Let’s all go to the lobby… How you can vote for SFL in the Games Media Awards 2013
Here at SFL, our idea of a lobby conjures up an image of a red carpet jutting up to a black counter where we dip hands into striped, fluted boxes of warm sweet popcorn before we scurry past cardboard cut-outs of our favourite sci-fi heroes en route to the darkness and magic of the cinema screen.
So when a colleague advised us to lobby for this year’s Games Media Awards, we were initially baffled, not only due to the distinct lack of popcorn in the process but because SFL is not a gaming or media site.
Why would people consider donating their vote to us?
My answer?
For all of the following reasons I’d like to share with everyone who over the past three years has engaged with the games section we are proud to have at SCI-FI-LONDON. We are and always will predominately be a film festival; passionate about bringing a mix of rare, eclectic, sensational, and original cinema to the UK. With an international reputation, we are the UK’s biggest sci-fi genre event yet our core intention has always remained the same over the past 12 years: to challenge stereotypes whilst being fun and inclusive.
Following a chance meeting in 2010, SFL Festival Director Louis Savy asked me if I knew anything about videogames and was I capable of stringing words together online. We both felt that it was time to fully embrace videogames within the festival and created the games section on the SFL website. Games have always played a crucial role in the festival’s history as AAA titles like Dead Space and Starcraft II had been main festival sponsors. After going hands on and watching game trailers in between films, once fest-goers had left the venue, the cables and banners were neatly packed away and games would become a distant memory for another year. The occasional title would find itself dropped on the festival office doormat yet would remain pristine in its cellophane wrapper until perhaps bundled in with other DVDs as a competition prize or finally taken home during a tidy up.
Cracking open a copy of EA’s Dante’s Inferno we knew that to avoid any review being swallowed up in the swell of games media coverage, we had to show we could do things differently; to challenge what stereotypically a game review was whilst being fun and inclusive for our mixed audience. The result was the first ever “His and Hers Review”, exploring the game from a male and female perspective, getting under the skin of the characters, sharing what we enthused or rage quit over and laying our opinions side by side. It’s still one of the strongest features on the site and I can probably count on one hand the number of titles myself and fellow writer Ian Abbott find aspects to agree on.
What we do all agree on at SFL is that gaming is now a hugely important part of what we do and we sincerely believe that videogames and related products should be positively promoted and celebrated with as wide an audience as possible. We aim to provide our loyal, enthusiastic, educated and equally passionate audience with quality news, previews, reviews and interviews, not just during our festivals but all year round. You won’t find a score attached to any SFL review, and we try to avoid jabbering on using gaming lingo about frame rates or what controller button does what. We’re likely to skim over details like budgets, size of development teams, comparisons to Zelda, how many weapons you can hold in your inventory, or whether a title is better on the XStation or PlayBox. We take each game as we would a movie and comment on our connection to the game, whether it was fun and what we think makes it worth telling other people about. That’s what we do as a festival and this is part of the fabric of the games section. We’re not attempting to compete with other games media outlets in terms of the timing and quantity of our coverage. We don’t even bother covering the bad stuff (unless it’s so surprisingly terrible we simply can’t help ourselves *cough, Thor: The Video Game cough*) but what we do offer is hopefully an interesting, insightful, alternative view that contributes to an industry that we find exciting, diverse, and are awesomely in love with.
The coming 18 months are going to be hugely exciting for SFL. We’re looking forward to an amazing year of programming very special events across the UK as we aim to engage with even larger, more diverse audiences. We’ve had the pleasure of attending E3, the MCV Awards as a member of Games On Song, Develop Conference, GDC, Gamescom, Eurogamer Expo, to mention a few, and will continue to not only build strong working relationships between the festival and the gaming industry, but to keep supporting and contributing to the dialogue about interactive entertainment, be it film or gaming.
Huge thanks in advance from myself and the SFL team.
Let’s all go to the lobby and get ourselves a treat!
Tracey
@scifilondon @tamcgarrigan @GamesMediaAward #GMA #SFLgetmyvote