If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already seen that 2025 is going to be the last edition of Now Play This.
We’ve had a pretty good run of it, as weird little game festivals go: ten years, eleven editions. We’ve had a bunch of directors: me and v buckenham from 2015 to 2019, Marie Foulston in a very difficult 2020, Sebastian Quack from 2021 to 2023, Luján Oulton for last year and this year. A bunch of producers too: Sophie Sampson, Nick Murray, Susie Buchan, Jo Summers, Lexi Stevens, among others.
But it’s always been a challenge to keep the festival going. And this year, the board took a look and concluded: this is probably as long as we can carry on.
I think closing a festival isn’t the same sort of thing as closing a shop or a venue or a normal company. You practice shutting down every year: you put a huge flurry of work into a day or a weekend or a week, and then people come and it’s great and then it’s over and you clean up and sit there and go: huh yeah, okay. A festival by its nature is contingent and fleeting and special and almost doesn’t exist, lofted communally into temporary being. So to say maybe let’s not do that again is sad, but no great stretch of the imagination.
NPT is wrapping up for the same reasons a lot of festivals wrap up: a festival is a weird exhausting anomalous thing, and sooner or later you need to either find a way to make it more sustainable — basically, to find a scale where your ambitions and your capacity to fundraise are in accord. Or if you can’t do that, you have to go: well, we had a fun time, but that’s enough.
We’ve had amazing partners through the years, with Somerset House acting as our base from our very first year, and London Games Festival — the larger festival that NPT sits within — giving us a reliable pot of money each year. Without those two ongoing commitments, there’s no way we’d have been able to run for more than a couple of years.
But the funding landscape is rough, and even in years when we’ve been successful with other funding applications, the precarity of it has been a lot to deal with: each year’s directors and producers putting in applications and hoping, planning different versions of what they could do based on what money might come in, looking at timelines, holding different visions of the possibilities in mind and pushing them forward in parallel. We applied for an Arts Council grant this year but missed out on it, and that’s not the reason we’re closing shop, but the touch-and-go what’ll-happen-next nature of project-based funding is certainly a big part of it. Another part of it is just that something like Now Play This requires a bunch of people at a time to kind-of empty jugs of themselves into the mechanism to keep it running; everyone steps away eventually, and if that time comes for a few people at once, the machine runs down.
We’re so grateful to everyone who’s worked on Now Play This through the years, to Somerset House and everyone there for hosting us for a decade, to London Games Festival for funding us so consistently and steadily; that solid base, a place to play and some money to act as core funding, was absolutely key to every single year of the festival. And we’re grateful as well to ACE, and Ukie, and the Goethe Institut, and everyone else who’s chucked in money or support or effort or attention, whether for a year or five years or more. To everyone who’s shown their work — hundreds of designers and artists and their incredible games — and especially to everyone who’s made something new for the festival. To the many thousands of people who’ve come along and played, over the years.
What’s next?
Well, there’s this year’s festival still to come, steered by director Luján Oulton and producer Lexi Stevens. Luján’s written a wonderful overview of what they’ve got planned. The funding situation means this year is operating at a smaller scale than some previous years, with a focus on events and workshops rather than an exhibition, but the lineup is so exciting. The theme is folk games, which I think makes for such a satisfying last edition: NPT has always been interested in exploring the process of making, the ways that players reinvent games, the big sticky space between design and play.
We’re lucky, I think, to be in a position where we know we’re wrapping up before this year’s festival kicks off; it’s more typical to have your last edition, and only realise later that you won’t be able to do it again. But we’ve got advance notice! So why not come along and play one last time?
Beyond that: the people who have worked on NPT over the years are still doing stuff! And we’ll keep at it after this year’s NPT is over as well:
- Jo Summers is continuing to put together amazing community projects and game events
- Lexi Stevens is producing a dizzying range of festivals, as well as getting on with her installation and immersive work
- Luján Oulton is putting together individual game events, but also working on GAIA, a wonderful network and think tank for people working in game arts internationally
- Marie Foulston’s brilliant film The Grannies has been showing around the world, and she’s working on a game prototype that I don’t think we’re allowed to say much about yet but it’s extremely cool
- Nick Murray is pursuing their practice in the wonderful and hard-to-explain overlap of games and art and poetry; they’re currently finishing up a residency at Barham Park Studios, and they have a super neat exhibition from that running 26-30 March
- Sebastian Quack is still working away on a bunch of brilliant event curation and game design projects, including a videogame about climate change deniers
- Sophie Sampson is helping people understand clothes; her instagram account is a joy filled with mini-essays
- Susie Buchan is up in Dundee, working as part of the amazing Biome Collective, plus doing production for game and event projects
- v buckenham is doing a bunch of strange game design; her most recent big release was her project Downpour, a gorgeous adventurous game-making tool for your phone; she has a blog if you wanna keep up
- …and I’ve been doing bits and pieces; my most recent big thing was a novel, a comedy called The Husbands, which came out last year. I also have a newsletter for general keeping-up-with
Plus Dick Hogg, who’s done our branding every single year, is making games, most recently the perfect Wilmot Works It Out; Alex Parrott, who’s done our design and layout all the way through, is continuing to design and art-direct beautifully across so many different fields; our constant photographer Ben Peter Catchpole is photographing things and making them all look amazing; so many board members current and past, including Emma Boulton, Laura James and Lynn Love (current) and Dan Hett, Darren Murphy, Elle Osili-Wood and Hilary O’Shaugnessy (past) are carrying on doing neat things in and around play and technology and community.
I’m not going to list full credits for artists and production staff every year because it would be literally hundreds of names (though I will sneak in a few from 2024: Daniel Green on tech production, Grace Aitman on social media, and Jane Morris as production and research assistant). But so many people have put work into the festival: explaining rules, organising zines, cutting out bits of paper, assembling cabinets, carrying boxes, knowing where the secret bobby pin is hidden in each room to restart a tablet that’s frozen, giving a talk or writing an essay or just wholeheartedly playing.
Somerset House is constantly putting on amazing exhibitions and events, of course. And London Games Festival isn’t going anywhere! Their drive to include less immediately commercial and more experimental games has been pretty conclusively demonstrated through their decade of support for us, I reckon, and that interest isn’t going away. We’ve been talking to them about how they might carry on some of the spirit of Now Play This into the LGF as a whole, and what we can do to support that, so if you liked NPT, keep up with the London Games Festival for next year and beyond.
We’re also planning a casual chatting-about-game-events hangout as part of this final NPT year, to see if there’s anything we can do to help new shoots grow from the weird mulch of our festival. Nothing big or formal, but if you’re involved in organising game events and you’ll be around that weekend and you want to come along, drop me a line at holly@hollygramazio.net and I’ll send over details.
And other than that — well, thanks for reading, thanks for playing, thanks for a decade of festivals, and we hope to see you at Somerset House this year.
Holly on behalf of NPT xx