Announce O’Clock

Announcements.

So many damn announcements. So let me just skip the preamble and get right in there shall I?

Meet Ben

That terrifying beard in human form is games journalist Ben Barrett. He’s going to be taking over our social media/blog for the foreseeable future. This doesn’t mean I’m stepping away or Emma will move away from livetweeting our events, it’s just that we’re trying to be more of a consistent presence. As I’m trying to bring VideoBrains to more places, I just don’t have the time to look after things. MORE ABOUT THIS LATER.

Ben, Alan and I are sprucing up the site at the moment and you’ll start to see a new format. The individual talk posts are going bye bye, replaced with more detailed youtube summaries. Along the top you can see a lot more options than before, including an option to give us feedback/pitch talks and report problems with events via our contact form. You can back us on Patreon, follow us on Twitter or get to our talks easily.

The VideoBrains site will start to host more of the opinion pieces and reviews that we’ve been running before and then ignoring, and we’ll start to be more active on Facebook and Twitter after June’s event too. Our earlier talk posts have already vanished and you should see them all clearing off in the next week or two.

Think of it as an experiment, and if it doesn’t work, we’re all going to blame Ben in unison.

Holy Format Changes, JakeMan!

We’re not taking questions any more.

I’m not kidding. No questions, no more.

I’ve been thinking for a long time about how we’d go about this and there’s a few reasons. I’m going to lay them out.

• Questions don’t really add anything to the talking experience for a lot of people.

You can talk to the speakers at the front after their talk. This happens at the end of every talk as it is, but it means the audience can choose to engage and ask their own questions or they can go and get a beer.

Many questions are just for personal understanding (which is why I don’t really ask many, because I have the benefit of being able to email speakers after the events) and which that may be valuable for some people, it’s not for everyone.

• Structurally they are beneficial for what we’re trying to do.

By changing this we’re in a position now to group talks together. This means the structure will go from 1 talk 1 break to 2 talks 1 break. This means you guys get less breaks but more substantial breaks. I don’t need to wrestle to get people to sit down again and you guys don’t need to be watching your watches while you’re trying to chat.

• Keeping to time with questions is really hard.

Keeping to time when you factor in questions actually is really hard, guys.

• Keeping to time with questions is really really hard.

Seriously. You have no idea. So hard.

VideoBrains in MORE PLACES.

This bit is quite exciting.

We’ll be appearing at NineWorlds as part of the Video Games Culture track this year. This is really exciting for me personally because VideoBrains was born out of the Video Games Culture track last year. There’s no cost for the event, if you’ve got a 9W ticket, you can swing by and watch me try something different.

It’ll be an evening of micro-talks: 9 talks that are 9 minutes long to commemorate 9 Worlds. If you’re at NineWorlds, do get in touch. Talks about 9 doves are bound to annoy Tim immensely so do pitch those at me.

I got Tim to say some words.

I was really proud when Jake approached me after 2014’s Nine Worlds to say he’d been inspired by the atmosphere to set something up. It’s exactly the sort of thing we were hoping 9W might inspire, and it’s been amazing to watch it grow – it just goes to show the want people have for more in-depth, conceptual events about video games. Having started off sharing our speakers, now we’re sharing theirs! It’s great to see it come full circle and we’re super excited to host them this year.”

I’ll also be talking about some of those there eSports on a panel with some other nice folks.

Secondly, Brighton!

We don’t have a full date for this yet, but we’ll be running a VideoBrains as part of Brighton Games Week, which is running as part of the Digital Festival 11-20 September.

We don’t have a solid date for this yet, but I’d love to take pitches already with a theme of: Strange Lands.

Tickets for June.

It’s next Saturday. The 20th. Do come along.