EGX

Since 2008 I have curated submissions for the Leftfield Collection, a part of EGX. EGX is one of the biggest videogame shows in Europe; taking place in the ExCeL Centre and the Birmingham NEC, attracting over 80,000 visitors per show.

The curatorial brief for the Leftfield Collection is a simple and now longstanding one: to show the best new experimental work alongside other independent games, all in a way that’s accessible to existing audiences. This is a constantly moving target, with genres that seemed unthinkable a decade ago now having their own followings.

Curation is still not that common a practice in videogames, and one of the challenges of this job is to perpetually resist and work against the almost exclusively commercial mindset people bring to videogames – something that isn’t helpful at all when it comes to raw experimentation and innovation.