Game Arts International Network
Interconnecting Game Arts Organizations, Collectives, and Curators
The third Game Arts International Assembly will be happening June 5-7th, 2023 in Toronto, Canada. With a participant cap of 20, GAIA is an intimate symposium for game art curators and game community organizers to level up their professional development and connect with their international peers. In addition to on site talks sharing personal experiences, playful workshops, and practical sessions, GAIA will include field trips to different locations in the city.
We’re starting a new project and we want to hear from you!
If You Don’t Like the Game, Change the Rules: Alternative Modes of Videogame Production will be a print comic and white paper about work and games available at events like Game Developers Conference, A MAZE. Berlin, and more.
Continue reading “If You Don’t Like the Game, Change the Rules”
In GAIA’s fallow year we want to plant some seeds for our 2023 (hopefully in-person) symposium with a casual open discussion series. We asked some folks in the game arts community what questions they’re wrestling with these days…
Shalev wondered How do you find your people once you immigrate to a new place?
Louie inquired How do you create a sustainable workshop or communal space?
Gwen mulled over How do you get other cultural workers into games?
Jim struggled with How do you work collaboratively in a fractured community?
Come and chime in! These are not GAIA sessions — they will be very informal 1 hour online hangs where our hosts will be asking a question they don’t know the answer to. We’ll do them every last Saturday of the month for as long as people have questions to play with. (You can suggest one here for later in the year!)
The first one will be Saturday Jan 29th at 11AM EST. (Subscribe to the gcal here for this and future months as the exact time will change to accommodate different time zones).
This series is a project of the Game Arts International Assembly, organized by Luján Oulton (Game on! El arte en juego), Jim Munroe and Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan (Game Arts International Network). Illustration: Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan.
Game Arts Curators Kit is a new seventy page handbook for anyone interested in bringing a curatorial eye to the presentation of videogames. Over 25 writers and editors have generously shared their field-tested experiences of exhibiting games, spanning the practical to the political, the ethical to the esthetic.
Beginning as an idea in a session led by María Luján Oulton and Chad Toprak at GAIA 2019, Chaz Evans and Rene G. Cepeda took up the massive task of coordinating the writing of over 25,000 words on our nascent art practice during GAIA 2021.
It’s currently available in wiki form and invites input from the community, with plans in progress to have it published physically by VGA Gallery. There will be a roundtable on its creation as a part of Society of Literature, Science and Arts 2021 on Oct. 1st.
Continue reading “Game Arts Curators Kit & Community Calls”This year’s symposium had over 300 attendees check out over 18 hours of programming over the past few months. We heard fascinating perspectives from speakers from 21 countries and feel like we shared some important conversations!
Will you help us make future editions of GAIA even better? Fill in our 3-minute feedback form to help shape our shared future.
You can discover or revisit all the sessions in our doodle documentation — there’s one delightful page for each.
(Fullscreen recommended, click the >> button then select Presentation Mode.)
We are more than half way through the Game Arts International Assembly 2021 at this point and we thought we’d give a bit of a summary of some of the highlights thus far. We chose to have Mer Grazzini doodle document the sessions to give people sense of what they were like! Here’s The New Spacemakers session:
Why should you stop using an ironing board as a desk?
What does your manager secretly want you to know about work-from-home?
What are the top ten challenges and benefits to remote working for Canadian game studios?
Isolation Nation is a collection of articles featuring work-from-home tips, best practices, and insights about remote videogame creation.
Continue reading “Isolation Nation”
The Game Arts International Assembly is a stretched symposium for game art curators and game community organizers.
9 sessions spread over two months. Free to one and all. And starting next week!
We have already received a number of exciting proposals for Game Arts International Assembly sessions and have started working with people to flesh them out. However, there’s still a few more days for you to submit any ideas you might have via our not-very-taxing form. For further inspiration check out our programming from our first edition. Selected sessions will receive an honorarium.
Continue reading “GAIA Proposal Deadline”
This time last year we held the first Game Arts International Assembly in Buenos Aires, and it was a pretty wonderful experience. Over twenty game arts curators, festival directors and community organizers travelled from a dozen different countries for a thinktank addressing our common challenges. Some of us explored Patagonia after, where the discussions continued.
Continue reading “GAIA 2021 Registration Open”