GameCity calls on public for speaker proposals

GameCity Squared has opened up its programme, calling for anyone to submit an idea for talk, presentation or panel on videogames, according to the event's director Iain Simons.

Describing this year's festival in Nottingham as having a "radically different approach", Simons explained how the 2008 event lost the "openness" that differentiated itself from other expos.

"We all really wanted to restore the openness of it," he told GamesIndustry.biz. "[Last year] was great but really wasn't quite open enough and lost the spirit of the first few years - so we're definately going to try to recapture that this year.

"Open in the sense of giving literally anyone the opportunity to potentially stumble across something fantastically interesting. The barriers we put up last year were the price, the geography - not everybody wants to go into a night club - and to some extent the marketing of it. So this year it's going to be as open as it possibly can be for just anyone to discover, hopefully, something wonderfully interesting."

He explained that GameCity didn't see itself in competition with any other events in the UK, in that it was trying to be more creative and draw in non-gamers.

"We're looking to take risks and experiment a bit," he said. "I'd like to think that GameCity is a place where you can see different approaches to how we might talk about, enjoy, explore and think about games. Some of those might be rubbish but some of those might be brilliant too.

"I think we give people a different way to discover the understanding and appreciation of what games are," he added.

Simons said that the games industry had reacted more positively that he expected to the open nature of the show.

"What really delighted and surprised me was actually that we heard from the industry, from developers and such, that what they really enjoyed was the openness… the demand from developers and publishers for that kind of openness was fantastic."

He announced that that this year's event would be the first to have an open structure so that anyone could contact him to propose an event or talk anywhere in the city.

"In the past GameCity has been programmed by me and to some extent that will continue to be true this year but also in the spirit of openness we want to really open it up to people who might want to do something," he explained.

"So if anyone's got an idea about how they might want to talk about games - we'd really, really like to hear from you."

Those interested in proposing an idea were advised to contact Iain Simons through the GameCity website