INTERVIEW
As the driving force behind the GameCity festival, IAIN SIMONS was responsible for bringing a worldwide celebration of the gaming industry to Nottingham each year. Last year, the festival took up permanent residence in the city, under the guise of the National Videogame Arcade. Iain talked to Business Network Editor Jon Smart about the transition.
Jon Smart: How did NVA come into being? Iain Simons: I had run a festival in Nottingham called GameCity, which started ten years ago, and what we tried to do was bring all different kinds of people into the world of video games, not necessarily just to play them, but to give them an understanding and an appreciation of what video games are, how they are made and, crucially, expose the fact that games are actually made by people. The weird thing about games is that, unlike all the other
creative industries, many people don’t actually know who made them – you know who made your favourite film, who wrote your favourite book, who your favourite musician is, but you probably don’t know who made your favourite game. That’s always struck me as being ridiculous. It’s
institutionalised, the whole industry has been constructed in that way, accidentally I think, but that’s the way it is. It makes it really difficult for an industry that wants to be
taken seriously as a culture or an art form to achieve that if it completely shields the people within it from the world. So, the festival was always based on that premise, and
that is also the core idea of everything we do. Ten years is a long time and it became apparent, as the
festival moved on from year to year, that we would need some sort of permanence for what we were trying to do and the audience that we were doing it with, rather than the transient approach we were taking across the city. It just felt right to take the next step and establish a
dedicated, inclusive home for video games, which didn’t exist in the UK until we came along.
JS: How is NVA funded? IS: We’re essentially a start-up. GameCity was a project of Nottingham Trent University (NTU), which has retained its stake in this business, alongside the backing of my business partner, Jonathan Smith. Jonathan was heavily involved with a games company
called Traveller’s Tales, which is the developer behind Lego Star Wars and other hugely popular games in that franchise. They were starting out with that just as we were starting GameCity and our paths crossed regularly as he did a lot with the festival and came in as a business partner at GameCity. It was his backing that enabled us to have a punt at establishing NVA.
JS: Why did you choose this building as NVA’s permanent home? IS: The momentum behind the Creative Quarter, in Nottingham, was really starting to grow at around the time that we were looking to do this, so when we started looking for some premises, we found this place pretty quickly. It’s such an unusual building. It’s not without its issues, but it’s interesting and it does a lot for us, in terms of what we want to do. We didn’t know what our needs were at the time, and
those needs change over time anyway, but we knew we wanted to be on the high street, we didn’t want to be a place you had to drive to. It was really important for us to be in the city, to be a part of the community. We pretty much knew straight away that this was where
we wanted to be based when we saw it, so we went from there and opened our doors just over a year ago.
JS: Why did you choose Nottingham to start GameCity? IS: Nottingham is great from a pragmatic point of view because, as a city, it hasn’t really ‘donutted’ out that much. You’ve still got a market square that’s in the middle of the city centre and you’ve not got to do that much to animate the city around it.
22 business network May 2016 Before GameCity, I was writing about video games. I did
freelance magazine articles and a couple of books and I’d done a project at the National Film Theatre (as it was then), on the Southbank, in London, which was a weekend gaming festival – which, coincidentally, is where I met Jonathan – which was very much a prototype for GameCity. It involved getting a number of prominent developers together to talk about their work. At the time, gaming was still quite niche. It was pre-Wii,
pre-iPhone, so gaming had not yet become as mainstream as it is today, which proved the case, to me, that there was an opportunity to do a festival aimed at broadening it out to different groups of people that wouldn’t normally be associated with gaming. I sat there with a sheet of A4 and wrote down all of the
things I thought the festival should be, then I pitched that to London, to Sheffield and to Nottingham. NTU got behind the idea really quickly and I lived in
Nottingham, which also helped. Broadband was still in its infancy, so digital literacy, at
the time, had become a big thing for the city and GameCity created the opportunity for Nottingham to rehearse and enact ways to help people start to feel good about technology. Video games can be a quite gentle way of doing this. It was really brave of NTU, and of the city, to back
something like GameCity in the way that they did. The accepted model for engaging people in video games
– both at the time and to a large degree, today – was through massive conventions, filled with loads and loads of screens, for people to play games on. We wanted to do the opposite of that and create
something much more personal and intimate, so the backing we got from Nottingham was pretty much unheard of at the time.
JS: Has the pace of development within the gaming industry, on the back of broadband and the advent of smartphones, mobile technology and the like, surprised you? IS: Absolutely, it’s been transformative. The tools to make games – and to a lesser extent, to distribute them – are so accessible now that many different people are starting to make different types of games. It’s no longer just about middle-class white men making games about space marines and the like, and I find that really exciting.
Enjoying the action
Photo courtesy of Neil Hoyle Photography
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