This year, Jimmy and I are trying out some new preservation ideas – a few of which we kicked around with the National Archives folk earlier this year.

‘All this must Pass’  is on Thursday 15th @ 3pm, hope you can make it!

Following the comment thread responses is illuminating, highlighting the emotional weight that this subject holds for (some) people and the nuance we need to express rather better than we are now in order to navigate this investment.

We just found out we’re going to be doing a version of this at Develop in July, which should provide a particularly interesting context to deliver the ‘dead games’ message.

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.

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.

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.