subject of GameCity, the Nottingham-based games festival that closed on Saturday.”

Kotaku : Fans build their own Zeldazine

SegaAddicts @ GameCIty 6

“When I arrived in the frankly lovely town of Nottingham, it was hard to get a grip on the festival as a whole. I had looked at the programme list and was honestly shocked by the amount of interesting stuff you could go see for free.”

Made  2 Game : More to GameCity than the GameCity Prize

“If the Prize comes to define GameCity it could lose that identity – and become defined by it, as, say, Sundance has started to be defined by what wins its awards.”

Eurogamer TV : What is GameCity?

Addict of Fiction

“Gamecity has been around for 6 years now, and yet they still seem to miss either accidentally or purposely what the majority of gamers want,”

Here’s Jimmy and I on an ‘early’ morning podcast with the brilliant Keza and Stu from IGN.

22:44 minutes of barely keeping it together can be heard here

It’s scary being cited alongside luminaries such as Chen, Cuthbert and Braben – although I was really surprised by Jenova’s opening answers.

You can read more details at Eurogamer, The Independent and The Guardian.

Things are feeling a lot more solid already this year. I think we might be getting close to what we actually want it to be this time.

Here’s a lovely pic of Eric Chahi, Rich Lemarchand and Robin Hunicke proving that 4-way Skype conversations *do* work sometimes…

Back next Thursday then for another instalment of GameCityNights, which this month features the amazing Chris O’Shea who does this…

Little Magic Stories from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo.

And this…

Air Guitar prototype with Kinect from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo.

..as well as lots of other brilliant stuff.

Dr Sketchy’s are also going to be there – it’s shaping up to be a good one.

See you there?

Alex and Mark came up and did MM’s first ever public appearance at our first ever festival…

Not only that, but there’s an interview with former FRD / Crytek scribe and festival best-friend Rob Yescombe…

I think Jonathan is brilliant, having first met him when I approached him to talk about the first LEGO Star Wars project at NTI* back in 2005. At the time LSW was still a gamble, the LEGO format being something that people had only really seen through the beautiful animation previews and not yet the game itself. Seven years on and at least two buy-outs later, Giant Entertainment as it was then is now part of a global megacorp and churning out LEGO franchise titles with a surprising regularity. More surprising than that for me, is that TT are managing to buck an expected trend of diminishing quality. They’re not just putting out projects to a template, but tangibly evolving it with each iteration (mostly, anyway….).

Jonathan is one of the festival’s best friends and a brilliant speaker.

You should come along if you can make it.

Details and Tickets are here!

On Wednesday 27th April, Jimmy and I are part-reprising the National Archive talk at the Institute of Engineering and Technology lecture series.

There’s refreshments (?!) from 6.30 and the show starts at 7. You’d be most welcome and can book free seats here.

As if that weren’t enough, next Thursday 28th Season 2 Episode 4 of GameCityNights crashes into Antenna, welcoming Stewart Gilray of Just Add Water and Lorne Lanning live from his Berkeley retreat. It’s all about Oddworld and it’s going to be lovely to hear from big Lorne again.

Find out more and get tickets at nights.gamecity.org – show starts around 6…