Feral Vector is the new name for Bit of Alright. When we started out with BoA, we weren’t a hundred percent certain it was a viable event, and didn’t know if it would happen more than once. So of course, it felt okay for the name to be throwaway, an in joke coined during a drunken night out with game developers and journalists in Brighton. Three years in, that’s definitely not okay anymore, and there are a couple of reasons for that.
Firstly, as Anna Ghislaine pointed out, when she arrived at BoA 2012 she was handed a badge that she would never wear because it had “Bit of Alright” written on it. While it’s not a gendered term, gender can drastically change its connotations. In an industry and cultural sector struggling with such issues, I don’t feel alright about that. No one voiced offence, but I was still embarrassed and we dropped that badge for 2013. For 2014, we’re getting rid of the name altogether, because it would always have potential to create similarly awkward situations.
Secondly, the name riffed off a long dead thing I used to organise, and there’s almost none of that left in it. That former thing was a conference, and by the time I stopped doing it I was getting bored of the format and was pretty sure I could do something better.
One year later, I spent the morning of BoA 2012 constantly running around fixing stuff, and thought it was a disaster until production manager Jo Summers made me sit down, eat lunch and look at Twitter. Everyone seemed to be having a lovely time. As organiser, your job is to confront everything that goes wrong, and that gives you a decidedly negative view. Most people don’t notice what’s broken. That’s even more true when you remove the focus from a stage and construct even the tiniest parts of the event to allow people to move their bodies and attention around.
BoA 2012 was a sort of controlled, distributed chaos throughout Battersea Arts Centre, and something fantastic emerged from it. I could only see that near the end, when I walked from a room where Patrick Ashe was performing, through zombie LARPers, past people playing J.S. Joust under a stained glass dome, into the main hall past the tea urns, Ninja, Lemon Jousting and Ordnungswissenschaft. Laughter and the sounds of Proteus filled the air.
We did it again in 2013, but on a fishing trawler at Canary Wharf, and that time it felt even more like it had an identity, like we understood a lot more of what it was and what we wanted it to be. Loads of smaller things clicked into place and made us realise why they did or didn’t work. It was as if the chaos were controlled and let go much more appropriately, and I’d started building a crew who understood and could deal with it.
Our general approach is that fewer rules makes for a better thing. That makes it stressful to run because there are no lazy patterns or habits you can rely on as organiser, but the payoff is extraordinarily worthwhile. Most event organisers like things to be smooth and painless, as glossy and close to TV perfection as possible. We don’t. Screw that. There are much better things than roller banners and DMX lighting to spunk a load of money on for your event.
Game developers are the most creative people I’ve ever met, because they don’t just make stuff: they’re making things in the midst of a largely uncharted medium, one with a much bigger expressive range than most people realise. The potential cultural influences, and useful practice, are so wide that making developers sit still for the day seems cruel. There’s too much variation amongst small game developers for just one thread of content to be relevant for everyone.
We want our events to be feral, filled with chaotic good, as befits anything welcoming a diverse bunch of creative people. We have more ideas than we’re able do right now. There are so many directions Feral Vector will go from here.
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We’re most of the way through programming the next one, which will be announced very soon, but if you have an idea of something you’d like to do with a small crowd in London this June/July drop us a line on hello@feral-vector.com. If you want to hear about the next one as soon as tickets are available, make sure you’re on our very low frequency mailing list.
