[Bio as hastily supplied to Tom Kim for Gamasutra radio interview...]
Following the completion of a degree in contemporary art, Iain worked for 4 years as a writer and performer in fringe theatre and as a musician in commercial productions.
Like many others, a self-taught passion for the internet and new media led to new career options in the early mid-nineties. After forming the new media projects company, Suppose, in 2003, he directed a wide range of projects for commercial and arts sector clients. Gradually however, his love of live events and writing started to raise it’s head again. Suppose started organising events in pubs, clubs, restaurants - inviting interesting nerds to come and talk about their ideas and work in an environment fuelled by food and drink.
It was at one of these events that he first met James Newman, whom he invited up to talk about his (then) forthcoming book ‘videogames’ - a game theory reader for Routledge.
A gamer since childhood, the possibility of merging content production, live events and ideas about videogames into a new project was a tantalising prospect. And so it was in 2004 that PublicBeta was formed - a publishing and events company that was set to transform content about gaming into something richer and more interesting. The absence of investment, practical business skills or appropriate skillsets didn’t deter PublicBeta from publishing its first project, ‘Difficult Questions About Videogames’ in 2004 to worldwide indifference. Well received within the niche of a small niche of game thinkers and academics it lay the groundwork for future content projects and provided some valuable lessons about business and debt-management.
Despite shifting modest volumes of books and ‘videogames are rubbish’ t-shirts - PublicBeta ceased trading in late 2005 with Iain’s realisation that his core interest and skills were in content generation and ideas - and less the logistics of distributing books to the high-street.
Beginning a career as a games writer by cold-pitching anyone who would listen on the back of the ‘Difficult Questions’ book, he was lucky enough to secure a few well-placed regular commissions.
In 2005, he programmed the first weekend of videogame content at the National FIlm Theatre, on London’s South Bank. With a title clumsily plundered from the ‘ergodic’ anecdote of the Difficult questions intro - NTI* (*non-trivial interaction) bought together speakers such as Jonathan Smith, Valve, Peter Molyneux, Jamie Fristrom and many others to talk about making games.
NTI* was well received - and suggested that there might be space within the british cultural calendar for a videogame festival. Having been frustrated by the present industry event model, it seemed there must be a viable alternative to the sensation of having leagues of competing marketing teams braying at you with a painfully sustained intensity in anodyne conference venues.
GameCity was a model pitched to a few different UK cities in late 2005, happily it was Nottingham - through Nottingham Trent University - that took it upon themselves to run with it. This was wonderful news for Iain as it meant he could still get the bus to work, being a Nottingham resident himself.
Alongside developing the festival, now entering its third year, he continues to write about games for various publications - as well as published the books ‘100 videogames’ for the BFI with James Newman, and Inside Game Design, for Laurence King Publishing.
He’s currently working on GameCity 3, a new book ‘Play Britannia’ and building a playground near a lake. He works from a shed in his garden whenever he can. This is where he is happiest and where he feels he belongs.