Gamer Culture at Belfast Culture Night 2011

GamerCulture Logo

An exhibition of beautiful posters on the theme of Games

BAG of BEES presents GamerCulture at Belfast’s Culture Night 2011.

The Idea

Video Games have been with us now since the mid 70s and the average age of a person playing games is now closer to 40 than it is to 15. We are a part of a generation of adults who have grown up with gaming, and as we have matured it seems that video games are following-suit. The companies making games also have a huge impact on the economy of whatever area supports them, with Canada a prime example of positive effects and recent trouble at Scottish studios a reminder of what happens if the government fail to keep an area competitive.

But Culture Night is all about inclusive fun, not tax breaks and job losses, so we decided to put gaming centre-stage and invite some talented people to design a poster for exhibiting around the streets of Cathedral Quarter on the night.

We also designed and built an 8-bit inspired website for showing-off the works in a fun, creative way.

The Contributors

From the outset, we wanted to make the exhibition as diverse as possible. We wanted game makers alongside game players. We wanted journalists words surrounded by composers’ tunes and we wanted to showcase Northern irish talent alongside some of the best in the world. It is testament to the openness of the gaming community that we ended-up with so much amazing work to show.

The Posters

Dave Smith Matthew Knight

Mark Hollis Brown Thornton

Tee&toast Meat Boy

Superbrothers

Neal Stray Jewellery

Ste Curran PopCap

Mark Reihill Hector

Dave Explosm

To Conclude

This is not an exhibition poised to start a debate about whether games are “art”, but no-one can deny that the experiences our contributors have had while gaming are any less important than the ones they had while watching a film or playing a sport. If anything, we wanted to show just how far gaming has come and remove a little bit of the stigma from it.