Archive: August 23rd, 2003: Edinburgh International Games Festival / Insert Credit
Hello and welcome to my workblog. If you’ve stumbled here by accident, drunkenly blinded or traumatised by the other dark corners of the Internet, then perhaps you might like to find out more about me at my biography, or if you’re in the mood to hire me, you might want to check out my resume. If you’re the patient type, though, you might prefer to stick around here, as I’ll be going through my archives and posting up links and commentary of all of my writing until now, daily, until I run out. Then this will probably turn into the usual ramblings these things end up as.
Until this year, all the art forms but one. This year marked the introduction of the Edinburgh International Games Festival – a festival dedicating itself to ‘celebrating the cultural impact of video games’, which hoped to validate gaming as an art through a public gaming exhibition, a ‘Game Over Film’ debate in conjunction with the Edinburgh Film Festival, and an industry day of discussions and lectures. But was it successful?”
It’s only fitting that I begin my workblog with a link to my first published work online, and it is, roughly, the first piece of video games journalism I ever wrote. My first draft was an insanely dull explanation of everything that happened, written in a kind of “he said this, then she said that, then he said this” way, and it’s thankful that Brandon Sheffield (editor of Insert Credit) knocked it back more or less instantly. Of course, he didn’t actually approve this version, which was posted up by Vincent Diamante (co-creator of IC) so I don’t know what he thinks about it, even now.
This was written in the dark old days when you had to HTML your own articles for them to get posted up (a system, actually, that Insert Credit is still using, which is why articles are posted so rarely). This is the reason the formatting is occasionally iffy. Still! My first article, and I’d already rubbed shoulders with the delightful Ste Curran and David McCarthy (previously Edge staffers, now sworn protectors of the wonderful Triforce) and I wrote a fairly amusing, and only slightly libellous, appendix.
August 16th, 2006 : Archive, Features, Insert Credit