re: iain simons

Been thinking lots about the Snowman (again) this year… Anyone know where one can find the original transmission with the Briggs introduction?

After the initial showing on Channel 4, and in its initial showings on U.S. television, an alternative introduction was sometimes used. Instead of Raymond Briggs describing how much it had snowed the winter he made The Snowman, while walking through the field that morphed into the animation of the same landscape,David Bowie was shown reciting the same speech after walking into the attic of ‘his’ childhood home and discovering a scarf in a drawer..(via wikipedia)

[fragment]

Before I do what I do now, I used to work as a musician – more specifically, as a Musical Director*. Thus, each Christmas season would be spent in the dark – a dull haze of alcohol, laughing, boredom, sleep, M&S curries and the company of musicians and turns. For the first four years, I mostly loved it. It wasn’t a place to develop ones love of music, indeed music was treated very badly there, but the sociality of pantomime – the liveness – was something I loved deeply then and miss deeply now. 

Anyhoo… Today, some friends kindly took us to see this years panto at our local rep, and it was a curious experience which got me thinking about experience and specifically audience participation in the work I do now and the stuff that I often write about. One of the things I’ve always aspired to do with GameCity is to develop it into an intense, all-enveloping ride for your brain for a few days. Sign away 72 hours to be within our control and be subjected to the most amazing, stimulating ride possible within UK law. Emerge the other side humming with enthusiasm, new ideas and totally invigorated – feel you had experienced something that had left you, just a little bit, changed… We’re some way from doing that as yet, but I’d like to think that there have been a few moments in each year that have come at least hinted at the potential.

So… In a critical culture which is often dominated by the language of film, I was wondering why we don’t make more reference to theatre and other performance art when we talk about games? More specifically, I was wondering how much theatrical conceits are considered in the production of them? Panto is only the most obvious candidate with its heavily telegraphed mechanics : Call and response. Water pistols. Audience transgression onto the stage. Performers transgressing into the audience. Everyone can agree that the proscenium arch is there, which makes it so exhilarating when it’s ignored. Hmmmmm… I’m excited about developing this liveness for the ’09 shows. 

*I’m not making this point out of any kind of pride, more to highlight the dull isolation of the role. The MD is a very different gig to being in the band, which is IMHO far more fun…

The longest single conversation I have (which is still in progress) is about workflow. I always have it with the same person, James Newman, who is similarly obsessive about such matters – and finally, in a cruel ironic twist, it never gets resolved, consequently eating hours out of my potential and finite hours available to implement such a workflow. I dream of a day when one day everything will fall into place, a perfect union of system and software will take place and I’ll disappear into a supernova of productivity. Hmmm.

Until then, here’s the problem(s).

1. How do I capture, store and organise the research materials I find on the web. This is the primary source of my research, although I also need to store and organise audio / video interviews – of which I also do a lot.

2. How do I share and sync everything gathered in (1) across multiple machines is a transparent and TOTALLY stable way.

3. How do share and sync the library created in (1) across two machines and allow the potential for joint annotation.

4. How do I share the library created in (1) and allow the joint annotation enabled in (3) AND create an environment for shared authorship. 

5. All the above must allow for the possibility for offline working. 

With respect to point 1, it’s recently been announced that Devon Technologies are about to launch the public-beta of the next iteration of their popular knowledge management app. DevonThink. DT is one of the apps that both James and I have spent some time with, but to date have singularly failed to ‘get’*. Despite having some high-profile endorsements neither of us have managed to comfortably live with it for more than a week.

Having just flattened my two main working machines, I’m hoping DT might provide an early Christmas present. 

*It is possible, of course, that we do *get* it entirely – it just doesn’t do what we want.

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.

Back from Develop, which was brilliant. Hugely refreshing to go to a conference that was free of the usual patchiness.

More about it later – but my overriding memory of it is over on CultureTech for your perusal.

The CultureTech blog at New Statesman is now up-and-running…Play Britannia continues with some wonderful new interviews….GameCity 3 is starting to eat up everything in its path…

Some time after the release, but a new (and very generous) review of 100 Videogames has just gone up at popmatters…

he bespoke peripheral, and in particular looking at Wii Fit. It’s interesting to write for a magazine so ..er..’design’ centred, particularly because it start to question any assumptions you might have as to any shared understanding of what ‘design’ even means. Looking forward to writing more for DW, and in particular working hard to understand not so much where videogames as a whole might fit into their editorial mandate – but which facet of them. As for Wii Fit itself – it’s a really remarkable package. Catching a view of the UK television campaign a few nights ago, you see just how wonderfully considered Wii’s strategy is. 90 seconds about a balance board, with an almost incidental ‘by the way, you can purchase Wii Fit for this amazing peripheral’ tacked on the end. I’m already more excited about forthcoming balance board titles than anything else. I can’t really see me getting excited about GTA IV until there’s a Wii version where I can properly run around the city. The promise of the little beige box is really just starting to become visible.

I’m currently crunching away on a new book, which aspires to be a (rather than ‘the’) history of the British videogame industry (incidentally – that cover is going to be changed…) As such, I’m finding myself drinking a variety of beverages with participants in this extraordinary story in an attempt to find some sort of consensus as to what *actually* happened.

Shortly after having spoken to two people about the same event however, it becomes rapidly apparent that the real core of this story is in the disparity between the recollections of the individuals involved. After starting with the best of intentions, it became clear that establishing a time-line of events that everyone could agree on was going to be impossible within my mortal life – luckily, it’s also not especially desirable. The book has been morphing in its aspirations, which at first felt like a dilution of what it was supposed to be, but rapidly became more interesting for it. Writing about nerd-culture, for a supposed audience as unforgiving as the nerd crowd are, the challenge has shifted to something altogether more interesting. Never intended to be a catalogue of release-dates, it seems to be coming to life now the focus has really shifted to the anecdotal experiences of these pasty-faced adventurers.

I thought it might be fun to give a brief run-down on some of these encounters on this site, to give a little colour to the meetings and (frankly) hopefully make you want to buy the book when it comes out. More of those soon…

Anyway – I’ve never been much of a blogger, but I thought it might be time to start doing so. Mainly because historically I’ve tended to be involved in interesting projects which have disappeared with little record of what they were or how they happened. I’ve always been at least slightly envious of folks likeKieron and his ability to keep his end up so well – so I’m kind of thinking it’s time for me to do this properly.

This is really for my benefit rather than yours, although if you enjoy it at all – then I’m delighted.