excited
frayer came to visit this week and we went up to see a play directed by hanacandi; not an easy night's entertainment, but wonderfully acted and technically immaculate. Some lovely people are coming to stay in a couple of weeks, though, and after a fair bit of saving up we're hoping to take a little holiday to Italy, probably in May, so there are things to look forward to in the near future.Mostly for the UK games people from hereon, this one.
Something very exciting coming up soon is GameCamp, an unconference of the style where people who hopefully know lots about game-related topics can get together to discuss and play. The first GameCamp took place a couple of years back and this picture of the co-operatively generated schedule board suggests the sort of subject matter, though sadly there doesn't seem to be much other documentation about it and it wasn't even blogged about in as much detail as I'd like.
It's going to take place in That London (well, Richmond, which is -upon-Thames and thus London to the rest of us) on May 8th; tickets are released at noon on Friday 12th March, or this Friday. I am unlikely to be able to go, by virtue of that being likely to be bang in the middle of when we're in Italy, but I'd really appreciate it if someone knowledgeable could go, have conversations like these on my behalf with people who are smarter than me and tell me what the conclusions are:
Why aren't gamers interested in game shows?
Why hasn't there ever been another laser tag?
Why are people computer gamers, RPG players, Games Workshop fans and so on rather than just gamers?
How can the UK get a top-3 World Puzzle Championship team before 2020?
I'm happy to start y'all off and would love to do so in person, but a conversation is better than a monologue. (Or a monololgue, as I Freudian-typoed.)
One of the organisers recently blogged about a video games discussion panel in London, hosted by a MP who I consider a bit of a thug. More relevantly, Nick Palmer MP (who, in what I will claim to be full disclosure but really is just a bit of name-dropping, edited a magazine that I used to write for before he was elected) was reported as having said words to the effect of "we are looking at games Olympiads, ways of reminding people that games are all sorts". (I'd love to hear more specifics, if anybody has them.) Another reason to vote Labour, then... at least, if you're me.
Possibly tied in with this, but more likely not, PartyPoker's PokerBlog suggests that poker has been accepted as a mind sport by the International Mind Sports Association, who organised the World Mind Sports Games in Beijing in 2008. I cynically interpet this announcement to mean that the IMSA are looking to hold another World Mind Sports Games event, but are struggling for sponsors and hoping that one or other of the big online poker companies will sponsor it. If PartyPoker ends up being the sponsor, I wouldn't at all be surprised to see PartyGammon sponsor it as well and backgammon being declared a mind sport as well. (Taking this a step further, even blackjack takes a bit of thought, and I'm sure duplicate blackjack would be even more of a mind sport still.) I hinted at this a couple of years ago (last sentence, second last paragraph) but didn't spell it out explicitly. A logical development, and not an unwelcome one if it means that there'll be a second World Mind Sports Games...
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