igfest : The Interesting Games Festival

Taking place in and around the Harbourside in Bristol, as part of the Bristol Festival from Fri 19 to Sun 21 Sept igfest will be the first event in the South West that actively encourages people to rediscover their city through playing games on the street.

At igfest you won't find players hunched for hours over screens or shuffling counters around a board - that is unless the screen is 20ft tall and mounted on the side of a building, or the board is Queen’s Square and the counters are the players themselves...

Some games require stamina, some require puzzle-solving. Some games last for hours, some for a few minutes. Some games are completely low-fi, and some games use advanced technology to enable a whole new way of playing. But none of these games requires payment - the entire festival is free to play.

One game may see you fleeing along the harbourside with a Pac Man ghost on your tail, another has you playing snakes and ladders up and down the stairs and ramps of a multi-story car park.

igfest organisers, Simon Johnson and Simon Evans describe their vision for the festival:

Imagine the city of Bristol as one giant playground... Everyone is playing - running, hiding, seeking, finding, escaping, tagging....Imagine interactive games jumping off the computer screen and landing slap bang on the streets of the city. No more screen glare, no more joysticks, no more consoles - just you and your team battling it out in a mad selection box of multiplayer games in the real world. Imagine igfest…

Running over three days, igfest has something for everyone - the old, the young, families, singles, technophobes, skater boys, uptown girls, marketing executives and mechanics - all will find a game to tease, tantalise and thrill.

The games are some of the hottest in the world, created by a variety of national and international gamers, theater companies, and creative agencies, crossing the boundaries between art, technology and performance.

Swings

igfest has been programmed by iglab the monthly event that gives players early access to new games and offers a play-testing facility to the designers. Earlier this year igfest organisers, Simon Johnson and Simon Evans, were invited to New York to take part in the international games festival, Come Out and Play .

Find out more about igfest at www.igfest.org.

igfest is part of Bristol Festival and is supported by the South West Regional Development Agency, the Pervasive Media Studio and Watershed.