The magic fairy dust of the game: National Videogame Arcade powers up in Nottingham

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Maths and magic as the £2.5 million National Videogame Arcade prepares to open to the public in Nottingham

“What was your symbol?” asks Iain Simons, the gently tiggerish Co-Director of Nottingham’s proud new National Videogames Arcade, encouraging a gamer partaking in a square-off, Bash and Dash, involving the kind of huge red buttons which might appear faintly intimidating to anyone less carefree than a child.

“Pants, it was pants,” replies an opponent demonstrably on the way to victory. “You’ve lost me already,” concedes the resigned tone of the defeated.

Everything is on freeplay in this generous arcade, giving a Willy Wonka sense as you breeze through its five floors. The newest addition to Nottingham’s cultural quarter, it is neither a bewilderingly hi-tech nor hyperactively infantile place, although it could be either of those for visitors who will it so.

What it is, most purely, is an introduction and exploration of the fabric and nuts and bolts of digital technology. The NASA-style Mission Control allows people to customise their own virtual world through pedals, buttons and art, using sprites – a two-dimensional animation projected within the large central screen – or making their own animations, drawing the background or incorporating their photo into a game’s constellation.

A relatively simple entrée to coding designed by some of the best brains in the business, this segues into a room where Minecraft, the logistical grandaddy of all building block games, is set into a virtual reality portal. The light streaming through the windows today, apparently, is unconducive to the darkness of the giant helmet visitors are invited to arch their heads into.

Elsewhere, there’s an impressive, decade-spanning take on A History of the World in 100 Objects, although fans of a certain age – say, old enough not to consider the 1995 Sega Saturn a relic requiring explanation– might feel dispiritingly old at certain junctures.

Witness the building’s spinal column, as Simons terms it, and you might sense the abiding intention. It looks like the stairwell of a Victorian school. There is a great and pronounced potential for academic rigour here, which is not to say it’s a dry set of displays.

The interactive elements are almost always amusing and thought-provoking on various levels, from physics to brute gamesmanship: the first temporary exhibition, in the middle, is all about jumping. From the sample of available participants it seems that may not take a leap of faith. It might, however, require reinforced floors.

The spaces where learners can pick apart and mess around with games at their earliest stages offer a transparent framework of ingenuity and play. Rarely under one roof is there such a casual lineage between the conceptually colossal and the deeply frivolous, where a detailed deconstruction of coding can exist beneath a wall on which grown adults transpose their life force to a pair of brightly-coloured virtual pants.

“It sends a great positive message to parents, teachers, media, government about the games beyond entertainment,” muses Ian Livingstone, the BAFTA winner who received a CBE for services to the games industry in 2006. “They are of cultural significance.

“You only have to look at people enjoying smartphones or devices and the diversity of people playing and making games now. It’s good that it’s all happening now, for people to see, within this building.

“It’s turning children from playing to making games, but not just within the games industry. Computer science is a discipline. It underpins the digital world in which children find themselves in the same way that Latin underpins the analogue world.

“It’s not just about coding, it’s releasing creativity. It’s thinking, getting kids to figure things out by learning and by doing.”

Problem solving, intuitive learning and making mistakes in a safe environment are other qualities the team here, who want to involve as wide an audience as possible, extol. They want to crack the borders between art and science, the high-end cinematics of Hollywood and the decidedly more lo-fi interface of YouTube.

But on a simpler level, there’s a reassuring constant. “People keep asking me what the most important things than run it through it are,” Livingstone says with unwavering certainty. “Gameplay, gameplay, gameplay.

“Technology and graphics play a supporting role, and it’s an important one. But the magic fairy dust is the game.”

• The National Videogame Arcade opens in Nottingham on March 28 2015. Admission £6.50-£8.50 (free for under-5s, family ticket £20-£25). Visit GameCity for full details.

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Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk//science-and-nature/technology/art522049-the-magic-fairy-dust-of-the-game-national-videogame-arcade-powers-up-in-nottingham