Knights and Bike - Rex Crowle
Our work in the arts involves the very best British and international artistic talent. We help to increase the audience both for international work within the UK and for UK work globally. We bring artists together; supporting the development of skills and policy in the arts and creative industries. Through this work, we ensure that culture plays a vital role in helping us to connect and understand one another.
Bringing games and interactive into the work of the organisation speaks strongly to the idea of culture in its broadest sense — games are high capital creative industry, as well as entertainment, popular media, toys, playful experience, and arts practice. Each of these aspects overlap with each other; intersecting and interacting, producing work, businesses, communities, networks — as well as interacting with wider cultural, creative, and artistic practices.
Tom Mead, Indie game concept
As we began to explore the work undertaken in the UK and globally, we became increasingly interested in how the local informed how people worked and what they made — and also how those people identified as artists, or as we came to think of them: as artist-game makers.
With much of the focus on games and interactive sitting in a global discourse, we questioned what it means to make work in a specific town, city or country, having grown up or moved there as an adult, with an established scene or no peers nearby at all. The result is the 11 interviews and three essays presented here.
Together, they sketch out a picture of the ways that games mingles with space, communities, artistic and commercial imperatives, but always returning to the local and the personal.
By Paul Callaghan