Hello,

This week I’m mostly writing about some neat events at the upcoming London Games Festival! I know about half the people reading this don’t care about games at all, sorry. Honestly, not sure what to do about how inconsistent these newsletters are in terms of whether they’re about books or games or stuff my cats have done. I reckon the best thing is probably just to be very clear at the top about what each newsletter has in it, so if it’s not interesting to you you can tell right away? Anyway, this week it’s really just a bunch of recommendations:

• London Games Festival events

• Some Fringe shows I saw in Adelaide that I thought were good and which are currently on in Melbourne

• Some books and games and so on that I’ve enjoyed lately

LONDON GAMES FESTIVAL EVENTS

ANYWAY. The London Games Festival kicks off on 13 April, and it’ll be running till the 19th. This will be the first year of LGF without Now Play This, a festival of experimental game design that I helped set up over a decade ago. Which is sad, of course! But there’s a bunch of side events going on during LGF that will, I think, be of interest to the sort of person who sometimes went to Now Play This. I’ve been working with LGF on this a tiny bit, and they’ve supported a few different events poking around in this kind of area:

• LADA (the Live Art Development Agency) are putting on The Rules of Watching at 7pm, Wednesday 15 April, at the Garrett Centre in Bethnal Green. This is an artist talk from Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Symoné around spectatorship and agency, building on a two-day game jam — they are both SUCH neat artists working in a very close and informed way with games, and thinking a lot about how play works in gallery spaces, and this should be so interesting.

• Voidspace are putting on Strange Play, a week of events at Theatre Deli near Leadenhall Street. I’d particularly recommend checking out Strange Play: Open Mic on Monday 13 April (“inspired by stand-up comedy and scratch nights, it invites grassroots artists to present short playable works in front of a live audience”), and Strange Play: Showcase on Saturday 18 and Sunday 19 April, a “weekend long exhibition of experimental games, immersive experiences and playable art”. Voidspace have been doing great work, and the lineup for this looks amazing.

• Play Praxis are putting on a day-long mix of demos, roundtables and workshops at Siobhan Davies Studios, 2pm-10pm on Thursday 16 April. ​This is their second event — they ran a wonderful prototype in November last year. This edition, they’re looking in particular at the human mind and the role of play in helping us understand ourselves and each other, with some brilliant games and speakers. It’s a day-long event but structured (and priced!) in a way where dropping in and out is very possible.

• I’m going to be at all of these, but if you’re trying to pick just one, I would say, hmmm: if you’re interested in gallery contexts, in people with a fine art or a live art background who are working with games in a really resolved and thoughtful way, go for LADA; if you’re most interested in weirdness and haphazard experiments, free itch.io games, larp, theatre, or work that has to kind-of create its own context to exist, go for one of the Voidspace events; if you’re most interested in the experimental side of commercial indie games, or games with a social purpose, or academically inclined work, and in seeing conversations develop between these different areas, go for Play Praxis. But it’s not like there are strict borders between any of these types of work! If you can’t get to the one that seems like the best fit, then try one of the others!

There’s also a bunch of other games stuff going on, in and around LGW. For example, here’s some other stuff that might be worth checking out if you’re in town:

• Keza MacDonald and I are gonna be having a chat at the Barnsbury Book Festival in north London, in the afternoon on Saturday 18 April! We’ll be talking about Keza’s great new book on Nintendo, how The Husbands started off as a doomed videogame project, and about books and writing and games more generally

• The Twentieth Century Society is hosting an online talk on Thursday 16th about videogames as architectural archives

• ARCADE is a little free exhibition of playable and playful work made by artists, curated by COVEN, at Hypha Studios just around the corner from King’s Cross — definitely worth dropping in on if you’re in the area

There’s a lot of discourse going on at the moment about the decline of spaces and events for experimental games, but there really are a lot of people trying to find ways to share those games and to have conversations about them, so, you know: if you want these spaces to exist, the best thing you can do to help is to go along and take part.

ADELAIDE FRINGE + SOME COMEDY RECOMMENDATIONS

Okay! What else has been going on? Well, I was back in Adelaide during Fringe, which is always a nice time. We got carried away and saw fifteen or so Fringe shows; some of them were terrible but that’s the point of seeing a bunch of different things, isn’t it.

My favourite was probably Man Sings The Same Song Over And Over Again For An Hour, by Conk, a show which really does deliver on its title. The whole show is basically just a display of incredible virtuosity; part of what keeps you watching is the sense of “come on, this can’t possibly work, can it?”. Like a circus show where someone is flipping around and catching onto ropes, but instead of “can she genuinely jump in the air and spin around a bunch and not break any limbs, surely not” it’s “can he genuinely sing the same song over and over again, with just enough charm and variation that it works as a show”. And… yeah! he can! There’s a big timer countdown in the corner of the room, running 60:00→0:00, which is such a great touch, there’s little running jokes and moments that develop, but also the core of it is the repetition. We saw this at 5:45pm — surely not ideal timing for something like this, surely you want people to have had a couple of beers — and even so it ended with the whole audience raucously yelling “ONE MORE SONG, ONE MORE SONG”.

If you’re in Melbourne — where the Comedy Festival is currently on, with a lot of shows that were just in Adelaide — then you too can see this man sing the same song over and over again for an hour.

Other stuff we saw in Adelaide that I loved, and that’s currently showing in Melbourne: Mish Wittrup’s Not As Good As I Remember, which is trad one-person-talking standup, so charming and funny, and Hot Department’s Amalgamation, which is sketch comedy and generally great, a bunch of inside jokes told with so much conviction that they make you feel like you are, in fact, part of that inside; there’s a sketch that’s just an impersonation of one of the performer’s dads and it’s somehow one of the best things in the show.

SOME THINGS I’VE ENJOYED LATELY

• I find it a little embarrassing sometimes to read and enjoy the Litfic Books That Everyone Is Talking About. That particular sort of novel about a slightly wry woman in, probably, New York, having some emotions about her life. Probably longlisted for the women’s prize. Good sentences, good observations. How shamefully predictable that I would like them. But! I read Katie Kitamura’s Audition and Erin Somers’ The Ten-Year Affair and I thought they were both so good! So beautifully structured! I liked them both very much! Just because I feel too conspicuously like the target audience for something doesn’t mean the something isn’t great!

• Terry and Kerry and I went to the current London production of the musical The Producers. I’ve never seen the movie — I’m not by nature a movie person, I think I tried to watch it once and got kind-of bored and drifted away — but yeah, this was great. West End theatre is wild, isn’t it, something that relies on hundreds and hundreds of people to come along every single night. How many people do you reckon there are watching a big-budget musical or a long-running play in London, on a typical night, sitting across all the different theatres? Like, twenty thousand, maybe? The mechanics of how people are made aware of what shows are on and then convinced that there’s one in particular they should go and see and that they should buy some quite expensive tickets to do that, I don’t know, it seems so terrifying, so precarious. When I go to the theatre it is usually such a contingent thread that leads me to end up at a particular show — maybe I know someone who’s involved in it, or someone posted a review somewhere, or a friend saw some cheap tickets and suggested it, or I thought “god I LIVE in LONDON I should go and DO THINGS more often” and I googled “what is HAPPENING in LONDON that I should DO”. Theatres with six hundred or nine hundred or fourteen hundred seats that need to draw so many individual people every night, pulling them in on these delicate snappable threads.

• Print Gallery of an Artist by Daniel Linssen is a really lovely free, short platformer game. Very beautiful and baffling to navigate. It got a bit hard for me maybe five levels in, a kind-of square grey level which I didn’t get past, but that was fine; mostly it’s just a series of spaces to explore and be gently confused by and I loved it.

Okay, that’s it for this week! Next time, books again.

Best,
Holly