Next Event
Alex Moseley
Well, it's been three months since the first, historic, event at
Channel 4; and while - if you're anything like me - the time has shot
past, I thought it would be good to reflect on that day, and start to
think about another meet-up, if we feel one would be useful.
For what they are worth, here are my brief reflections on the first
day; please add or contradict these with your own:
- there was an excellent, broad, range of presentations from all
sectors
- within my own sector (education) I felt that we moved forward our
collective thinking on the genre
- the breakout session was extremely interesting, but there was too
little time to produce meaningful results
(more direction needed or longer time to develop/present)
- one area which raised its head throughout but wasn't discussed was
funding
- we have a collective challenge set by Dan to move ARGs forward :-)
My initial thoughts on another meeting would therefore like to
continue/build on the first two, provide more space for cross-sector
breakouts/workshops, cover the issue of cross-sector funding/models,
and discuss the future of ARGs.
Over to you!
Alex.
Adrian Hon
Thanks for starting this thread, Alex!
> - there was an excellent, broad, range of presentations from all
> sectors
I felt this was one of the highlights - as I've said to many people, I
really didn't know much about what was going on with ARGs in
education, and it was eye-opening to see what had been done. In
particular, I think the candour with which people shared their
experiences and stats was great.
I would think there's an opportunity to expand the presentations from
broadcasting and elsewhere; it's a shame that Oil Productions weren't
able to make it to talk about Routes, but next time maybe they can
share their experiences. Likewise I know that 4ip and other NGOs have
stuff going on that they could share.
> - the breakout session was extremely interesting, but there was too
> little time to produce meaningful results
Agreed. I'm not sure what the solution is here, but I do think that
the format next time will be different, probably longer. At the very
least, we should be able to get people lunch, and increase the length
of the day, allowing for more mixing and smaller discussions.
> - one area which raised its head throughout but wasn't discussed was
> funding
Very useful to hear about this; I imagine 4IP would definitely want to
get involved here. Maybe also people from the research councils and
the Wellcome Trust.
> and discuss the future of ARGs.
A session that's always very popular at the big GDC in San Francisco
is the 'Game Studies Download', a quick-fire run down of the best
academic research done into games over the past year. It would be good
to do a similar thing from a serious games perspective, summarising
the most interesting work done recently.
Adrian
--
Adrian Hon - mssv.net
Chief Creative at Six to Start - www.sixtostart.com
Founder of Let's Change the Game - www.letschangethegame.org