Advertisement
Iain Simons, Festival Director of GameCity: We've been running a festival called GameCity for the last nine years. We wanted to make a different kind of games festival, one that wasn’t about just filling a hall with lots of people playing games – we've put on gigs at them and had developers collaborating in different art forms. Running alongside that, we had the video archive, which was done in collaboration with the Science Museum in 2008. The kind of natural next stage was to get a place of our own. Childishly simple, but for this to have permanence, we wanted to give a home to video games.
Advertisement
Yeah, it will be pushing in the same area as the festival, but with a sense of community as you can return to it more then once a year. For us, the idea that people can make games is quite a big thing.What do you mean by that, exactly?
The tools that you need to make a game are becoming far more accessible and easier to use. You might not remember this but in the 1980s, when VHS cameras came out, people used to make films at home. This spread the idea to a whole new generation that anyone could be filmmakers. And I certainly feel we are at that point now with video games, where people can enter the industry who aren’t your typical male nerds. You can have different people making lots of different games and as a result culturally they become a lot more interesting. That’s really exciting for us.
We're not going to rent people desk space or anything like that – but what we do hope it will be is a centre for people to make games, to talk about the things they make and get feedback. It’s a lot like open mic night in that sense – it’s about building up a culture and community.What has made it easier for people to create video games?
Well, Twine is a really influential tool. It’s a free tool for people to create interesting text-based narratives. The amount of people that are making diverse material for it is amazing. When I split up with my girlfriend, I would sit there and write songs about how much I hated my parents. It’s at the point where tools like Twine are beginning to complement that kind of thing – they're a means by which you can express yourself. And that's where video games will become really interesting. When people start expressing things other than their desire to shoot Space Marines.
Advertisement
In a similar manner to books and films, video games have tons of genres and themes. So there is a growing literacy thing in which people grow to understand games as something that is an increasingly diverse field.Typically, the games industry hasn’t been very good at that. The sort of stuff it puts effort into communicating is its scale – with games like Call of Duty having a bigger opening weekend then some movies. For us it’s about games growing in cultural confidence and people making games. So that means people who make games talking to the public more.Do you see video games as an art form and want more to recognise it as such?
Yes. I’m absolutely not on a mission to convince people they are all art. What matters is if they are interesting or not, and frankly that’s the same for film and TV – is it worth our consideration? Something that consumes as much time and intelligence as video games… it's ridiculous to not consider them seriously.
So that there are games that people can play together. There are games like Civilization, which are more solitary. But it’s interesting to talk about those games with other people who play them and that helps convey what games are. It’s about joining video games up with the real world. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to gather together constantly and be social, as we don’t want to be social all the time. But it’s about balance. And it’s about bringing fresh air into video games and brining video games out into fresh air.
Advertisement
It’s clearly a cultural thing, in that there can be spaces where thousands of people can be creative and gather to discuss it as an art form. It’s wholly cultural in that sense. I want my son to play good games and there are plenty of bad games out there. Parents have to deal with that and it’s hard. Obviously beyond letting 9-year-olds play GTA. There isn’t really a space where they can be directed to that sort of stuff. So it’s that role. A social, societal, civic kind of space.If people are making games, will gaming companies survive?
Well the market seems to suggest otherwise, with the rise of mobile games. I mean, look at things like Minecraft. This is pretty subversive to the business models of the past 20 years. The idea that a publisher has to give you money to make a game is largely over. All you need to make games now is an audience. The idea that the old-school publishing system is in decline is really exciting.It seems like Minecraft is the answer to a games industry which focuses on graphics. It has come along and it’s very simple. You could imagine someone making that.
It’s a brilliant idea. It’s an interesting time. With the last generation of consoles and rise of HDTVs, people were focusing on photo-realism and HD content. We could see the actors cry and what not. And there was an idea that games have to be photo-real. But people engage perfectly well with Bambi and Watership Down. So the idea that there has to be beautiful games is not necessary tied to games being emotionally mature. Steam, the app store and deals like the Humble Bundle give a platform to many different voices. And that’s what exciting about the arcade. People can walk in and say, "Hey, I have an idea I want to express" and they can do it.
Advertisement