December 2nd, 2009 §
Last week, Jimmy and I went to West Bromwich to attend a Digital Archiving conference organised by the lovely Screen WM people. Excellent event, with truly inspirational talks from Tony Ageh, the Home of Metal project and the National Fairground Archive. Perhaps most encouraging was the realisation that many of the activities we’re currently engaged in, both with the NVA and GameCity, are already forming some of the more progressive outputs of other archival projects. We’re currently failing to fully understand the potential significance and draw the right frame around much of what we do- number one in a relatively short list of things to urgently fix in 2010.
The venue for the day was the extraordinary ‘Public‘ arts space, situated at the edge of the West Brom shopping centre, which has not been without its share of well-documented problems(incidentally, Vaizey – depite his apparent hostility to the building, opened the whole day). It’s one of the strangest, emptiest, biggest, pinkest,most confusing buildings I’ve ever seen. As Jimmy remarked, it’s like being battered with a hammer made of air. Anyway, after walking round the venue we made our way to the summit where we came upon a fun animation installation/ tool which a nice bloke insisted on explaining to us. The Public is a strange, probably ill-advised building – but the stewards within it are very friendly.
Notes:
The local Express & Star was leading with a story about a dog that is a hero.
West Bromwich has no train station, but is easily accessible via tram.
February 21st, 2009 §
Very much enjoyed my trip down to London-town last week, meeting with BAFTA and the lovely Mr Dave – before gatecrashing a London IGDA chapter and meeting splendid Siobhan and Andy – before finally being guided across town via the upstairs rooms of several bars en-route to Thoughtworks HQ for their Geeknight, at which I was one of the speakers.
So, this was a change in format from the previous gigs – which I hadn’t wholly prepared for – happily however, it was a really fun one. The Geeknight crew are a friendly, but rigorous audience and little gets past them without a demand for clarification or a general challenging of the idea being presented. As was pointed out on a twitter response, what was perhaps most fun was having an evening where cultural studies and computer science collided.
In terms of presentation, we really need to thin down the core STV gig in terms of ideas and modularise the whole thing more to respond to the crowd. Whereas the National Archive audience were very engaged by the high-level view of the project, including the background narrative – Geeknight London was provoked very early on in the talk into an argument about our supersession assumptions. The same thing happened later on with Cosplay and to some extent with emulation – we really need a kind of flashcard version of the whole show. There’s just too many ideas to cover in a talk without it seeming random and slight, for me anyway.
In other news, this weekend I’m moving into my first Blackberry. Splendid, maybe.
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.
January 17th, 2009 §
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.