January 11th, 2009 § 0
Sat writing up some answers for an interview about archiving, and the issue of documenting process came up. It occurred to me that I couldn’t think of a documentary about videogames that came close to the candor of ‘Hearts of Darkness‘* (or that Metallica film I don’t know the name of…)
Jesus, this industry needs to start showing some humanity…
*The possible exception to this is the 80′s BBC 2 Documentary in the Commercial Breaks season, which – incase you haven’t seen it…
January 3rd, 2009 § 0
Been thinking lots about the Snowman (again) this year… Anyone know where one can find the original transmission with the Briggs introduction?
After the initial showing on Channel 4, and in its initial showings on U.S. television, an alternative introduction was sometimes used. Instead of Raymond Briggs describing how much it had snowed the winter he made The Snowman, while walking through the field that morphed into the animation of the same landscape,David Bowie was shown reciting the same speech after walking into the attic of ‘his’ childhood home and discovering a scarf in a drawer..(via wikipedia)
January 3rd, 2009 § 0
[fragment]
Before I do what I do now, I used to work as a musician – more specifically, as a Musical Director*. Thus, each Christmas season would be spent in the dark – a dull haze of alcohol, laughing, boredom, sleep, M&S curries and the company of musicians and turns. For the first four years, I mostly loved it. It wasn’t a place to develop ones love of music, indeed music was treated very badly there, but the sociality of pantomime – the liveness – was something I loved deeply then and miss deeply now.
Anyhoo… Today, some friends kindly took us to see this years panto at our local rep, and it was a curious experience which got me thinking about experience and specifically audience participation in the work I do now and the stuff that I often write about. One of the things I’ve always aspired to do with GameCity is to develop it into an intense, all-enveloping ride for your brain for a few days. Sign away 72 hours to be within our control and be subjected to the most amazing, stimulating ride possible within UK law. Emerge the other side humming with enthusiasm, new ideas and totally invigorated – feel you had experienced something that had left you, just a little bit, changed… We’re some way from doing that as yet, but I’d like to think that there have been a few moments in each year that have come at least hinted at the potential.
So… In a critical culture which is often dominated by the language of film, I was wondering why we don’t make more reference to theatre and other performance art when we talk about games? More specifically, I was wondering how much theatrical conceits are considered in the production of them? Panto is only the most obvious candidate with its heavily telegraphed mechanics : Call and response. Water pistols. Audience transgression onto the stage. Performers transgressing into the audience. Everyone can agree that the proscenium arch is there, which makes it so exhilarating when it’s ignored. Hmmmmm… I’m excited about developing this liveness for the ’09 shows.
*I’m not making this point out of any kind of pride, more to highlight the dull isolation of the role. The MD is a very different gig to being in the band, which is IMHO far more fun…
December 13th, 2008 § 0
Found via a Google Alerts for gamecity.org links…
“…He also discusses how to achieve games and job content much edible to non-gamer audience…”
“…illustrator and smouldering events coordinator of Nottingham’s GameCity Fete..”
“…an collect of primal to actual gritty artifacts and record…”
“..In the instruction of conversation nearly the celebration, which grew out of and evolved from initially author unrhetorical alcohol- and curry-fueled get-togethers, Iain speaks passionately roughly varied subjects such as the personation of scheme advocates as apologists of the occupation, the deficiency of a earthborn play to the games business..”
Not sure what this is or how it got here, but I’m very pleased with how the Babelfish is working today.
December 7th, 2008 § 0
“Ironically the official number could have been even higher but the organisers actually ran out of wristbands to register everyone.”
Google alerts just popped up a nice link about the zombie part of the show, which is as amusing as it is alarming to see the photo’s back. Last week we also got the first look at a rough-cut of a promo, also featuring crane-footage of the zombie mass. My main irk at the moment is that there’s been little footage to surface so far of JoCo leading the zombie chorus, which for me remains one of the highlights of both GameCity 3 and my thirties. (That said, there has been *some*…)
Next week: we nail down more decisions about a potential next event, make boxee work on AppleTV, do more work on logic, rationalise back-ups & coss-mac syncing and spend more time in the shed.
December 2nd, 2008 § 0
Having shipped GameCity 3 and learnt a huge amount about accessibility, informal learning and what the whole festival is really about, I’m of a mind to move quickly into new projects, not least of which is what we do with GameCity… Unusually, the future of the event has come into focus incredibly quickly this year. Having tried some radical restructuring of the show this year the lessons from doing so have been swift and clear. So much so that we’ve already started to put the foundations of the next stages in place, something we’ve never even been close to considering at this point previously. I’m going to return to discussing this shortly, just as I’m going to be returning to this blog again very shortly. It’s taken some time to work out the function of this and how to organise it into my worklife – but it does seem like it might finally have some degree of utility, if only for me.
In other work, the National Videogame Archive project is now well underway. We’ve been having a lot of fun with a campaign which was instigated to both promote the work and emphasise the emotional/human value of the technology (and culture) we’re looking to preserve. Save the Videogame is planning to grow rapidly over the next year, but not before it’s caught up with the first unexpected flush of popularity. For those of you yet to receive your badges, we apologise and promise to get them to you before Christmas.*
CultureTech is starting to gather pace again, following a slightly tricky period over the festival. Being close to the editorial team of a site like New Statesman is hugely illuminating for me, particularly to bear witness to some of its problems. I’ve been thinking a lot about sociality online of late and in particular solitude and how it can be created, preserved and treated not as an either/or in design terms, but as a state which can be moved in and out of. Erik Huggers’ Screen Digest quote has really stayed with me for the last few weeks, not just because of its indication of the beeb marching toward further social-networking – but because of the sheer poignancy of his words. C”mon Erik, cheer up. It’s nearly Christmas.
*probably.
July 28th, 2008 Comments Off
Finally! This is truly brilliant news. We run the whole GameCity backend (excepting the knowledge base) from Google apps, and this is going to make things a lot easier.
They should really make this native in iCal though.
Anyway – I’m off to Develop now… See you there?
July 21st, 2008 § 0
…up and running with the new wordpress, which is as brilliant as I’d hoped it would be. Still playing with plug-ins and widgets but more or less there…
July 20th, 2008 § 0
It’s that time again, when for no apparent reason, I migrate from one cms to wordpress (again). We’re just getting organised…
The book & project pages will be resumed very soon…
