Dan Walker is an original Idle Thumb, he previously worked as a third party QA project manager, and is now working in theatre and promoting live comedy with Filthy Gigdog.

He’ll be talking about the portrayal of video games in stand-up comedy, the way this has changed over time and what that tells us about games and gamers (it might not be what you think). He will also address the basic rules of comedy and discuss the use of humour in games. Hopefully, this being about comedy, he will make you laugh at least once.

(When David Caruso pops his shades on, you know the game just got serious).

Holly Gramazio is a game designer for the excellent Hide & Seek, who make games spanning everything from live events to museums and mobile apps. She’ll be speaking about games in fiction, which have an alarming propensity to TURN DEADLY, usually in an extraordinarily quick fashion. Whether they have protagonists running from real assassins or playing against death itself for their own soul, these lethal games often have shockingly poor design. Sometimes, they also hilariously misrepresent games or game designers.

Yesterday, Holly opened a spreadsheet up to other game designers and asked for examples of games in fiction. In mere hours, it had filled with around a hundred and fifty hilarious plot summaries, none of which I’ll spoil here. You’re a funny bunch. I’m looking forward to seeing you pick them apart with Holly on the 3rd of February.

There’s a lot of art out there that I just can’t connect to, but Patrick sits comfortably between performance art, spoken word and videogames, with a result that’s human, amazing and hilarious. I saw it at GameCity last year, and it’s better than most of the things I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe the year before that. Don’t miss your chance to see it at Bit of Alright.

Here’s a description from Patrick:

“Several Amazing Things About Tetris (1984) is a short performance piece about the video game Tetris, obsession and some amazing things. The piece is a one man show in which I attempt to tell the audience about my favourite video game of all time, Tetris. The show however only lasts as long 1 person can play a game of Tetris for, so as soon as that person gets a game over, the show ends at whatever point I reached in my performance.”

Patrick’s WordPress blog is here, and his twitter account is here.