London Games Festival 2012 – VIDEO GAME NEWS & UPDATE

As the the London Games Festival 2012 has today entered its second full week, organiser Ukie has unveiled some of the sights, sounds and games that have made the festival so far – and added three new events to the calendar.

“The first 10 days or so have been, frankly, bloody brilliant,” says Kirsty Payne, event director, London Games Festival. “We kicked off with the brilliant Eurogamer Expo, which again broke new records, then moved onto some really excellent initiatives which have shown unique ways to celebrate gaming culture. And this is only the start – there are loads more events scheduled for the coming month. I urge anyone thinking about attending one of these events to make sure they do.”

The Journo-Dev-Swap-Game Jam caused perhaps the biggest stir last week – a 48-hour game design challenge, which saw developers become journalists and journalists become developers (with the help of student coders). You can catch up on these astonishing two days at Develop Online (http://www.develop-online.net/news/category/66/JournoDevSwap) or the official Tumblr (journodevswap.tumblr.com) and play the results – for free here: http://www.indieskies.com/journodevswap/. (Spoilers: Keith Stuart and Theo Chin won best game, and Lionhead’s Mark Backler was crowned best developer journalist).

Award-winning radio show One Life Left brought its celebrated karaoke to the capital for the first time on Thursday. The packed Walkabout Temple was ‘treated’ to tunes such as Crazy Taxi (to the tune of Paparazzi), an astonishing Heavy Rain (with huge apologies to Prince and the colour purple) and what felt like the whole of Imperial College on-stage singing about what it would be like to work at one of the UK’s most successful game developers Rockstar, to the tune of Nickelback’s hit.

Jam_Sponge has kindly put his photos on Flickr (www.bit.ly/TbjV8i) , whilst a video of Paparazzi can be found here www.bit.ly/SXAcOq

Three new events that have just been announced are: Game Art vs Street Art on Thursday 18th October, ‘44 Club: Games and marketing, what’s the score?’ On 22nd October, and Digital Shoreditch’s Halloween Scarethon on October 27th.
Team Lumo, the development team at Blitz Games Studios behind unique action-adventure ‘rain-‘em-up’ Kumo Lumo, has partnered with Graffik Gallery in Notting Hill, London to present an exhibition that will showcase work from some of the biggest and best urban artists in the UK alongside artwork created exclusively for the event by Team Lumo themselves. The exhibition will feature artwork from renowned artists Tim Lewis, Andrew McAttee, DeadCert, International Nobody and Static. The exhibition will be held on Thursday 18th October at Graffik Gallery, 284 Portobello Road, London W10 5TE from 10:30am.

Companies are increasingly trying to incorporate brand-based online, mobile and social games into their marketing. But what does this really mean for brands and the people in charge of them? What are the practicalities? Do consumers really want to play “advergames”? Is “gamification” just the latest overhyped new thing? Or worse, simply a wasteful and distracting fad that does little to build brands and consumer engagement? What does a successful brand-based game actually look like? On 22nd October at the ICA Yarden Yaroshevski, CEO, Stikipixels, Dr Richard Bartle, Professor of Game Design, Essex University and Chris Deering, Former CEO and president of Sony Computer Entertainment will tackle all of these questions, exploring the benefits and pitfalls of using games in campaigns and how to best use the new opportunities gaming provides. The event will be chaired by Jo Twist, CEO, Ukie.

London-based Digital Shoreditch, the team behind the annual Digital Shoreditch Festival, is excited to announce their Scareathon – a Halloween-flavoured hackathon extravaganza. It will be held on Saturday October 27th at Ravensbourne University in London, as part of the 2012 London Transmedia Festival in partnership with Ravensbourne, Queen Mary University, City University, MSN UK. The goal of the event is to design, make, build, or create a project (virtual or actual) in the spirit of Halloween with the intent of inducing surprise or fear. The outcomes might include websites, apps, physically interactive projects or digitally-created soundscapes, among other things.

Highlights this week include GamerDisco on Wednesday at the Book Club Shoreditch, plus the IGN Pub Quiz at Walkabout Temple on Thursday night.

Full details can be found at www.londongamesfestival.com
The London Games Festival is held in association with Ukie and The Guardian.