April 6th, 2010 Comments Off
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.
February 18th, 2009 §
Last week, Dr Jimmy, Tom from the NMM and myself travelled down to Kew, having been invited to deliver a talk there about our work on the National Videogame Archive, which is one of the core projects we’re working on at present. The whole thing was organised by the brilliant people at the National Archives, which is an awe inspiring operation the scope of which I truly didn’t appreciate. Seriously, folks – you should go there. I always had a sense that there must be a National Archive, but actually visiting it is both surprising – in the extent of its scale and accessibility, humbling in how it brings our efforts into perspective and utterly terrifying when considering that our efforts are part of that ecosystem. It’s one thing to talk about videogames as part of our cultural heritage (not that we do a lot of that at all, actually) but another entirely to begin to visualise them as part of a continuum of history.
The talk was an adaptation of the Save the Videogame presentation we’d done in Manchester, mostly with the jokes removed and delivered wearing suits. As with all talks about games, the access points are seldom shared across the whole audience. One corner of the room delivered moans of warm nostalgia when Elite was mentioned, but remained coldly silent about Horace goes Skiing – happily that kind of segmentation serves to illustrate one of our key points.
Anyway, more on the ongoing campaign very soon – coupled with our steady realisation of the magnitude of the task. For now, a gentle image of myself and Dr J outside the archive.
December 2nd, 2008 §
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.