GameCity news

Date: Wednesday 28th October, 6.30pm – 10:00pm

Venue: Broadway Media Centre, Nottingham, NG1 3AL

Hide&Seek team up with GameCity and the Broadway Cinema for the eighth leg of the Sandpit UK Tour, offering the people of Nottingham the chance to take part in a free social gaming extravaganza.

Hide&Seek’s events have been a regular fixture on London’s Southbank, introducing the public to cultural destinations which they may not have visited, or heard of, and transforming the spaces to incorporate art, music, theatre and everything from lasers and fluffy toys to grand pianos. Hide&Seek’s brand of social gaming has long been an escape for its regular gamers and their events have been seen as a great way for people to get together and have fun, as well as being a popular social alternative to going to the pub.

The Nottingham leg of the Sandpit Tour will showcase Sandpit’s unrivalled mix of pervasive, social and traditional games. Including Moveyhouse, a cinematic adventure inspired by a legendary ‘happening’ in 1960s New York and Scoop! which tasks players with catching celebrities on camera indulging or exposing their private, personal, scandalous secrets. Plus for those just dropping by or who are caught between which games to play there are a

number Pick and Play Games giving players the chance to take part in small drawing games, Victorian parlour games

and more, with rules and props included.

Iain Simons, Director of GameCity said: "GameCity isn't just a clever name - the City really is as important as the Game. We work really hard to develop new strategies to bring people together, playing in their natural habitat - so it's

great to be able to work with the brilliant Hide&Seek folks in bringing Sandpit to Nottingham during the festival."

Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema is the eighth stop on the Sandpit UK Tour before it visits Sheffield and Newcastle introducing the north to the unique immersive Sandpit experience.

Hide&Seek director Alex Fleetwood comments on the Sandpit UK Tour: "Games have broken out of the video screen - live, social experiences that get you interacting with the world around you, playing with real people, and seeing your city in a different way. The Sandpit tour celebrates all the possibilities of playing games in the real world, bringing artist and gamers together in a friendly, engaging environment."

Media enquiries: Alison Beasley, Lincoln Beasley PR. T: +44 (0) 1608 645756 E: alison@lincolnbeasley.co.uk

T. +44 (0)20 7749 6850 Daniel Lipman: daniel.lipman@ideageneration.co.uk

www.ideageneration.co.uk

Paul Drury: pauld@ideageneration.co.uk

For full details on Hide&Seek and the Sandpit UK Tour please visit www.hideandseekfest.co.uk.

Editor’s Notes

Ticket Information

You can reserve a free place for this Sandpit by calling the Broadway Box Office on 0115 952 6611.

Or simply turn up as we will ensure there are some spaces reserved on the door.

Hide&Seek

Hide&Seek make social games and playful experiences. They founded the UK's first festival of pervasive games in London in 2007, and have been working, thinking & playing together since then. They run the Sandpit, a thriving network of artists, game designers and players, and produce events with cultural venues around the UK.

They work with brands, broadcasters and agencies to help them understand participation and community. And they design, build and runa lot of really cool stuff, at any scale.

The Sandpit

The Sandpit is the game design community supported by Hide&Seek. Bringing together artists, game designers and players and allowing them to collaborate creatively, the Sandpit has created more than 50 new games in the last year alone, and tried them out at monthly gaming events held in galleries, cinemas and under railway arches in London. Over the past two months Playmakers has been a central feature of these events, and special sessions have given game makers and players the chance to try out new rules and refine the game further. Collaborators

can follow the game’s evolution on www.playmakers.org.uk, where they can also contribute their own ideas.

Alex Fleetwood

Alex Fleetwood founded Hide&Seek in 2007 and has had a hand in all its projects since then. As well as Hide&Seek, Alex has produced projects including The Eternity Man, a film opera for Channel 4 / ABC Australia. The film reached a global audience of half a million people and recently won the Rose d'Or, one of the most prestigious awards in television. Alex sits on the London advisory panel for Artists Taking the Lead, the main commissioning programme for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, and recently won the British Council UK Young Performing Arts Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Holly Gramazio

Holly Gramazio curates the Sandpit, Hide&Seek's monthly pervasive gaming night. The rest of the time she designs her own games, pervasive and otherwise, helps other people and organisations to design theirs, writes short stories about the London Underground and bakes quite a lot of cakes. Holly recently completed her PhD in online fiction. More information about her projects is available at www.severalbees.com

Continued from previous page

GameCity

GameCity is a lot of things, but most of all it's an ongoing project to find out what a videogame festival could be.

Unlike a lot of videogame events, it’s not really a place to come and play them - we’d rather do that at home on the sofa. But if you do love videogames, you’re going to find lots here to enjoy. There’s something at GameCity for anyone who’s interested in

interesting things. If there’s something you’d really like to see us do which we haven’t yet - then get in touch. Here's how...

http://gamecity.org/

Broadway Cinema

Broadway provides a unique cinema going experience with a packed programme of film screenings, talks, festivals, courses and digital art exhibitions. In October 2006 Broadway completed a £6m development that has seen the addition of two new cinema screens (making four in total), two state-of-the-art digital projectors (for superior quality sound and image), the worlds first (and only) Paul Smith cinema auditorium and a stunning glass front that can host digital art projections. In 2007, Total Film Magazine named Broadway one of the top 10 cinemas in the world due to its

‘chocolate love seats’ designed by Nottingham’s international designer Sir Paul Smith.

Partners

Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Playmakers is funded and produced in collaboration with NESTA

www.hideandseekfest.co.uk

www.sandpit.hideandseekfest.co.uk

http://gamecity.org/