Following the launch of the Nottingham City Economic growth plan (?!) I dashed down to a freezing Battersea Arts Centre to talk with Dr Jimmy at the brilliant David Hayward’s ‘Bit of Alright‘ event. A bit of a tricky gig from a talking-on-a-stage point of view, but a really nice atmosphere throughout the building (did I mention it was cold?).

All of the details are here – hope you can make it!

Also this week :

“We hadn’t considered that the devs themselves might sometimes be a barrier.”

Stuff on mediation over at (Game)CityHall

‘The Hidden Art of Shadowboxing’

Finally, a more public context to celebrate the opening sequence of ‘Fate of Atlantis’, it feels like the year has closed very nicely, indeed.. ;)

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.

The Prize project seems like the obvious next step for us, following the festival, the nva, GameCityNights – we’re hoping this feels like an invitation to as many people as possible to get involved in thinking about videogames and their place in the World.

The response has been largely positive, which is reassuring.

Some nice initial discussions broke out over at Nintendo Life

Similarly at Destructoid, where a mis-attribution of Frances’ quote to me has led to some jury-criteria-discussion

We even managed to make HuffPo :)

David Thompson, though – was less pleased.  He’s got me bang-to-rights on the phraseology I’ve been using to talk about the prize. It’s true, our hope is that the Prize will occupy the same kind of cultural space as the Turner / Booker / Mercury – but in making those aspirational analogies I honestly hadn’t thought through what those prizes also are – celebrations of British talent.

So, on that basis, he’s 100% right.

But that’s not the heart of what he’s really pissed off about. It’s another missed opportunity for the British industry to celebrate itself. As he says, UKIE and TIGA spend all their time bigging the UK up, but then BAFTA or GameCity don’t seize the platform to actually deliver on that in event terms.

Whoaaaa there…

That was the part that really hit me. You see UKIE, TIGA and BAFTA are all either industry trade bodies, or funded by the industry. GameCity is an independent project with no particular constitutional responsibility at all to the UK (or any other) video game sector. We do what we do for lots of reasons to do with Univerisity research, developing the cultural profile of the city, economic development – but mostly because we think it’s interesting and can add some entertainment, education and value to folks’ lives.

It’s exciting / flattering and alarming to me that we’d even be mentioned in the same breath as those institutions – but my perception of what we do and our responsibilities (and thus values) are very different.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting for a moment that David is wrong – and I’m completely behind his view that the trade bodies should do more to participate in broader culture and celebrate the UK industry more. It just had never occurred to me that we were part of that establishment and shared in the responsibility to do so.

Maybe he’s right?

Footnote/

(Of course, making that leap that we perhaps should just focus on UK videogames in the Prize throws up a whole load of other questions – not least what a UK video game actually is, but that’s for another discussion…)

VisionSoundMusic is a new festival which was originally pitched to me as a ‘festival of sync’ed music’ some months ago by Andrew, and it’s a brilliant concept. ‘Sync’ed music’ didn’t make it into the final marketing copy (quite rightly) so now it’s the UK’s ‘first festival of music for visuals’.

Andrew has assembled an amazing programme for the first year, for which I’ve been contributing to the videogame part. Now, ‘amazing’ is an adjective that gets thrown around a lot in these parts (especially in the forthcoming frenzy of press releases we’re drafting) – but in this case it’s really deserving.

Daniel Pemberton, Nitin Sawnhey, OK GO!, Scorsese and Carpenter interviews, Richard O’Brien (?!), Richard Jacques… It’s a genuinely brilliant line-up – (and don’t forget there’s a a brilliant SoundCloud ‘audio-ad- remix’ on the site too..) and I really hope you can make it.

Early-bird tickets are now available for the whole event and we’ve just published details of how to get them over at GCHQ.

Hope we see you there!