Where do Horaces come from?

 

Regular attendees of GameCityNights, or the most recent festival, or any of the National Videogame Archive / Save the Videogame lectures that @drjimmy and I have done over the last few years – might be at best vaguely familiar with a running game we’ve had embedded into everything we do on a screen since about 2008.

Around the time that Save the Videogame launched with the National Videogame Archive, Jimmy and I did a series of different talks around the Country. My recollection is that we were thinking of a quiz section which would run through the keynote presentation we were preparing for a talk in Manchester. This was initially going to be a ‘spot the game from this unreasonably detailed screenshot section’. These are usually good fun and helpful in establishing shared reference points for the audience and thus how to pitch the rest of any talk, and also in warming them up for discussion / heckling. One of the most difficult things about talking about videogames to any audience if how divisive they can be as a topic. This has been particularly evident around the NVA work, which would often obviously be looking at games from history. It’s a source of constant surprise how the mention of Elite can have some of the audience growing misty eyed or punching the air, whilst the other 90% stare blankly. Horace is a helpful bridge-builder…

I think that Horace Goes Skiing was one of the featured games we were going to show, and upon making the slide it became suddenly obvious that Horace should be hidden in multiple slides and form the basis of a participation device to keep the audience attention.

It was also clear that Horace should be embedded into not just that presentation, but all presentations from now on. Thus it was so.

Horace is helpful for us, and has appeared before many audiences in many venues over the last four years, including at the Japanese Embassy, Wellcome, the National Archives, Develop, the British Council and (my favourite) on Eric Chahi’s hand during the GC6 launch event. Of course, most of these audiences were unaware of his presence at all; for us, when declared, he’s a useful device both as an induction into the National Videogame Archive project and the whole project of digital heritage; and more latterly a kind of undeclared mascot for the festival activities.

Occasionally, his usage hasn’t been so positively received. Here, at a Save the Videogame gig in Birmingham, in an effort to make a point about the emotional life and history of videogames; the audience were forced to ensure the entire duration of ‘All by Myself’ whilst a videogame character shrank almost imperceptibly into nothing.

Horace 2011

The Horace project shifted up several gears in 2011, when the brilliant David Hayward – who worked with us on GameCity 6, was working on some ideas for ways to laser-cut/ etch different foodstuffs for ‘My Dinner with Eric’, a dining project we produced with Eric Chahi. David had been doing some R+D on this at the Nottingham Hackspace and during a Skype conference with Eric presented his first prototypes and findings :

First David showed us the Dark Chocolate etching:

This was followed by light chocolate:

This in turn was, of course, a cream cracker:

Neither Eric nor myself were adequately prepared however, for the following image he shared.

Brilliantly, in addition to the food experiments, David had been mass producing a clone army of Horaces at the hackspace, burning them out of sheets of felt. His concept was to make hundred of them, affix magnets to the back of them, and hide them around the City during the festival for the public to find. Clearly the best idea of 2011.
With David’s permission, I’d like to share with you the making-of video he sent me – as it really is one of the best things I’ve ever been sent.

But that’s not all.
Having discovered that the felt army worked well, David then created a new layer of motivation in the game by the introduction of controlled scarcity. The Golden Horace, of which only a few were ever fabricated, would reward the finder with untold wonder if discovered.

Horace & William.

And so, the Horace story continues.
As you know, at GameCity we’re very committed to exploring the foundation that Games are made by people (lots more on this soon…) and Horace was created by one William Tang…

Two questions then :

1. Where are you William?

2. Are you William?