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.
Someone asked for the contact address of a friend yesterday as they wanted to talk to him about his new company. After a few minutes searching I realised that I knew where his office was, and his phone number – but the only other ways I’d talked to him were in person, on Twitter and inside Facebook.
Happily, his fb chat popped up on Adium which I had on in the background, so I requisitioned his email address and forwarded it to the gentlemen in question – who had no interest in Twitter, although he might well have a Facebook profile. It simply didn’t occur to me to ask.
After I’d done that, I had some lunch.
I might email the bloke and ask how they got on. I have all his contact details on the card he gave me when we first met at an event I was talking at. I hope they manage to talk to each other.
I’m always surprised when anyone ever asks me for advice or directions.
Anyway – last week a nice bloke very politely asked me for some thoughts about a book they were working on, which sounded like a brilliant project and clearly something which should be published – the problem of course, is that the subject matter is videogames. There’s a popularly held idea that videogames are in some way ‘mainstream’. This is a popularly held myth, mostly perpetuated by my colleagues in the videogame selling industry. In wider consumer culture however, whilst the collective term of ‘videogames’ is recognised as just that – a collective term – any deeper analysis or critical interest is severely limited. I don’t mean that to sound as sniffy as that – this isn’t just about the absence of some kind of developed literacy as an academic college-boy cultural studies problem, but the barriers to participation at a domestic level that such an absence creates.
Thinking back through my conversations with various commissioning editors over the last few years, I wince remembering some of the pitches I’ve made as the editor perfectly reasonably asks who would buy such a book? The fact remains that whilst the consumption of videogames is on the rise, the public understanding around them – and appetite for content about them is still lagging behind. It’s growing – and that’s brilliant, but just because scenes featuring people playing Wii have started appearing in TV shows that doesn’t mean people want to read about them, or think about them when they’re not playing. I’m still convinced that a lot of this is being driven by the absence of any discernible humanity being shown by the games industry. Until it begins exposing its artists to the world it’s going to remain in a state of cultural participation which is alarmingly retarded considering its age.
At the Save the Videogame show last week (more about this later) this topic came up again – not just are ‘they’ ‘mainstream’, but more importantly, how we will tell? It was a short discussion and the only hallmark we could agree on was that you would know where to go in the book store to find titles about games. Selfishly, this would also really help next time I’m pitching a book.
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.
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…
Late last year, after several months of legal to-ing and fro-ing, the National Videogame Archive was launched at the GameCity 3 show. To coincide with the launch, myself and Jimmy conceived of a campaign during a late-night skype, the intention of which was to heighten the emotional and cultural intent of the whole project.
The NVA is really only very partially about the preservation of code, more central to its conception is the question of how games can be explained and translated – the answer to this is seldom contained within the games themselves.
Save the Videogame then, was conceived initially as a way to capsulate the humanity in the archive, whilst also providing a useful push-off to get the Archive collection launched. It proved to be more successful than we were prepared for – Keita was generous enough to design a launch t-shirt, Big Tone came through with some really nice branding – and a series of pledges were recorded by a number of devs and GameCity attendees.
So, right now – we’re just into the planning of a series of live events in support of the campaign, which will be gathering some pace again when the GameCity online efforts are wholly retooled in the Spring.
Kilburn Building
Oxford Road
Manchester, England M13 9PL
Category: Social
Save the Videogame
Videogames are disappearing.
No, really. They are.
Consoles, cartridges, discs, and tapes gather dust in lofts. Crucial prototypes get thrown away when studios go bust, rare versions of classic games are lost forever. Every day, we lose bit of our history.
We need a National Videogame Archive.
Luckily, we’ve just started one.
Tonight, Iain Simons and James Newman will be explaining the origins of this new project, and addressing the issues surrounding digital heritage, inviting you to have your say in the preservation of this most important of cultural forms.
Issues addressed will include:
- Cultural Elitism
- How to preserve Fan-Culture
- The challenges of translation and access
- Horace goes Skiing
As well as being an incisive look at the cultural and technical challenges of digital preservation, Save the Videogame will also feature plentiful opportunities for the audience to win prizes.
We’ve enjoyed games for years.
They need our help now.
*The Archive was actually first publically talked about a good year earlier in a New Statesman supplement we did for GameCity II.
The brilliant, brooding Mr Tom Armitage has just recorded an extensive interview with CBC radio addressing the themes of the recent talk he did at GameCity 3 – If Gamers ran the World. It’s part of the Spark show and can be heard in full here…
It’s more likely than ever that in the coming years, people with power – political, industrial, corporate, technical – will have played videogames. And not just had a passing experience with them; they may actually be what we might term “gamers”. In the coming years, the world will face such as impending recessions, peak oil, and global warming (not to mention all manner of other difficulties over the horizon). And it’s not just impending disaster; there are all manner of positive challenges we’re going to have to rise to. What have videogames taught the leaders and innovators of tomorrow? What are the necessary skills for the 21st century that gamers have been learning for years? What can we learn from games, and what can gamers – and game designers – take to other industries and sectors? Tom will examine these questions with reference to MMOs, football management, survival horror, twitch-shooters, beat-em-ups, and more, with barely the briefest reference to SimCity.
A series of interesting interviews lined up, there should be a lot of developments at CultureTech this year. Like most of the rest of the blogging world though, I couldn’t really let this pass…
Most likely though, is that the Americans simply got better presents.
6.6 billion friend requests were approved on FB in 2008. Feel the love.
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. 
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 ‘
Late last year, after several months of legal to-ing and fro-ing, the National Videogame Archive was launched at the GameCity 3 show. To coincide with the launch, myself and Jimmy conceived of a campaign during a late-night skype, the intention of which was to heighten the emotional and cultural intent of the whole project.