Night City is a Chicago studio curating community-based video game development, festivals, exhibitions, and educational resources. Night City emphasizes the importance of local context, community involvement, fostering connections, and making a difference right where people live and interact.

Night City’s mission is to strengthen community by:

• Reconceptualizing video games and interactive entertainment as participatory community art.
• Affording diverse, local creators an equitable space to share their creative expressions with in-person audiences beyond traditional commercial channels.

Why?

While video games are a popular form of art and entertainment, video game experiences in community art contexts are few and far between. This is pronounced when compared to the number of exciting in-person events and spaces enjoyed by artists and audiences of other art forms, such as film, visual arts, comedy, theater, music, dance, and others.

There are dozens of diverse game creators in Chicago crafting unique interactive experiences. Unfortunately, the lack of local venues for showcasing this work strands these creators in the ultra-competitive and creatively stifling online commercial game marketplace, where only projects from creators with the privilege of fame or an immense marketing budget stand much chance to find an audience.

The lack of opportunities for audiences to experience games in contexts beyond the commercial landscape has shaped misconceptions about the medium and impeded its potential by limiting who feels invited to participate (both as creators and players).

Night City seeks to make progress toward solving this dilemma by providing a venue for local game developers and other community members to exchange culture, discover new insights, and make new connections.

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