Author: BGI team

The BGI is delighted to announce that we have appointed 4 new trustees, Helen Kennedy, Catriona Mary Wilson, Ben Pearce and Andy Payne, to assist with the governance and running of the charity. We are confident that these new fantastic personnel will continue to guide the BGI in achieving its mission of educating the public on the science, art, history and technology of videogames.

Please find profiles below with more information on our new trustees. You can also view profiles of the rest of our trustee board here.

Helen Kennedy

Helen is Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries at Nottingham University. Helen’s career has been characterised by her passion for the integration of research, innovative curriculum development with collaborative and creative partnerships. She has an international reputation for her research and advocacy work in Game Studies and for her leadership in the development of the field.

Helen was co-organiser of the first UK International conference on games – Game Cultures – in 2001, and spent the following eight years inaugurating and developing the Play Research Group and the Digital Cultures Research Centre as key international nodes in the field of Game Studies. During this period she published widely and collaboratively with other members of this network and in the process established a distinctly British Game Studies approach to the examination of computer games, everyday technologies of play and the wider ludification of culture. Her current research interests are feminist interventions into games culture, experience design and cultural evaluation. She is a Principal Investigator on an international equity project aimed at the transformation of games culture and the games industry. Recently she has been awarded further significant UK Research Council funding to investigate new technologies and new creative practices in immersive experience design.

Catriona Mary Wilson

Catriona Wilson has worked in the UK heritage sector for nearly 20 years in independent, local authority and university museums. She is currently Head of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL, having previously been Collections Manager and joint Heritage Manager at Guildford Heritage Service where she developed a keen interest in the preservation of Videogame heritage. Before that, Catriona established a new museum of medical history at the University of Worcester – The Infirmary. She has fundraised around £2m in project funding to date, which has created numerous permanent and project-based jobs and traineeships.

Catriona advocates for fairer and more ethical heritage jobs with the grassroots campaign Fair Museum Jobs, and is a committee member for the Society for Museum Archaeology. She has been mentor to numerous members of staff and volunteers, is a UCL Wellbeing Champion, and a Clore leader.

Ben Pearce

Ben works with the charity’s Board of Trustees to lead on vision and strategy, developing new national partnerships, funding opportunities and initiatives to ensure ‘PiH’ continues to inspire better health and wellbeing through the visual arts. Ben was previously Project Director at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), developing and leading the Lottery-funded Reveal, Celebrate, Explore programme, and overseeing the first stage of the redevelopment of Burlington Gardens into a new centre for artistic learning. Prior to this, Ben led a London 2012 Olympic host-borough project (High Street 2012) in the East End, which included a historic building conservation scheme, and a heritage, culture and community grants programme. Ben is also a Trustee of GEM (the voice of heritage learning); a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and Vice Chair of the Better Bankside Corporate Responsibility Group, which helps businesses across this part of London support local community, charity and cultural initiatives.

Andy Payne

Andy is an experienced video games entrepreneur of 33 years and has worked with many of the world’s top studios & publishers, running Mastertronic from 1988 – 2015. He chaired trade body Ukie from 2005-2015 and is still a board member. He is a board advisor at games developer Bossa Studios and a founder of games industry charity, GamesAid, where he is now a Patron, as well as working closely with BAFTA to develop their presence in games. Andy founded mobile & tablet specialist AppyNation and Gambitious, now renamed Good Shepherd, which is the world’s first equity based crowdfunding platform for games and movies. Andy was founder of simulation specialists Just Flight and a VP of games charity, Special Effect. Andy also sits on the Creative Industries Council, which reports directly to DCMS and BEIS, as well as being a founder of the UK Crowdfunding Association. Andy is chair of The British Esports Association and a board adviser to the world’s biggest esports company, ESL.

We are delighted to see Ukie’s announcement this morning that its board voted unanimously to support our charity and called for industry to help fund our programmes in games culture.

Dr Jo Twist OBE, CEO of Ukie, said: “Games have a cultural significance and the NVM has a role to play in preserving and presenting this to the public. Supporting it shows our long term commitment to celebrating our industry culture and we hope it goes from strength to strength”

Stuart Dinsey, Chair of the Ukie Board, said: “We encourage companies and individuals to visit Sheffield and support our industry’s heritage as patrons or sponsors. While we continue to fight for public funding for games culture through our Next Level manifesto, the sector can make a valuable contribution to preserving heritage in the coming years”

Claire Boissiere, Vice Chair of the BGI Trustees: “I’m super excited about the possibilities this deeper collaboration between Ukie and BGI opens up and I’m looking forward to working together on future initiatives.”

This Friday we celebrated the first birthday of the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield. It was a fantastic event, in which we packed out the museum to celebrate our achievements and look forward to the future.

We were particularly pleased to welcome Chris Kinglsey OBE and Jason Kingsley OBE to the event, where we announced our partnership with Rebellion to launch the UK Collection – a long term collection initiative that will preserve and exhibit UK gaming history. This was particularly exciting, as Chris and Jason also announced their acquisition of the Bitmap Brothers, which will also take a large place in the UK collection.

Please find a slideshow below that outlines just some of the things we’ve been up to over the past 12 months, and also some of the things we have planned for the future.

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On the 17th October 2017, Islamic Relief UK, the world leading humanitarian relief charity, launched a new videogame at the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield. The game, ‘Virtue Reality’, is based on real international development projects run by Islamic Relief in more than 40 countries across the world, from Pakistan to Mali. The game, developed in partnership with Ultimatum Games, aims to teach young people how international aid works, whilst also combating negative perceptions of Muslims in videogames.

Local school children traveled from across Sheffield to attend the launch of the event, and were amongst the first to try out the game. It is currently available on iOS, and will be released for Google Play Store soon. The launch also ties in with Charity Week, a fundraising campaign among Muslim students in the UK.

The BGI is incredibly pleased to have played a part in the development of Virtue Reality, and of subsequently hosting the launch event at the National Videogame Museum. The event was hugely successful, with local school children engaging greatly with the game. The event was also covered by BBC Look North, BBC Online, Charity Digital News, Islam Channel, GEO News.

Please find a gallery of pictures from the event below:

Sheffield, 27th May, 2019: The BGI is now an educational charity and has revealed its mission and programmes.

The new charity’s goals are to educate the public about the art, science, history and technology of games through the National Videogame Museum, educational programmes and formal research. The BGI is the first charity dedicated to games culture in the UK.

The National Videogame Museum lies at the heart of the BGI’s plans in Sheffield. This includes a busy summer schedule of exhibitions and events at the galleries, before Japanese games luminaries including Masayuki Uemura, former head of R&D at Nintendo, visit to give talks at the Museum. The Pixelheads education programme is also expanding into Yorkshire with the help of the Arts Council of England, Learn Sheffield and Sheffield City Council.

Following the launch of the Games Education Summit in April, the BGI is launching its first FutureLearn course, How to Start your Career in Games Development, developed with assistance from Sumo Digital, Square Enix and Aardvark Swift.

BGI has also opened offices at the University of Nottingham. The Nottingham team will work on educational and cultural initiatives, develop games festivals and other cultural events around the country and extend its formal research into games culture. The team’s ninth publication on games heritage preservation and curation is expected to be published late in 2019.

Ian Livingstone CBE, Chair of BGI Trustees, said: “We’re delighted that the unique work conducted by BGI programmes such as the National Videogame Museum and Pixelheads has been recognised by the Charity Commission. This is timely validation for all the hard work in championing games culture that our small but growing team has been doing in the Museum. I invite anyone who cares about the cultural life of video games to join us and support this amazing project with content, evangelism and funding to help expand the programme in the years to come.”

Claire Boissiere, Vice Chair of BGI Trustees, said: “This is a really exciting time for the BGI. Successfully registering as a charity enables us to grow our range of programmes and partner with a much wider group of organisations interested in culture, skills, diversity and sustainability.”

The BGI and Bath Spa University have won Research Council funding to start a new games heritage preservation project that builds ties between Japan and the UK to preserve games heritage.

The project brings together Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Bath Spa University and the National Videogame Museum (NVM) in Sheffield to identify and share best practice in game preservation, curation and exhibition. The project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

A series of collaborations, visits and research starts in May 2019, when the BGI’s Head of Collections Professor James Newman and NVM Director of Culture Iain Simons visit Kyoto, before leading Japanese videogames heritage academics, including the legendary Japanese hardware designer Masayuki Uemura, former head of R&D at Nintendo, visit the UK later in the summer.

The work brings together experts from some of the world’s leading videogames heritage preservation institutions to map the preservation of ‘at risk’ videogames material, identify the latest innovations in the curation and exhibition of videogames and investigate solutions to legal, technical and infrastructural impediments to their preservation and exhibition. A parallel series of events and lectures are planned in both countries before articles are published in journals in early 2020.

The project is a step towards a large-scale exhibition with the NVM in 2020 that will foreground the underrepresented histories of UK and Japanese game development, culture and practice, including the decades of interactions and flows of talent and creativity between these two pioneers and key players in videogaming.

James Newman, Professor of Digital Media at Bath Spa University, said “Videogames are a vital part of contemporary popular culture but they’re in danger of disappearing. As old systems and storage media fail, we run the risk of losing access to games forever so it’s essential that we take steps to preserve them for future generations of players, gamemakers and researchers. Working with the National Videogame Museum and Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies ensures that the project brings together world-leading institutions in the field and allows us to take a truly international approach to the challenges of game preservation, interpretation and exhibition.”

Iain Simons, Director of Culture for the BGI and NVM, said “We’re honoured to be working on this new research project, hoping to add to the knowledge and best-practise of museums around the World through this exciting collaboration. The NVM is an international institution and has enjoyed a long relationship with our esteemed colleagues in Ritsumeikan University as well as colleagues from around the World. Videogames are a global culture, so it’s right that videogame interpretation and preservation is a global effort. We’re excited to be playing our part!”

Continue reading “BGI and Bath Spa University lead British-Japanese collaboration to preserve games heritage”

Grads in Games Awards & ‘Search for a Star’ & ‘Sumo Digital Rising Star’ Finals and Conference Day returns on April 17th, with this year’s event being even bigger and better than ever.

Brought to you by Grads in Games (an Aardvark Swift initiative) this year’s event is being held at Sheffield Hallam University and The National Videogame Museum on April 17th from 9am to 8pm.

The event is free to all students in games education, lecturers and academics involved in games related courses, and games industry professionals who are interested in the next generation of developers. For ticket information contact martin@aswift.com

There will be talks throughout the day from games industry professionals, an academic round table discussion with UK games studios and games educators, and a networking lunch between industry professionals, students and academics.

Confirmed speakers for this year’s event include:

Phil Owen – d3t

Jason Avent – TT Odyssey

Philip Oliver – Game Dragons

Attendees can also meet with studios exhibiting on the day to chat about the industry and careers. Current confirmed exhibitors are Sumo Digital, TT Odyssey, nDreams, d3t, Wargaming, Bulkhead Interactive.

Our industry judges will be interviewing the competition finalists on the day, the last stage for participants after battling their way through two competition rounds over the past few months. Final deliberations will be made, and the winners decided.

The day is rounded off at The National Videogame Museum with the Grads in Games Awards and the crowning of this year’s category winners of the Search For A Star and Sumo Digital Rising Star competitions.

This event couldn’t be organised without the help and support of the Grads in Games partners: Boss Alien, d3t, Epic, Firesprite, First Touch Games, nDreams, Red Kite Games, Sumo Digital.

For more info on our sponsors, visit our website to see their profiles www.gradsingames.com.

The beginning of October saw the latest in the BGI’s series of Continue events. Co-organised by Pilot Theatre and York Mediale, this ambitious two-day annual conference brought together heavyweight speakers from the games, culture and arts sectors, deep insights into some of the most creative and immersive theatre, storytelling and education projects – along with game jams, badgers, and a group of three year olds stress-testing new interfaces for gameplay and blasting into space. Typical Continue fare then!

The two days kicked off with BGI Culture Director Iain Simons discussing the importance of ‘platforms’. Looking over through the experience built up over a decade of running the GameCity festival and the National Videogame Arcade, Iain spoke about the way in which different configurations of creative constraints had created new platforms for commissioning exciting work throughout buildings, in specific rooms or across entire city centres.

The call to think about establishing new platforms for making and commissioning creative work was picked up by the NVA’s Professor James Newman who led the diverse audience of arts and theatre practitioners through their first experience of game making. Based around the unexpected – and unexpectedly inspiring – theme of ‘badgers’, eight teams spent an hour and a half of focused making, breaking and remaking as they designed, playtested and refined their creations. As well as giving rise to the most amazingly varied set of word games, puzzle games and board games, the session highlighted ways of using game mechanics to explore complex ideas (from debates around the control of TB to authenticity of ‘alternative facts’) and showcased new ways of encouraging a greater diversity of participation in gamemaking.

The morning was rounded off by a presentation by Professors Peter Cowling and Marian Ursu from the University of York‘s Digital Creativity Labs on creativity and AI. Provocatively entitled ‘Is creativity the last bastion of humanity?’, Peter and Marian began by considering whether creativity is a uniquely human trait and ended with a fascinating discussion about whether an AI capable of creating visual art or cinematic set design could ever really ‘care’ about what it was doing in the same way as an human.

The afternoon programme comprised talks and showcases by a diverse range of artists and gamemakers including Simon Will from the internationally-renowned collective Gobsquad speaking about the robot opera ‘My Square Lady’, Sarah Butcher from Non Zero One and Tom Bowtell and Elliott Hall from KIT Theatre talking about the pioneering work in immersive theatre.

Sam Barlow made a break in his hectic production schedule and Skyped in from New York to talk about the inspiration for the smash-hit game ‘Her Story’ and the process of creating an original experience based around a computer interface and the true crime genre of fiction. Discussing the perhaps surprising absence of Her Story clones, Sam spoke about the challenges and opportunities of working on the much-anticipated spiritual sequel with the support of Annapurna Interactive.

The first day concluded with Continue’s infamous ‘Panel Machine’ firing out questions on arts funding, code clubs and the U.K. computing curriculum, and opportunities for more cross-sector networking and collaboration.

Again, set in the wonderful Hospitium building in the heart of the grounds of Yorkshire Museum, day two began with the Playable Conference and it was nothing if not diverse. Virtual Reality, the UK premiere of binaural soundworks Nightmare and Sweet Sixteen, brainwave controlled movies with over 17 trillion possible narrative combinations created by the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab, new twists on the board game incorporating mobile phones and social media, or spaceships controlled by tinfoil hats, a selection of fruit and a microcontroller were all on show – the latter being a particular hit with the group of three-year-olds from the local nursery who joined us before their alfresco picnic.

Day two continued with more fascinating talks from Invisible Flock reflecting on the challenges of developing and implementing the ambitious ‘If You Go Away’ augmented reality experience and Leila Johnston’s guide to storytelling and technology which offered insights and practical tips drawn from Hack Space and other work.

Before the Panel Machine was rebooted for the closing session, acclaimed journalist, author and now Media Molecule Narrative Designer Cara Ellison offered a uniquely personal insight into the promise of videogames as a real and virtual space within which to tell new kinds of stories. Delivering a sneak peak into one of the most anticipated PS4 titles ever, Cara demonstrated ‘Dreams’ to a rapt audience of theatre makers and artists.

And so, just as it began with a discussion of platforms for creating new work and engaging new audiences, this edition of Continue closed with a discussion of videogames and gameplay as a platform for new forms of storytelling. And again, we’re proud to have created Continue as a platform to host and showcase such diverse creative works and inspiring ideas.