I’m finally putting my money were my mouth is and have organised a meeting to rally people around ‘Project Brutal’ an idea to create a series of events and projects that celebrate and capture Birmingham’s Brutal Library whilst we still have it. The initial meeting is being held on the 20th of April at the ever delightful Created in Birmingham shop and anyone with a passion for the library is welcome to attend.

Full information on the initial meeting can be found on the eventbrite sign up page… and there’s more info over on the tumblr I’ve set up to track the project.

Any questions then just drop me a line!

After ranting last November about the decision to not list the iconic Birmingham Library building, I’m back on the war path, albeit a creative and productive one. I won’t go into the full ins and outs on here, as I’ve set up a tumblr to help channel the project into one low monthly payment, or blog if you will.

Basically the idea at present is to find like minded people and creative networks/ groups keen to work together to organise a series of events and activities to celebrate, enjoy and capture the library before it potentially meets its maker.

I’m going to be joining the people dots with a meeting in mid-late March and will post the full details on here asap. So if you have any sense you’ll head over to the tumblr site and sign up!

pip pip

The workshops where pitched at a good level, not starting right at the bottom and assuming a basic understanding of electronics (an understanding I didn’t have). But I didn’t mind as this made the workshops more sociable as others who did understand helped us laymans muddle through together. I merrily ended the day knowing how to power and programme enough lights and buzzers to earn instant gratification and get thinking on how to implement this into something fun.

It was interesting to hear the more experienced hackers present their work at the end of the day, and that even at this level a lot of people felt compelled to apologise and confess that they hadn’t written all the code themselves or had copied circuits from others, as if it was somehow cheating to not be able to claim ownership to every step of the process.

I know I was suffering the same needless sense of guilt in the workshops and it was reassuring to hear those more experienced feel it too. It reminded me that most people aren’t experts, we all need to start somwhere and we’re all learning as we go along, sharing our ideas and projects so we can take and re-appropriate these to make them our own. Because I don’t want to be an expert….actually that’s a lie I secretly wish by some magical fluke I’d turned out to be a programming and electronics genius, but that’s impossible and besides the point…Because you don’t ‘need’ to be an expert to play, and now I can.

Last stop was the Eurogamer Expo in London. I won’t go into a highlights list as I’m sure the diagram above does a good enough job of summing this up. I’ll admit that I’ve been a light weight this week and was on game/play overload at this point so I’m sure the expo wasn’t just the incomprehensible brown blur of boys, bombs, boobs, blood and guns that I remember.

But what I do remember was the Indie Games Arcade upstairs, providing an eclectic respite and creative safe haven featuring titles such as Joe Danger, Time Fcku, Fig. 8. You can read about more of the games featured and the Indie arcade here (I’m particularly sad I didn’t get to see the responses elicited by the Happening Game, but David’s write up goes some way to consolling this)

Again its a shame that so much was overlapping last week, but on the plus side running up and down the country (okay so only from Nottingham to London) to events made it feel like the country was buzzing with excitement and love for games and I only hope this feeling lasts.

And on the 3rd day Marie uprooted from the Midlands and journeyed down to London for Playful 09. And it was good.

Highlights (in order of how legible my notes where)

+ Free red liquorish rope at registration

+ Kareem from Media Molecule talking in regards to managing a creative business/team by incorporating ideas of ownership, responsibility and encouraging personal projects.

+ Robin Burkinshaw talking about the history of Alice and Kev

+ @stml calculating the odds of Christ’s resurrection at 96 billion to 1, then going on to present his analogue matchbox computer that takes on players at noughts and crosses.

+ Learning via Russell Davis that the world’s largest model railway is in Hamburg (I <3 model villages & railways)

+ @rexbox ’s retro projector presentation  (took me back to sitting at the front of assemblies at primary school and having to move the hymm sheets up and down  and usually back to front).

+ The way the lights reflected on the balloons at the end of the day creating evil smiles. Can’t find a photo to adequately demonstrate this so here is a doodle I did during the day.

I’ve had no intertubes for the past 4 days so my blog posts are suffering from a bit of a time delay.

Highlights (in order of when I remembered them)

+ Pretty much all of the GameU talks.

+ Wanting to bang my head against the table listening to Feargal Sharky’s variety of metaphors for piracy, chairs, trees and aids featured.

+ then Adam Atomic bringing some sense into the piracy discussion, and also stating that Canabalt’s iphone piracy levels were only 15%.

+ Hearing about Rex Box’s favourite childhood game (a cross between blob of dirt on a car window and space invaders)

+ Jon Burgerman agreeing to cry for  £1 at his sale on Saturday.

+ Deciding to stick around an extra hour to catch Robin Hunicke’s live projected performance of Flower in the Exchange Arcade.

image c/o Game City

Highlights so far (in order of appearance)

+ Keita Takahashi acting like a naughty school kid by playing random videos of Boy George on the Jonathon Ross Show, an ice hockey game and someone cleaning a goldfish bowl at the end of the playground announcement (which reminded me of the Friend’s with You one from a few years back)

+ 3rd place in a Canabalt tournament (even if my score ‘1800′ was still a bit shameful) resulting in some nifty over-sized shirts.

+ “Find something that allows you to build a game over a weekend or you’ll loose your mind. If its taking you any longer then whatever you’re doing, its too complicated.” – Adam Atomic on rapid prototyping and the origins of Canabalt. (coincidently it was announced elsewhere in the universe that Unity’s indie level software is now FREE… but also worth noting that Adam’s Flixel is also open source and free too)

+ Adam Atomic then explaining how he created the sound effects for ‘running on a crane’ using his macbook, a saucepan and some sneakers whilst his wife was out of the house.

+ Lord Puttnam commenting on how the game industry needs to be lead by the creatives and not the technology, and how he sees this coming from the independent and bedroom coders.

Goodness me, October has been (and still is for another week) a ridiculously busy month for Game events. For me it started back on the 1st when I crossed the Atlantic to visit LA’s Indiecade and will end on Sunday at London’s Eurogamer Expo (passing through Gamecity and Playful along the way).

Indiecade was a great ‘first ever’ game festival experience. From being surrounded directly by the developers of the games the festival was celebrating, to engaging discussions focused on culture, art and innovation and hearing talks by personal favourites Keita Takahashi and Steph Thirion.

However being a game festival novice I do admit  I was quite the Norma no-mates for the duration, which is especially difficult when surrounded by a such a well connected community. Anyhew- my inability to socialise aside, the games that lay at the heart of the festival were an amazingly eclectic selection that reminded me yet again why I’m so fascinated by indie games ..and a particular nod to Peanut Gallery’s festival favourite Minor Battle that was an excellent mix of pervasive and virtual play. (n.b. a selection of Indiecade titles will also be showing at Game City Squared this week in Nottingham).

So onto the week ahead, and although its a shame that so many excellent game events are clashing, its not going to stop me doing my darnedest to take in as much as I can! I’ll report back with my findings later on, but in the meantime here is a rodeo round up of things I’m particularly excited about…

Gamecity: Something Splendid I have nnnnnooooo idea what this is going to entail, but doesn’t that make it all the much better? (this week’s LFF suprise film being the exception to that rule).

Gamecity: Curry Session- Adam Atomic, Making Canabalt The guy who made Canablat, talking about making Canabalt… with curry. Yeah!

Playful: A one day event about games and play in all their manifestations with an eclectic and exciting line up of speakers, summed up well by this tweet

Gamecity: Frozen Synapse Beat the Dev: The cleaner almost threw away their prize pot, but thankfully its still there to win if you can take on indie devs Mode 7 as they peview their upcoming release Frozen Synapse (I hear its like chess with guns- this is a good thing).

Eurogamer: Indie Games Arcade: If you’ve read this far down, you’ll know by now that I like indie games, so of course I would always be looking forward to more.

This week saw another fresh set of  indie game challenges cast upon a crowd of eager developers by the Experimental Gameplay Project and 2-Bee Games . And of course these two are not the only US based indie game projects which have popped up on my radar in the past year…

artxgame Attract Mode and Giant Robots collaboration that teams up artists & developers. Current projects include Jottobots a collaboration between  J.Otto Seibold and Kyle Pulver.

Gamma – Kokoromi’s annual contest, which last year ran with the too cool for school theme of stereoscope 3D giving birth to games such as Papermoon

Experimental Gameplay Project – a group of indie games developers running monthly competitions around a given theme (this month ‘bare minimum’), with the stipulations that they must be the work of one person and worked on for no longer than 7 days.

B2 (2Bee) And finally 2-Bee games who are running their second indie game competition – perhaps the most incentivised of all the offerings with a cash prize and ‘publishing deal’ for the winning game (which last time was the  visually and auditory stunning Auditorium)

So as I coo over these projects and their amazing output I’m always left wondering, why don’t I know of any thing similar based in the UK? Although there’s nothing preventing us Brits from taking part or engaging with most of those listed above, we still lack the fun and inspiring sense of community, collaboration and direct motivation that comes from events such as Kokoromi and artxgame.

And even with all the fluffy and loveliness of community aside these events have encouraged the creation of not only some amazing and well known games (some which have gone on to be fully developed), but they also form excellent PR platforms for the regions and developers involved.

So am I wrong, am I missing some amazing competition or event? The closest I can think of was the recent X48 challenge, or even at a stretch the pervasive games community brought together through Sandpit?  Or am I correct that there is a definite gap for a big monthly/bi-monthly indie game challenge and event- nothing big, just something lo-fi, fun and inspiring.

Well either way I’m not one to sit here and complain and wait for something to pull itself together, no I think its about time something needs to be done… hmmm where to start…