Tomorrow evening GameCity, Nottingham's wonderful videogame festival is starting a new monthly project. Taking place at the city's brand new Antenna centre for creative business, GameCityNights is essentially a series of 'talks' by leading gaming luminaries, followed by Q&A sessions, snacks and a, in typical GameCity style - a videogame trivia quiz.
This week's inaugural event will feature Hello Games, the indie gaming start-up behind forthcoming digitally distributed stunt bike sim, Joe Danger, which has already been enthusiastically embraced by the likes of Edge and Eurogamer - partly because the guys behind Hello Games have immense pedigree, coming from senior roles at the likes of Criterion, Sumo and Kuju; and partly because it looks bloody great. "They will be sharing secrets, anecdotes and show'n'telling this brilliant new game and they *might* even let you play," says festival director Iain Simons. It seems that From Software's lovely 3D Dot Game Heroes will also be making some sort of appearance.
Tickets are £3 on the door, and there's more info here. You can also follow the GameCityNights Twitter feed.
I think there should be events like this up and down the country on an extremely regular basis. Now that games are a mass market sociable proposition there just aren't enough opportunities to get together and talk about them in a, ahem, real-world setting.
On Gamesblog, we've often talked about the prospect of gaming versions of book clubs, while there are plenty of film clubs where indie cinemas show off new and forthcoming movies followed by Q&A sessions with the makers; this format can work just as well for games, as hopefully tomorrow evening's soiree should show.
Videogames have made it as a mainstream entertainment business, but they're yet to slip comfortably into the sociocultural milieu. BAFTA is making a lot of important strides in this direction, adding game-related events to its calendar of talks and discussion nights: just last week, Mark Morris and Chris Delay from Introversion were at the David Lean Room talking about Darwinia + (there's a review here).
What do you think? What would make a good videogame-related semi-cultural night out for you?
