‘The Hidden Art of Shadowboxing’

Finally, a more public context to celebrate the opening sequence of ‘Fate of Atlantis’, it feels like the year has closed very nicely, indeed.. ;)

We’re just about to fire off with the next season of our Monthly series of ‘videogame’ shows over at Antenna, GameCityNights. When we started them last year we were hoping to have an easy-to-organise, lightweight hang-out once a month to share some interesting stuff and provide a safe-haven for geeks at least once a month late night in Nottingham. Hmmm.

They’ve been a lot of fun over the last year but haven’t been without their challenges, so we’ve been putting a lot of effort this last few weeks into tweaking the format (perhaps more, creating the format), and trying to make them better. This friday is the launch party of Season 2, where we’re going to talk a little about some of those ideas but not at the expense of some excellent entertainment.

Personally, I’m especially excited as this is going to be the first time we’ve had some performance art at the shows. The Megaphones are going to be bringing their Time Freeze Annual Biannual Convention, about which I know little but am looking forward to a lot.

Derek Williams of OneLifeLeft and Iconochromatic will be illuminating all with his Free Market Economy -

Graham Goring, who delivered an amazing set at GameCity 5 is returning to deliver another -

Closing the night, Greig Stewart will be being a Theramin Hero once again. If you missed him at the festival, you really shouldn’t miss this. A rare opportunity to see a man control Super Mario Bros using an esoteric musical instrument.

I believe he’s also bringing this:

Nights is going to be different this year, and hopefully more interesting for it. Of which, more later.

Finally, some thoughts on Assassin’s Creed : Brotherhood just up at NewStatesman.

Also – starting guest blogging from tomorrow over at Creative Nottingham
…

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.

There will be nothing here until this is over. Do come along if you can – it’s going to be epic this year…

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.

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.

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.

*The possible exception to this is the 80′s BBC 2 Documentary in the Commercial Breaks season, which – incase you haven’t seen it…

Commercial Breaks