Continue Edinburgh Report

The final Continue event of the year before the National Conference took place earlier this month in Edinburgh. 

The fantastic setting of the University of Edinburgh Business School welcomed guests from a range of different cultural industries for the day. 

This day was particularly focussed on trying to shape some actions. As BGI culture director Iain Simons commented in his opening remarks, “by the time we get to the end of today, it’d be great to have some new ideas as to what to do tomorrow.”

Chris Speed from the University of Edinburgh’s Futures Institute kicked things off with an insightful and challenging introduction. The new Edinburgh Futures Institute where he’s based is working on some exciting new research – some of which you can read about in their site here: https://efi.ed.ac.uk/edinburgh-futures-institute/

Artist Yann Seznec and independent game developer Niall Moody, now an academic at Abertay University, followed up with a fantastically entertaining design session. Yann carefully unpacked his ideas about the tyranny of binary buttons to a rapt audience, building up to some excellent demonstrations of game design ‘juice’. This is the stuff that TED talks are made of, but more fun. 

Mal Abbas from the Biome Collective took us up to lunch. Incase you didn’t know their work, Biome are a fascinating group who work across a range of digital culture related activities (including the awesome Arcadia event from last year). Mal gave a fascinating and candid account of the development of ‘Monkey business’, a videogames project they produced in collaboration with the National Museum of Scotland and groups of school children. As the saying goes, never work with children and monkeys. 

Students from Abertay University delivered some great demos of their work during the lunch break. Sketchtown Showdown, Obsol33rt and Only Shadows were all received with huge interest from the delegates. A really rich range of work. 

Morgan Petrie from Creative Scotland (who were kindly supporting the day) kicked off the afternoon session. With Matthew Barr from IGDA and the University of Glasgow, Morgan carefully unpacked the results of some recent research on the sector in Scotland, along with some more candour about next actions and what they can do to help. 

You can read the research here. 

Finally, we welcomed three new guests along to take part in a closing panel. Gregor White, Maki Yamazaki and Amanda Tyndall. 

Working with questions submitted from the delegates and an aggressive pursuit of some next actions, chair Iain Simons pushed the discussion along hard. 

Continue Edinburgh was a stimulating, candid day which moved along at faster-pace than the previous events. 

Our thanks go to co-producers Riverside Studios and supporters Creative Scotland, University of Edinburgh and Creative Europe MEDIA Desk Scotland