Tuesday, 10. May 2011 - 08:23 | Comments Off
The brilliant Stephanie Barish emailed to prod me to tell you that submissions for Indiecade 2011 are now open!
Indiecade is a great initiative which has visited GameCity a number of times. They provide a brilliant platform for indie devs to showcase their work to a watchful world and have the best advisory panel seen outside of the UN.
Written a game? You should submit now! Submit!
Tuesday, 10. May 2011 - 08:17 | Comments Off
It seems I’ve spent more time than I realised over the last month talking about Plants Versus Zombies with Andy Robertson of the rapidly growing GamePeople. It’s part of the new series of podcasts that Andy has recently instigated which are shaping up really well. I’m always a little suspicious of the ‘bunch of people gather round and have a chat about some stuff’ format, but I think these are pretty interesting. Also, GamesTM this month has a group interview/ feature looking at family gaming that I’m a part of. Apparently…
We’re very much heads down into development on the next nights gig and festival at the moment and are hoping to have some very excellent and very new ideas to announce in the next month of so.
Tuesday, 19. April 2011 - 22:14 | Comments Off
Busy week coming up…
On Wednesday 27th April, Jimmy and I are part-reprising the National Archive talk at the Institute of Engineering and Technology lecture series.
There’s refreshments (?!) from 6.30 and the show starts at 7. You’d be most welcome and can book free seats here.
As if that weren’t enough, next Thursday 28th Season 2 Episode 4 of GameCityNights crashes into Antenna, welcoming Stewart Gilray of Just Add Water and Lorne Lanning live from his Berkeley retreat. It’s all about Oddworld and it’s going to be lovely to hear from big Lorne again.
Find out more and get tickets at nights.gamecity.org – show starts around 6…
Tuesday, 12. April 2011 - 12:05 | Comments Off
…Jimmy and I are talking and we’d love it if you came along.
Sadly, they left the name of our talk from the description on the site, but ‘All Things Must Pass…’ is shaping up to be fun…
Wednesday, 16. March 2011 - 23:18 | Comments Off
The coming weeks are quite busy with speaking gigs – it’d be great if you can make it along to one / some / all…
March 27th
Jakub Dvorsky @ GameCityNights
Jakub (Samarost / Machinarium/ Kooky) Dvorsky is one the most humble and generous speakers we’ve ever had to the festival, so it’s great he’s coming back over to do our March GCNights gig. He’s going to be talking about his studio, Amanita, his ‘other’ work art-directing the movie Kooky and announcing not one but TWO of his new projects.
James Newman and I are doing a couple of talks in April, which it would be lovely to see you at – mostly talking about digital preservation and the NVA. We’re testing out some new ideas at the National Archives talk, which will form the basis of much of our up coming work in this area and hopefully should start to move the discussion forward at least a little.
27th April,
Newton Building, Nottingham Trent University
18:30 Reception,
19:00 Lecture
The National Archives talk will be open to the public, and takes place on April 14th. Details to follow….
Monday, 14. March 2011 - 22:48 | Comments Off
Keef has just posted an interview with Ray MacGuire and Ian Livingstone up on the games blog which reminds me that I really must get those notes from the vision statement last year written up.
So why aren’t we seeing games on the Culture Show?
RM: I think that’s a discussion to be had with the media channels! But the experience of gaming is personal and it’s difficult to replicate that kind of emotional connection via TV. It has also been difficult to create news stories around the industry that capture the public’s imagination. With movies, half the attention is about the star, not about their performance, we don’t have that within our industry.
IL: Our heroes are virtual!
Earlier this week (and following on from some of the Livingstone-Hope review directives) I was at a strategy meeting aimed at getting more young people interested in STEM subjects. The more I think about this the more I see the two issues as being indivisible. The more I hear from the games industry illuminati, the less I think they believe that too.
Saturday, 26. February 2011 - 15:17 | Comments Off
Jakub Dvorsky is coming back to GameCity in March to headline the Nights gig on the 25th.
I’m really excited about this as not only is he showing Amanita’s TWO new projects for the first time ever, but he’s also going to be talking about the work he’s done as art director on this…
Kooky, like all Jakub’s work, looks amazing.
Friday, 25. February 2011 - 00:23 | Comments Off
I’ve been away off grid for a week on holiday.
Get back and discover that DoubleFine are doing the ‘From the Desk of” spot tomorrow evening…
Hope you can make it – come and say hello if you do!
Tuesday, 15. February 2011 - 11:04 | Comments Off
A quick note – I’m going to be interviewing Karl Hilton, MD of Crytek UK during the FrontEnd of the next GameCityNights.
“Karl will be giving a personal perspective on his experiences in videogame development in the UK, looking back over his experiences in a number of acclaimed studios. Touching on skills, operating cultures and drawing from other creative industries – perhaps most importantly Karl will be giving a unique insight on what it means to be producing triple-A games, in Nottingham City Centre in a time of economic austerity.”
Hope to see you there!
Sunday, 6. February 2011 - 19:53 | Comments Off
Had an amazing night at the start of the new GameCityNights shows a week ago. It turned out to be one of the better attended, strangest, longest and increasingly enjoyable events we’ve held. A huge amount of hand-wringing from the GameCity team was entered into the following Monday morning as we lapse into our inevitable hyper-critical post-mortem of what happened.
For my part, I just remember shouting a lot.
Luckily for us, the camera never lies -
…you can see Chris Harris’ brilliant photography of the night here.
Lesson #1 : Keep pass the parcel in place as a core element of future events.
Many thanks to everyone who performed – we’re motoring on with plans for the rest of the season apace now, and I for one can’t wait to do more shouting.
GameCity