Preserving the Games

The festival remains very much about experimenting with different ways we can think about and play games, so the last thing we intend to do is have pods with games on - not because there's anything necessarily wrong with those, but it's also not necessarily the best way to present games.

It's that kind of experimentation in working out how to allow the public the best access points, and hopefully shoring up games as a kind of cultural entities in themselves. Because one of the paralysing problems for the industry is that it spends time worrying about whether it's culture or not. Of course it's culture - so our starting point wasn't even having that discussion, it's going from after that point, working out ways to celebrate it, instead of defending it and validating it.

The problem is that you always end up starting from a defensive position, trying to claim that the stuff is important. Organisations like the National Media Museum... the DCMS has already decided it was going to fund a collection of new media, so there's no point about having the argument about whether we should be doing it or not. The DCMS has already made that decision, rightly, that games should be included.

The biggest thing really was being ambitious about the scope of the things we were going to collect, because the temptation is just to collect games and consoles, and fetish-ise the object. It's not only the fan side, but also the production side of things as well - those stories that don't get told.

Some of the interesting things we're doing with Game City is an expression of some of the archive work - some of the director's commentaries, stuff that you just don't hear, that you're used to hearing in film, and treating it as art, as craft. So Martin Hollis talking about GoldenEye, talking about it in a way that you've never seen before - even for fans of the game that know it inside out, it's a new perspective.

This is one of the core problems with the way that the industry talks about itself - every other creative community celebrates the people that make the work. It isn't about having celebrities, and we understand that it's more than just one person that makes a game, but the absence of a human being at the front of how the industry talks about these things makes is pretty essential.

Of course, there are exceptions, but the problem is that people don't know whose babies these games are. And these are, mostly without exception, really interesting people.

And we have a really poor language for describing games - we tend to easily slip into cliches: "The controls were really fluid," for example. So it's interesting to get insight into the way that these people describe their games as well - hear the vocabulary they're using - and understand stuff like pacing and compromises... to look at these things as art and technology, and even hear some of the banal office politics that humanises this work.

That's the stuff that's going to make people believe that games are culture.