If anyone knows their stuff when it comes to interactive art, it’s Nick Murray. Producer of not one but two interactive arts festivals – experimental game design festival Now Play This at Somerset House, and interactive poetry organisation Playing Poetry, which hosts events up and down the country – Nick’s knowledge of the interactive arts scene is only matched by their passion for it.
Nick enters the voidspace to share some of the wilder pieces they have invited audiences to interact with, as well as insights they have picked up along the way about breaking down silos, reinventing the wheel, and the power of interactivity to engage people deeply.
voidspace:
Thank you so much for joining us in the voidspace today. First of all, I’d like to ask you to introduce yourself, explain who you are and what your organisation does.
Nick Murray:
I’m Nick Murray. Primarily, I’m the lead producer for Now Play This, which is a festival of experimental game design and playful arts that happens at Somerset House in London every April. We’re part of the London Games Festival and we use the platform each year to champion innovative and socially conscious game-making and some kind of wider theme, exploring it through interactive arts, through playful design. That means we take in all sorts of styles of game, from huge street games, all the way down to really subtle tabletop things for one person.
Alongside that, I direct an organisation called Playing Poetry, which deals specifically with the interactive side of creative writing, particularly poetic writing. Playing Poetry comes out of looking at how for a very long time, writing could be playful through different writing techniques and writing exercises, but the reading perhaps wasn’t as playful: you just get the documentation of a writer’s explorations. We’re trying to use game and playful media to explore how reading can be a bit more joyful and a bit more playful.
voidspace:
Let’s start with Now Play This. The festival started back in 2015, didn’t it?
Nick Murray:
It did, yes. 2024 will be our 10th year.
voidspace:
I’d be interested to know how the landscape has changed for games, and the kind of things that you’ve been trying to do, over that time.
Nick Murray:
Back in 2015, starting the festival was very much trying to give the message that games can be art, and having to constantly fight that battle. Now I think the world is becoming more and more acclimatised to games being the mainstream. I think there’s a lot of discourse around what games are now. Games now are what film was 50 or 60 years ago, the main format for a lot of people to engage with new media, whether it’s purely on an entertainment level or on a critical level. So, we’ve had a wonderful boost in audiences who want to come in and see the way that artists are critically engaging with wider social topics through game.
Each year we have a different theme. Recent ones have been the climate crisis, democracy and love. We use games in all formats to try and explore how these media are used within society, and also how we’re perhaps not looking at them in some of the ways that we could.
It’s becoming easier and easier for people to make games now. There are so many of these new engines, like Bitsy or Twine or Ink, or Adventure Game Studio, all of these things where you now don’t need to have a coding background, or an engineering background. You can come in through a purely artistic lens and have the tools at your disposal to create some kind of interactive, playful media within minutes. For lots of people, it’s happening for the first time that they can make a game. This is something we try and champion with Now Play This, as well in our workshops, that people can come in who have been interested in wider art forms, and have maybe come in because of the subject matter and will leave with their first ever game that’s immediately playable. It’s just such a wonderful thing.
voidspace:
I love that so much. Have you found that the democratisation of game making has changed the kind of games that you’re getting?
Nick Murray:
Yes, there’s definitely a shift in terms of there being more kinds of games. For decades it was shooters. You had shooters, and Civilization and very classic studio-built games. Whereas now more people are using game in autobiographical ways or to write essays, or there are these ways that interactivity is now a format in which to explore things without necessarily needing to engage with game mechanics or what is traditionally thought of as game literacy. The idea of having a branching narrative and being able to explore someone’s thoughts in a way that in the way that you want to, through choosing different avenues, I think is just such a phenomenal thing that we have now.
We definitely get, because of the way that games are becoming democratised, a lot more games from marginalised voices. I think that there’s a real punk aesthetic. I like to think that a lot of these new tools like kind of Bitsy or Twine are being used in the way that zines were for so many years. People are making these incredible lo fi, quickly hashed together, amazing manifestos and screeds on particular aspects of daily life, they can make them in this wonderful playful way, put them on the internet immediately, and there’s a readership for this kind of thing. I think there’s a real burst of creation and creativity that’s come from this democratisation of game making.
voidspace:
What does the inherent interactivity in games, bring to the sort of engagement you get? Particularly from participants who are engaging with the themes of Now Play This but haven’t engaged with those in a playful way before or through interactivity.
Nick Murray:
I think that the primary difference in bringing in interactivity into these kind of workshops, or into any moment where you’re asking people to engage with a difficult topic, is that interactivity gives the opportunity to explore personal, intimate emotions that you might not be able to through another medium. I know this is something that you yourself, within voidspace, have touched on both in the conversation series and with some of the pieces that have been up there, that by being able to make decisions, you are invited to explore complex emotions that you can’t if you’re at more of a remove. You might feel excited for a character in a book or in a film, but if you have to make the decision for a character who is, for all intents and purposes your avatar in a game, you can now feel guilt and you can feel joy in a way that you couldn’t otherwise in non-interactive media.
I think that these are really essential parts of giving people context as to why certain social issues are important, and why huge societal shifts matter. Because at the end of the day, it does affect us all, but it can be very hard to make these not feel so abstract. I think by giving someone a personal view, where they are taking part, even whether it’s just a forum format, where you’re just throwing ideas around, your voice is being heard. And so now, suddenly your voice is part of this discussion and so you’re part of this discussion. It suddenly reflects on you, and you on it, in a really immediate way. That’s something I’ve been trying to push as much as possible, using games to engage new audiences, that interactivity will bring something that no other kind of medium can.
voidspace:
It’s giving it that personal aspect, that sense of identification or complicity or whatever you want to call it. I feel like it’s still a very new and a very developing medium, and those different methods of engagement are only just starting to be explored. I’d love to know what you think the immediate future might hold for how things in this area might develop.
Nick Murray:
God, I think you’re exactly right. Games as a genre, it’s a baby. It’s been maybe 60 years max, that it’s been anything close to the mainstream, or that people have been able to play. On one hand, it’s so exciting. The new things that are coming out each and every day are just phenomenal. On the other hand, it does mean there’s lots of bad things. Not in terms of bad actors. I think that’s a different conversation.
The way that game design or the way that game engineering is taught until very recently didn’t really take in other art forms. And I think this is not just a problem with games, I think this is a problem with a lot of art forms. That there is a moment where practitioners think that they’re doing something new, whereas in there is a whole rich tradition that comes beforehand, not just in that same genre, not just in that same kind of mode of working, but all art basically comes from the same place. We’re all just trying to boil down the fundamental human experience into something that you can tell someone else, it’s just telling a story.
So, I think that game is only now getting to a point where it’s learning from all these other art forms and thinking, what are the shoulders that I’m already standing on? I think it goes both ways. I think that art, fine art is now suddenly seeing game seriously, but because it’s art and it has a very rich tradition and is somewhat the snippy older sibling to all of the others, it’s taking what it likes and calling it something different. There is now a whole burgeoning ‘new media’ art form, which is games. It’s just games. But it’s very difficult to say games within an art market context. So, these are the issues that we have currently with games being very new.
But I think on the whole, it’s a really exciting time. I think that it’s this dual thing of having a frontier, where things are being discovered all the time, but it’s living alongside actual human lived experience, so we have a moral framework to build it on. You can expand out into this amazing world and not be a terrible person doing it. I think that’s really important beyond making the art. I think that’s important.
voidspace:
This is why I think it’s so important that all these different art forms talk to each other because people become siloed so easily. And you can see parallels between, for example, some forms of interactive theatre and some forms of performance art, but nobody’s talking to each other, nobody’s acknowledging that the other one exists. And so you have the problem of people either reinventing the wheel and maybe not learning the lessons they could, or maybe taking something in a new direction, but without being able to talk about the wider context, it loses something, doesn’t it?
Nick Murray:
It’s exactly the same between immersive theatre, interactive arts games, kind of street games, all of these different media. I was doing quite a lot of work with a game theatre company for a while, and a real huge hurdle throughout all of it was kind of the larger immersive kind of theatre companies who are very happily are comfortable in the space that they’re in. And it’s not necessarily interactive because you’re not kind of changing things. It’s very much strictly immersive. But because it’s a slightly older tradition, it’s a lot easier for them to subsume parts of interactivity and interactive theatre and game into them and then they just get called immersive theatre again. And then the silo just continues. Instead of them meeting together in the middle, they take the bits they want and just grow that kingdom.
voidspace:
Maybe this generation is still going to stay siloed but you hope that the people that are the consumers of this art now and the ones that become the creators and the big names of the future, they’re the people that are going to be more open to that sort of dialogue.
Nick Murray:
I think that talking and thinking wider on all these ideas is the important thing. We’re not an interconnected hive mind. We all learn everything new for the first time. But then imagine if you learn that thing and then someone gives you the connected bit, to get you to think about where that idea came from. This is going to make your understanding of that new thing even better. And then you’ve got this rich platform to stand upon, as opposed to recreating it again and thinking that you’ve discovered something for the first time.
voidspace:
The wider the web can be, the richer it’s going to be. Right?
Nick Murray:
The only way that these things will happen and that silos will break down is through community action, making these spaces where people can freely share knowledge. The reason why, or one of the many reasons why, all of these silos are being bolstered is because there’s still a market for needing to sell this work. There’s a commodification at the end of the day and if you come along and say, I haven’t made something new, I’m just riffing on something that’s already happened, capitalism doesn’t like it, basically.
voidspace:
I’m going to offer a challenge to that: in a lot of other art forms, you don’t have to be claim to be doing something completely genre breaking in order to be respected. In film, you don’t have to be reinventing the camera in order to be seen as a good filmmaker. So why is it that in interactive arts you have to be seen to be employing a completely new model, mechanic or dynamic every single time?
Nick Murray:
I think that’s a very good challenge. I think part of it is that idea of tradition. We’re all aware that some things, like contemporary art or film, have gone on long enough that you’re inevitably going to be riffing on something. There is this same kind of idea around games critique: the idea that if something is old enough, then copying it is riffing on it. A homage. Whereas if it came out last week and some other people don’t know about it, it’s plagiarism.
voidspace:
To be fair, the line between homage and plagiarism is often IP law, isn’t it? Down to capitalism.
Nick Murray:
It again comes down to who is going to profit from it.
voidspace:
I also think that there is at the moment, a slightly shallow assumption that in order to grow an audience, particularly in the immersive and interactive theatre space, that the only way you’re going to grow audience is through novelty. I think it’s really important to find ways of showing what else people can get out of these experiences. It’s not all about novelty, it’s not just about having to experience something in a way you never have before. Maybe that new experience is going to be something else. Powerful storytelling, or emotional impact, or making people think about something in a new way.
Nick Murray:
Again, being more established, there’s something that contemporary art is doing quite well at the moment, or is doing in a way that the others aren’t doing yet. With things like relational aesthetics, where the work is the interaction of people within it as opposed to whatever the creation that’s made it is. Obviously, it still suffers from that same idea of things needing to be novel. I think that, again, that just comes down to someone having to review it at the end of the day to get other people in. I’m thinking of pieces like Untitled (free/still) by Rikrit Tiravanija who essentially constructed a canteen and the art was people coming in and sharing a meal together, and that was it. It was stated throughout that the art was not necessarily the physical construction, but what happened within it. I feel like that’s the kind of thing that is starting to break down or is trying to break down these ideas that if you build something, then it can be commodified and sold on.
Again, I realise we’re slightly- this is a real tangent from the games literature side, but I think it is somewhat connected just in the sense that so much interactive literature has to be digital or is digital just by the nature of hyperlinking and the way that immediate code and stuff like this has to happen.
voidspace:
As someone who’s currently investigating starting a print press, I’m realising that there are practical constraints, but also financial ones. The great thing about digital is that anyone can pick up Twine and have a go with it.
Nick Murray:
It’s very hard to then translate that into a physical object to sell on without changing the format of it.
voidpsace:
That’s actually what I’m trying to do with our first publication. Watch this space.
It’s interesting. You think of one particular form as existing in one particular place, and it’s interesting to see what happens when you try moving it into a different place. Does it become something else?
Nick Murray:
Yes, but maybe that’s a benefit. Maybe that’s a really good thing. I think translation is really important, poetically, but also in terms of genre, and finding a different readership. Some people find it easier or more natural to read on a screen or on paper. So, I think things changing format should be something we explore more. Maybe this also comes down to that idea of things needing to be novel as well, that maybe there are artists who spend 30, 40 years making one piece of work over and over and over again because it’s interesting. The idea that you could I think about Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself, where she just reworked this one letter over and over again. I think it’s something like 200, 300 times with different artists, because translating the letter was really interesting and really important. I think that’s a phenomenal piece of work.
voidspace:
This takes us quite neatly on to the work that you’re doing with Playing Poetry.
Nick Murray:
In Playing Poetry‘s first exhibition, we showed the same piece of work in two formats. There’s a really lovely piece of work called the Amazing Push Poem Machine, which was developed up in Liverpool by Merseyside Play Action Council, with a series of poets. Dave Ward, Dave Calder and others. The idea of the piece is that it’s this huge platter with holes in and letters, and you invite people to throw balls into the holes and generate words, and it makes this huge ongoing poem. It’s this wonderful playful piece.
But we also showed it as a card game. It takes the same format of poetic construction, but as you pick cards, they have letters on and you can arrange them to make different poems. And while the idea is the same, or the mechanic is more or less the same, the two things generate completely different things, and have a very different feeling. One’s quite energetic and the other one’s quite contemplative and they’re both a physical piece and they’re both basically doing the same thing, so the translation isn’t even very far. The cards also have documentation of poems made back in the 70s when the piece was made so the construction of new poetry have all these amazing layers.
voidspace:
I think it’s fascinating that different physicality actually impacts the nature of what poetry comes out of that process as well. I don’t think that’s a connection that’s been made before.
Nick Murray:
I used to work in a dance theatre and it was the first point that I started learning about the idea of somatic practise, and what that really means in terms of everything else you do, and I think that it’s exactly the same with any medium, writing especially. I’m doing some work with an artist and a poet who does nature writing and place writing, but inside video games. He’s got this beautiful piece called Rock, Star. North., which is a whole poetic travelogue in the style of Wordsworth but in Grand Theft Auto Five. He just kind of walks through the space, and makes this beautiful epic.
voidspace:
That’s wonderful. Can you tell me a bit more about Playing Poetry, how that came about, what you want to achieve with it?
Nick Murray:
Before being in games, I was working in traditional poetry with a really wonderful publisher called Pending the Margins, who very recently became defunct, but were around for 17 or 18 years, I think.
They were doing really groundbreaking work with contemporary poets in terms of formats, genres, styles, that I don’t think I still don’t think anyone is doing in the same way. I’ve not found it. You know when you find if you’re writing something and you’re like, I know who I would want to publish this. And then that person goes, and if you can’t find someone to replace them, you suddenly realise just how impactful they were.
I also worked on the London Word Festival, which was a festival of performative poetry events. And that made the connection in my head between games, which I was doing as a hobby, just making on my own with twine and things, with the kind of poetic work that I was doing professionally. The pendulum swung all the other way and I went fully into games with Now Play This, and have been there since.
I realised that this love of poetry and games can be brought together, or should be, and hasn’t been in a way that I want it to. Exactly as you’re saying, if you don’t have it for yourself, make it. Last year we had our first exhibition of about twelve artists – poets and game makers – at the South Bank Centre with the National Poetry Library – celebrating playful creative writing through these amazing video games, board games, playful workshops, all sorts of really incredible things.
We had a couple of newly commissioned works. It was a really fantastic thing to have. One of the commissioned pieces has gone on tour. We took some pieces to Belfast this year for Belfast Book Festival, then over to A.MAZE., which is a games festival in Berlin. We’ve just opened a new exhibition up in Leicester with Phoenix Cinema and Arts Centre, celebrating the digital side: interactive poetry through digital arts. We’ve built this game arcade. And the commission that Phoenix and Playing Poetry had put together became a game called Wood Wide Web, which is a lo-fi forest walking simulator, in which you type words or lines. They get planted as seeds, those seeds grow into trees, those trees in turn, drop seeds, and the seeds are snippets off the text that you wrote in, and then they grow into trees, and it starts to build up this poetic forest that you can walk through as you. It’s a really, really wonderful piece.
We wanted to take that further, and so we brought it up to Phoenix. That’s the centrepiece of this exhibition. The game itself is connected via sensor to plants living in the exhibition space. We’ve nested plants everywhere, and the poems that are generated respond to the health of the plants or the wellbeing of the plants. If they’re happy and well-watered, the plants that come out are joyful and if they get a bit drier, the poems tend towards the darker side, which is also a very neat way of seeing how the plants are doing. That’s quite handy. That’s running until the end of the year.
voidspace:
What response have you had to Playing Poetry so far? What kind of audiences are you getting at the moment?
Nick Murray:
At the very beginning, because it was in a poetry based space, the audience was primarily poetry people, who would use the space naturally. But whenever we’d have our events, we’d suddenly see this huge influx of games audiences. People who would not necessarily be using the poetry library before, which was really wonderful, to bring these two together. Since then we have seen collaborations emerge from some of them, which is really phenomenal.
Since then, we’ve tried to take the work to particular audiences. With Belfast Book Festival I made sure that we were taking more game based work than strictly poetic work, just to try and mix it up. Then going over to A MAZE., which is strictly a games festival, we tried to take a few things that challenged that idea. I have a projected board game poetry sequence. A kind of map-making presentation about the climate crisis, through the eyes of Godzilla. We took that and brought Wood Wide Web as durational thing. It was projected, really huge, and people could come and just submit their poems and use it as this sort of restful space. The rest of the festival is quite energetic, it’s quite frenetic, and so we decided to make our exhibit into a really calm space where people could come in and just experience a poetic landscape for a bit.
voidspace:
That’s lovely.
Nick Murray:
Thank you! A big part of this is trying to show not just to new audiences, but the two kinds of audiences on either side that this is an interesting intersection to inhabit, and that these games and these poems can do something slightly different to what they might do on their own.
voidspace:
That’s brilliant. What are your hopes for the future, for Playing Poetry?
Nick Murray:
Good question! The exhibition side of it is something I want to keep going. I think this is a very nice model to be able to do this. It doesn’t need the ongoing energy of multiple events happening throughout the year. One or two exhibitions a year would be my goal, my dream. As long as they happen in kind of different places, to bring in different audiences, because I think that a lot of this work can be very London and very arts-audience centric, and I really want to push out of that. We’re also working on publishing some things physically. There have been a few physical pieces that we’ve had in exhibition that can quite naturally translate into multiples. We’ll see!
voidspace:
What advice would you have for aspiring creators in the spaces in which you operate?
Nick Murray:
I think there are a couple of pieces of advice that I always try to give myself. The first one being to just make things. And I give this with the addendum that life is hard, and we all have jobs and it’s a real struggle to just do anything and keep any energy for yourself at the moment, but within that, not just because you want to make things, but because creation is a font of joy, and joy can be resilience. Just make something. And if that interactive art, if that interactive literature is as simple as folding a piece of paper over in half, and then there being a piece of a word on each one. So as you fold it back and forth, things change. That’s something and that’s joyful. And you definitely should do it. The next step being to dick about with Twine because it’s really good. And an easy feedback loop for feeling pretty creative.
There are all these free resources available for doing it, some of them more difficult than others. At this point. I think it’s really useful to mention for anyone who is reading this, that Everest Pipkin has a massive list of resources for all kinds of game design, whether it’s like making assets to writing, to hypertext, to coding.
The second piece of advice is that the world is hard right now and if that creative spark doesn’t take hold, or it doesn’t give the kind of reward you hoped for, that’s okay too.
There is always a way to do something, even if that way is just in your head. Make something for the sheer act of doing it. Because it’s better than not.
Playing Poetry‘s latest exhibition, Virtual Textual, runs until 15 December 2023 at Phoenix Cinema and Art Centre, Leicester
Now Play This takes place 6-14 April 2024, at Somerset House, London