New social development initiative launches ahead of Nottingham’s fifth GameCity video game festival.
Today, GameCity officially unveiled OpenGameCity. The festival continues to evolve as it takes its first step towards transparency and democratisation with this new user-participation initiative.
OpenGameCity is a set of tools and specifications that allow developers, publishers, students, specialist practitioners and amateur enthusiasts a clearer way to interact with, participate in, and build, and extend, their GameCity experience. The programme is in its early stages, and launched alongside the festival’s preview event tonight at Antenna, Nottingham.
Festival director, Iain Simons, said: “We’re really excited to be able to release version 0.6b of the Draft festival spec and can’t wait to get people’s responses to it. This is a real change to how we develop and think about the festival, and we’re looking forward to discovering how it will be changed and extended by the people that care about it.”
As well as providing a platform for content creators, OpenGameCity is also inviting the active participation of venues and other locations around the city, in a bid to extend the footprint of the festival and develop the leisure economy of Nottingham City Centre.
“The ‘City’ part of our title has always been as important as the ‘Game’ to us. We’re hugely excited to be able to explore ways in which video game culture can really participate in the life of a city, the Takahashi playground project being our first effort towards that,” said Simons.
GameCity reaches its fifth anniversary this year and has grown substantially in scale since its modest beginnings in 2006. For the 2010 festival, the festival team are seeking to create new ways in which it can be of value to people who want to get involved. GameCity is about celebrating and exploring video game culture, and as such, OpenGameCity invites ideas from anyone with something to contribute, not just game creators.
GameCity 5 takes place in Nottingham on Oct 26-30, 2010. Find out more about OpenGameCity and participate yourself via the submission page at www.gamecity.org.
For more on the coming festival check out GameCity and follow them on Twitter.
Aaron Lee
Tags: community, gamecity, nottingham, ugc
