1 post tagged “london games festival”
I've been using my time off to attend London Games Fringe events. The London Games Fringe is a great idea: it complements the po-faced and gratingly commercial industry and consumer offerings with an opportunity for us to enjoy a more theoretical - and playful - approach to gaming. I probably shouldn't have said "theoretical" there as that doesn't make it sound any less dull.
It really isn't dull though. On Monday night NTK's Dave Green hosted the Games You Should Have Played event, the idea being that he and the other panelists explain... oh, you already guessed it. It was great to see the maraca-based rhythm-action game Samba De Amigo being demonstrated, even if a few of my favourite games were omitted from the list completely. Though it would have been a difficult task to please everyone like me, I got the feeling the event was particularly geared to non-gamers, who would definitely have benefited from the range of stuff that was covered, and been a lot less sniffy. But glancing around, I seriously doubt that there were any non-gamers in the audience - with the possible exception of a girl who turned up late and then spent most of the time outside, doing what appeared to be some form of vigorous yoga whilst wearing a very short skirt.
But moving on...
Today's day-long event was called Play Time, and was all about play. Considering it was free (with lunch included) it was very good value. It was hosted by Tim Wright (above) who I think is some sort of academic. Either that or an eloquent loon who wandered in off the Soho street - he's developing a 30-year plan to play golf on the moon, you see. With David Bowie.
I learnt a lot of interesting stuff about play - and much of it from people who aren't directly involved with videogames. The speakers included a poet, a blogger, a magician and a er... man from a theator, who pretended to rush off to the toilet and then rang his own mobile phone to see what we'd do. It was that kind of day.
It was also the kind of day in which we got to play with Lego - which is of course the best kind of day there is. I haven't played properly with Lego for years, but as an only child, it's one of the toys that was guaranteed to keep me completely engrossed by my solitary self when I was a youngun. Here's the model I built when we were prompted to make a "four-legged thing with a face":
The head spins round and everything. There was a serious point to the second part of the 'serious play' session, in which we were supposed to build a metaphorical journey from our life out of the model we'd started with. But as I had made some kind of semi-terrifying arachnid, I wasn't sure where to go with it and ended up on a tangent, pointlessly adding wheels. It's got four legs! It didn't need any wheels.
The magician (who also ran the Lego session) said that when most creative folk are brainstorming and they come up with an idea that's impossible to implement, they dismiss it. But for magicians and illusionists, the difficulty is actually coming up with new impossibilities that they haven't already mastered. Isn't that Interesting? It's all done with mirrors, of course.
