(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.

This session will not just be a talk, but a live demo too. What could possibly go wrong? Usually, live demos involve a lot of messing around with cables then a mumbled apology along the lines of “The internet’s not working so I can’t do most of my talk”. Not this one though! It involves software and people blowing into things.

Ian Willey from Appatta will be talking about what happens when solfège, fast fourier transforms and game design collide. For the last nine months he and James Everard have been building My Note Games, an iOS App for learners of musical instruments. It can teach you music and track your progress, in the process taking over all the boring bits of music revision and turning pieces of music into games of a sort. Ian Willey will be there with the app and some musical instruments. There will also be some nice prizes up for grabs. Audience participation is encouraged; feel free to bring along your recorder, bassoon, oboe, violin, saxophone, trumpet, guitar, piano…

Not even just for this session. We totally encourage musical people to bring instruments to Bit of Alright if they feel like it.