Forward the foundations of
Scottish Games Week
Making up for lost time, Brian Baglow intends for Scotland’s first games conference to bring the country’s industry together like never before. Richie Shoemaker tags along
I
t’s not often that you go into an interview with a list of questions and have them all answered, more or less, in one uninterrupted 20-minute response. Unless, that
is, the interviewee is on their third coffee of the morning and happens to be Scottish Games Network’s founder and director Brian Baglow. The subject of our rather one-sided chat is Scottish
Games Week, which is set to start October 24th and kick off a nationwide program that includes an industry conference, education symposium, an awards evening, and much more besides; taking place from the borders to the highlands and islands. Aside from how it aims to be all-encompassing, what is remarkable is that it will be the first significant event of its type in Scotland for a generation. “This is something that I’ve had in the back of my mind for almost
20 years,” says Baglow, who founded Scottish Games Network in 2004 when it started out as little more than a Yahoo group. “From 2004 to 2008, we had the Edinburgh Interactive Festival or Edinburgh Games Festival, depending on which year it was. But that took place during the Edinburgh Festival. It was a mishmash and, being honest, it was a bit of an excuse for folk in London to come up to Edinburgh on expenses during the festival. It never really hit the mark and it certainly didn’t showcase or involve the industry in Scotland. I’ve been trying to change that for quite some time.”
MISSION POSSIBLE A veteran of DMA Design and Rockstar Games, Baglow has been on something of a mission to raise Scotland’s games industry profile
44 | MCV/DEVELOP September 2022
beyond that of its most foundational and successful studios and to connect all the many touchpoints of the industry in Scotland together. “We’ve got all of these different funds and different
opportunities coming up through the tech sector, but also within Scotland’s creative industries. And as it stands right now, the games industry has no way of connecting. So my goal with this is really to use Games Week as a catalyst for change and to build a proper games ecosystem-wide cluster, because I think that’s
where we can innovate and pioneer. “My pitch with all of this to the government, public sector and the
Scottish media is that games are Scotland’s secret weapon. If we can just connect the game sector up more effectively, we’re going to be doing something that no other country in the world is capable of. Getting games in education from the earliest days, looking at games in terms of health care, social inclusion, mental health and well being. We’ve got so many opportunities to innovate and pioneer, but we need to be at the table. We need to be part of the discussions. And so that’s sort of the bigger picture for the whole of Scottish Games Week.”
WHAT THE TECH The catalyst for Scottish Games Week came in the wake of the 2020 Logan Report, which offered 37 recommendations to the Scottish government for building a more successful tech ecosystem, based around infrastructure funding and education. In the process of accepting all the recommendations, a fund was set up specifically to help establish events to promote the tech sector north of the border.
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