The Creative Territories Seminar that is taking place in the Summer School is part of a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK for its ‘Videogames Research Networking Scheme’. We want to ask you to help us by using your research skills to execute a small research project of your own. This will also be excellent preparation for the Seminar.

Researching Indie Game Collaboration Where You Live

Investigate any associations involving co-located groups of indie game developers in your area: this can be the city or town you live in, the province or region it is in, or the nation you live in. They might be game makers in a group by themselves or with different kinds of artists or media makers.

Research how the group is organised and operates. Answer these questions to help you:

1. Are they physically co-located all of the time or sometimes?

2. How is the group sustained financially (University funds, Government funds, Corporate sponsorship, contributions from members)?

3. What kind of activities, events, online communications do they operate?

4. How does the group support its members?

5. What kinds of games do members of the group make? Is this part of the group’s identity (eg. are they a group making activist games like molleindustria.org)?

Record any websites, documents etc. that you discovered in your research.

We would like you to produce a short summary of your findings about the indie game collaboration and your assessment of its value to the development of indie games in your area, and/or as a culturally significant media production model. We will be very happy to include your findings on our Creative Territories website once we have reviewed them. Your research might find itself in our final e-publication and you will be credited for that.

Thanks

Patrick Crogan and Helen Kennedy, Project leaders

Any questions? patrick.crogan@uwe.ac.uk