EGX Rezzed Diary: Day 1 – Noisy Trains And Indie Games

Last night I discovered trains are rather noisy. Perhaps discovered isn’t quite the right word, it was more that I had the knowledge reinforced. You see when I booked this hotel it was very cheap, far cheaper than the other London hotels from the same chain. It’s not in the most desirable area, but it’s certainly not worse than where I stayed in LA for E3 two years ago.

The reason it is so cheap, or at least I assume this is the reason, is the fact that it’s situated next to part of London’s train network. More specifically, my window faces directly onto the train line. It’s certainly not the end of the world, it’s just a bit of noise after all, but I’d never really appreciated just how loud trains really are. I mean they’re not all that loud from the inside, but the clanking of wheels and squealing of brakes are all too audible from my position on the outside.

Perhaps of more interest to you, however, is what actually happened at Rezzed today. Despite my previous complaints about trains, they are incredibly useful when you’re running late. Rezzed’s location, Tobacco Dock, is actually a pretty easy walk down from where I’m staying, but my refusal to get out of bed on time left a short hop down to Wapping via the Overground as the only real option.

With my laziness successfully countered by Transport for London, I arrived at Rezzed to team up with Tef, where he handed me an OlliOlli 2 finger board. While I’ve never actually been able to use these skating toys due to an almost impressive lack of hand-to-eye coordination, it’s still pretty cool. If you’d like one yourself then make sure to check back this afternoon for a little competition…

While I knew Tobacco Dock was obviously going to be a different space to Earl’s Court, the former home of EGX, I didn’t realise quite how different it is. Instead of being one absolutely gigantic space, Tobacco Dock is split into lots of glass walled rooms. The glass keeps the space feeling quite light and airy, but by splitting things up into a number of rooms things are just a lot more pleasant and less cramped. If it wasn’t for the fact that Tobacco Dock seems to be some kind of labyrinth determined to delay you as you attempt to find the one game you really want to play, I’d absolutely love it as a venue.

Ah yes, the games. While you might not really have gathered it from my meandering train of thought that these diaries represent, the entire point of this trip to That London is to play games. As I’m heading to all three days of the show I certainly intend to play a lot of games, and today was just the start of that. In reality I didn’t play a huge number of things, mostly due to my impatience when in a queue. My reluctance to wait to play something for more than a few minutes is a bit of a downside, particularly when many games only have one or two screens showing them off.

Then of course there were the bits of the day taken up by eating, talking to developers, bumping into friends and actually working out how to get to the lower floor of Tobacco Dock. I’m sure the stairs either moved or vanished at various points throughout the day, mostly when I was trying to work out how to get to the press room.

However, I did manage to spend time with Beyond Eyes, Starship Mechanic, Not A Hero, Ronin, Inside My Radio and Salt. I actually think Salt, a game that explores storytelling via stalking people on social media, may be the one that sticks with me the most, despite being the most simplistic in some ways. Social media updates are all there actually is to the game, and it’s really interesting to see these used as a mechanism for storytelling, particularly while you try and pick out which updates are actually relevant to your character’s tale. I’m already slightly hooked by the storyline, and I’m looking forward to playing the finished version sometime next year.

The two key points of the day, however, were recording a podcast about the day’s happenings with Tef, Vaughn Highfield and Christos Reid, and, of course, heading to the pub. Pubs are key in any London based game activity, and while there doesn’t appear to be much around Rezzed itself, there’s a few half decent ones a short walk north. For any of you concerned about my health, dinner consisted of a lamb burger rather than Haribo, although I did chase it down with most of a pack of Minstrels.

Sure, it might say it’s for sharing, but I think they underestimate my capacity to eat Minstrels.