I certainly did talk a lot about that, but in reading through my other thoughts, and trying to construct some sort of yearly narrative, something unexpected is in there too – something still aligned with that single idea (there was no escaping it), but one that makes me feel slightly better about drawing repeatedly from that well.

The strength of industrial rhetoric is that it tends towards the rational, towards the easily measurable, to metrics of volume and money. We sold X units. We funded Y projects. We have Z Studios and so many employees. These are quickly identified, understood, quantified, and compared, and lead to something I’ve heard a few times this year – the line that videogames have ‘won’. They make more money than movies, millions of people play them, the biggest entertainment opening in history belongs to a videogame. If you only care about those things, then sure, videogames have ‘won’. Yay videogames! And yay us for picking the winning side.

The measurable only goes so far. With all art, entertainment, cultural product, a huge part of it is the unquantifiable, the unknown, the weird, visceral, and personal responses to a piece of work. All the statistics in the world can’t change the way a novel or theatre or music or game tells a story about our world and how it works, and all the statements about how many people play videogames, how old they are, and how much money the industry makes, can’t sway those who view them as at best a waste of time or a cultural ghetto and at worst actively destroying our children and corrupting our society, no matter how ill-informed or cliché-ridden those thoughts and criticisms might be.

Looking back through everything I’ve thought & spoken about & written, I’ve realised that it wasn’t entirely about the false dichotomy of these various extremes, it wasn’t about the issues with industrial rhetoric or about presenting arguments about criticisms towards the form, it was more about trying to find the middle ground and what games could learn from other art-forms and what other art-forms might be able to learn from games.

Towards the end of the year, I saw Tom Stoppard interviewed by Alison Croggon at the Atheneum Theatre – video here – and in discussing his opinions on writing & his job as a writer, he talked about having to find ways – through the words themselves and with the actors – to meet the audience halfway. If he didn’t cast the work far enough, the audience had to work too hard to connect with the work; too far and the audience didn’t need to do enough and would become bored. By meeting in the middle, the audience, writer, actors, directors, and everyone involved became collaborators in the creation of meaning of the piece.

2011 was the first year where I personally felt that there was a real interest in games from a cultural perspective in ways that hadn’t existed before – Freeplay continued to grow at the State Library of Victoria, worked with the National Gallery of Victoria, and partnered with the Emerging Writers’ Festival. I wrote pieces for writers’ centres, the Australia Council for the Arts, The Australian Writers’ Guild, Kill Your Darlings, and Meanjin. The Department of Education and Early Childhood Development ran a year long research project into games, development, and virtual worlds which I was lucky enough to be part of, and ACMI announced their Game Masters exhibition coming in 2012.

But for all these anecdotal shifts, and for every reasoned and articulate piece about videogames, there has also been the continuation of pieces in mainstream media about the horrors of videogames – including appalling attempts to connect the tragedy in Oslo to local classification reform – or half-hearted, poorly written defences, cliched critiques of people who play video games, as well as almost unintelligible opinion pieces about games based on chinese whispers.

There may well be ways of looking at the world in which videogames have won something, streaking ahead over a finishing line or building a tower so tall that it will be decades before it can be toppled, but in other ways of looking at the world, there are still long roads to follow to properly map the place where things meet.

So with that as framing of sorts, here, with no doubt some omissions and oversights, is a bunch of stuff that I wrote and talked about in 2011 covering games, writing, culture, industry, and maybe some of the spaces in between. Hopefully 2012 will be as diverse.

Blog Posts

• Arts and Creative Industries
• Transmedia Victoria and the Global Game Jam
• Sexy Spanking Games and Murder Simulators
• Screenplay and Screen Australia
• The Thin Measure of Success
• We are not legion
• Thoughts and notes from GCAP
• National Cultural Policy and Games

Online Elsewhere

• The What, Why, and How of being a games writer at a writer goes on a journey, the official news site of the Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association,
• Games, storytelling, and the end of the world at if:Book Australia. Also available as an ebook – Hand Made High Tech
• A series of blog posts on Connecting: Arts Audiences Online for the Australia Council for the Arts.
• A series of blog posts as part of Brisbane City Council’s ibrary project on games & writing. This one about Another World, Deus Ex, and Shadow of the Colossus is my favourite.
• A piece on Novelty, Escape, Boredom, and Hope at Kill Your Darlings based on the Pecha Kucha slide night we did at Freeplay.
• Freeplay’s submission to Australia’s National Cultural Policy.
• Two posts at the Edge Queensland Blog – one called These words mean just what I choose them to mean looking at the language of game development and the other called Beyond the edge of the screen exploring the troublesome nature of the screen metaphor

In Print

• The Reader – Play is the Wrong Word (online version)
• June 2011 Edition of the Australian Writers’ Guild Newswrite Magazine – Games & Storytelling
• August 2011 Edition of the NSW Writers’ Centre Newswrite Magazine – Games & Storytelling
• Meanjin Quarterly Volume 70 Number 3 – Video Gaming: Have we seen it all (online version)

In Person

• IGDA Brisbane Game On
• The Need for Games Literacy – TEDxMelbourne
• Digital Culture Public Sphere
• Turning off our Screens – GCAP 2011
• The Assessment Panel – GCAP 2011
• Government Round Table – GCAP 2011

His support isn’t coming out of thin air though. It’s a result of lobbying by various groups and discussions around and submissions to both the National Cultural Policy and the Convergence Review designed to:

“…set the framework for Australian Government support for arts, culture and creativity for the next ten years, providing us with a common strategic direction and rationale for current and future investment.”

From culture.arts.gov.au

All of the submissions eventually end up online here, so If you’re looking for some insight into what various organisations are thinking about for the future of game development and other artforms or creative industries, it’s fascinating reading. I’ve collated some of the games specific submissions below and and if anyone with more time on their hands than me wanted to do some analysis or commentary on them, I think that’d be quite interesting.

• 60Sox
• ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI)
• Dr Jens Schroeder
• Freeplay
• GDAA
• Screen Australia
• SkillsHub
• Digital Culture Public Sphere Report – This is from Senator Kate Lundy’s Digital Culture Public Sphere initiative.

There are bound to be others that I’ve missed, so add them in the comments and I’ll update the list.

Unlike last year’s talk where I tried to give a reframing argument of how to think and talk about games and culture, I – quite last minute – decided to look at the part of creative industries that haven’t had as much exposure in recent discussions about games and government support or interest – that of the essential maker communities.

At the first glimpses of home computing technology, games could be made by small teams or individuals, but there was still a barrier of entry due to the technology which meant that the types of people drawn to game development as creatives tended to be drawn to the novelty of the technology. They were, for want of a better term, nerds – people, as Douglas Adams put it, who would call people up on the telephone to talk about how great the telephone was. Those early tech adopters were interested in what the technology could do. Those commodores and spectrums, then later amigas and ataris. Those old machines came with programming languages built in and libraries were full of books about how to make them do things, but you had to be pretty dedicated to learn how to make a game because the core skill at the time was that you needed to know how to program.

But still, an individual could do it. Could make something, write the code to a cassette tape, and sell it through the mail kind of like a really slow version of the App Store.

And because the barrier to entry was suddenly there – anyone with a computer and a will and some talent – could make a game, there was a whole bunch of crazy, experimental stuff within the audio-visual limitations of the medium. A whole bunch of experimental work that formed a lot of the gaming foundations that someone like me who grew up during that explosion of work has as the basis of their games literacy.

Initially, these computers had the same sorts of graphics and sound capabilities of their console counterparts, and that fact coupled with duping parents into the idea that a computer could be used for schoolwork as well as playing games meant that they enjoyed a lot of success, at least until console manufacturers found ways to differentiate themselves with different controllers, better graphics, better sounds. Thus the era of the NES, the SNES, the Megadrive, the Playstation (1, 2, and 3), then the XBox, and the Xbox 360 was born.

Thus the era of the NES, the SNES, the Megadrive, the Playstation (1, 2, and 3), then the XBox, and the Xbox 360 was born.

For developers, this was the start of the transition into an industry and away from the artisan model of the early 80s. Development for these consoles required pricey pieces of hardware and steadily larger and larger teams. It became trickier for individual people to make games, and the artisan model was gradually replaced with the industrial model, which became the dominant model of development locally through the 2000s.

But people had grown up with games. Adults about my age had played them their entire life. Those adults were having children, and those children were being born into a world where videogames were the norm and where they formed part of their development.

And some of those adults still harboured the dreams of creating their own individual, unique, personal, creative projects – and as those children grew up, they found themselves wanting to express themselves through the medium of their childhood.
And technology came full circle, enabling these things to happen through platforms like flash or iOS or the Unreal Development Kit. Digital distribution came of age with things like Steam or the App Store. And the foundations of those early experiments started to form into a concrete videogames literacy that new artists and developers knew intuitively because they’d grown up with it.
An awful lot of the discussion that you’ve probably heard has been about the economic possibilities of games as a creative industry, about studio growth, about the need for the development of original IP and about the funds required to make that happen, but one of the priviliges of the work that I do is that I get to interact with other creative industries and the part that’s often ignored in games is the part that sits in the middle of this quote – the bubbling, frothing, sometimes unseen and unheard, community of makers.

Every creative industry has them – music, writing, film, theatre – they’re all built on people who make things because they want to make things, either because they have something personal to say or because they want to experiment within their chosen art-form.

Games have been different for a very long time. Games have been an industry. Games have been the AAA or more recently the iPhone.

But this is changing.

I was digging around some old articles in preparation for this talk and I found this quote on culture from an article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper about the age of the critic being dead:

The point is that most people – especially those outside the high-culture capital of London – are involved in culture of their own choice, often of their own making. Professional critics spend their time whizzing between private screenings and secret gigs, opening nights and exclusive playbacks. Everyone else just does stuff they like, with people who like it too.
Miranda Sawyer, The Guardian, Jan 30, 2011

And so I thought rather than trying to talk about games and their place in culture, or trying to combat some of the misconceptions that gatekeepers of established artforms might have about the medium, I’d just show you what the community of makers in Australia currently looks like.

Freeplay is a yearly festival that takes place at the State Library of Victoria. Started in 2004 by Next Wave and taken over by us in late 2008. Since then it has grown from 600 people at the 2009 festival to over 2000 at the recent 2011 event with an audience that comprises developers, artists, writers, critics, students, and the general public. We’ve also expanded out from just a conference style event to playful sessions looking more broadly at games and play, a public expo and arcade with locally developed independent games and their creators, and relationships with the Wheeler Centre, the NGV, the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and State of Design.
The focus of the organisation and the festival is about the place of games and play in art, culture, and the wider creative community.

Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney have active chapters of the International Game Developers Association running meetups, game jams, show and tells, and talks throughout the year.
Running as part of AVCon in Adelaide, the Indie Games Room is “a non-competitive demonstration and celebration of locally and nationally created video game entertainment.”

Let’s Make Games is a non-profit association in Perth that works to support WA game developers through events, resources, reports, roundtables, and other events. Most recently, they worked with their community to contribute to Kate Lundy’s Digital Culture Public Sphere.
Which brings us back to games as a creative industry. While we talk about the shifting audience demographics or the projected growth in revenue or about how games are the next evolution of the film industry, we also need to look at ways of connecting, engaging, and enabling the communities out of which the next generation of content and skills and talent will emerge.

I’ll be uploading the talk I gave to the Government Round Table on the importance of maker communities to creative industries in the next few days, as well as the data I’ve collated from the Film Victoria reports.

My name is Paul Callaghan, I’m a freelance writer, developer, the director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival, and for the past few years I’ve sat on the board of the GDAA. I’ve been working in games for around 13 years now, and in that time at my various jobs, I’ve been called a:

And I’m sure if I’d chosen any other industry, I’d have been met with the same reception, so I don’t think this is unique to working in games.

But in putting this talk together, I’ve been thinking about what these mean – the length of time and the names I’ve been called – and came to two conclusions.

1) I have a perspective that hopefully sits a little outside of the mainstream industrial system

and

2) I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.

It felt only right that I start off with both of those in mind, because I’m going to be asking a lot of questions about the established order of things and it seems only fair that I open myself up to the same criticisms.

So, with that in mind, let’s begin with an anecdote.
At Freeplay last year, Brandon Boyer, the current chairman of the IGF was talking about Limbo and someone stuck their hand up and said ‘they couldn’t understand why anyone liked it because it was just a trial and error platformer’. Brandon thought about that for a moment and replied that maybe it was, but that it was also the first game to give him a serious Lord of the Flies vibe.

When I finally got around to playing it, I discovered something really interesting. It is just a trial and error platformer. But it also succesfully communicates that Lord of the Flies vibe. Both are valid opinions of the game, but require a certain perspective in order to view the game as one or the other or as both.

I didn’t have fun for a lot of my time playing Limbo. I was frustrated, exhausted, confused, but I persisted because there was something beyond just having fun in the game. A gestalt experience that said something through it’s mechanical nature as a trial and error platformer and a uniquely aesthetic work.

My games literacy, and I assume the literacy of the person asking that question at Freeplay, had evolved alongside the technology of games. When you think about it, it’s only really been what, around 30 years that videogames have existed in their current form. I’m 34, so, what I consider a game has been shaped by the evolution of the medium up to this point. My tastes have formed at the same time as games have formed. And the sorts of games those were tend to skew towards mechanics over aesthetics.

This was one of those lightbulb moments for me because I realised that if my own games literacy had evolved alongside those massive changes in technology, culture, industry, and art, then other people’s probably had too, and that maybe there was something happening at a macro level that was reflected in my own personal experience.  I started to think way more seriously about what that meant, questioning how I spoke about things, how I thought about things, about the things I took for granted. I started exploring my own personal philosophy of development and observing other people’s. I found myself frustrated by some of the wider discussions about games from both our external critics and our internal champions and what I’ve realised recently is really similar to the experience of Limbo.

At the same time, it’s possible for me to be both be completely wrong and have unique perspectives because it’s all about our personal philosophies – the stories we tell ourselves about what matters, how true they might be, and whether or not they’re useful for what we want to achieve because, in the end, not everybody wants the same thing. As much as we might fight it or wish it weren’t true, we simply aren’t all in this together.

Because, I think, the biggest challenge facing local developers isn’t tax breaks, isn’t a crowded app store model, isn’t the shrinking of licensed titles or the threat of new console hardware. Those are symptoms. What’s actually a challenge is the underlying philosophy of what we do, the reasons for doing it, and whether or not we have the conviction of those philosophies to push through.

Because creative industries – and artforms – are volatile – and our philosophies will be the only things that we have any control over.

So, to start, it’s worth looking at the history of development in Australia, the sort of philosophies that ight be ingrained, the stories it tells, and whether or not after 30 odd years, there might be new stories to tell.

This timeline, taken from the now gone Australian Games Innovation Centre, is a little out of date, but contains most of the major industrial beats of local game development.

And there’s thirty years buried in here amidst the ripples of studios as they rise and fall, and still manage to ship hundreds of games on everything from the ZX Spectrum to the Xbox 360 – and we are all part of the continuity of that history. People talk about Australian game development and they can’t help but evoke this timeline in some fashion. The studios that we’ve all worked in have grown out of this, and the people who hired us grew out of those, and it’s possible – as I believe tsumea did at one point – to trace the lineage of studios and people and the cultural history of local development.

Back in the 80s some incredibly successful and experimental projects. I still remember playing the hobbit and waiting for the green door to fill in, getting lost in a maze just beyond that door, and endlessly listening to Thorin singing about gold.
The 90s. Lots of new studios. Pretty good mix of original and licensed titles in there. Halloween Harry; Cricket; Manx TT; Dark Reign; Powerslide. Seems like a pretty healthy and diverse space.

2000s. Loads of activity, but the mix seems to be leaning towards the licenses. Still some original titles in here – Freedom Force & Ty – but also Starship Troopers; South Park Rally; Transformers; Jurassic Park; AFL; Saddle Club. It feels like the beginnings of the licensed, work-for-hire industry we’ve found ourselves in.And this continuity of development – this cultural history – influences us even today. Conversations begun way back at the dawn of Melbourne House very likely still resonate today, although after thirty years the root of them has probably been lost, but they are still there in how studios are run, in how people think about the various disciplines, and in the stories we still tell ourselves.

But so much has changed since then. Technology, artistic practice, the role of games in culture & society. And if we don’t question some of those same assumptions of that cultural history – just as if we don’t learn the lessons – we run the risk of not moving forward – as well as the risk of taking some of the issues from the old industrial models and transplanting them straight into an emerging ‘indie’ model.

So, let’s start with industry, how we talk about it, and what it actually might be.

The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation recently released a report titled “Working in Australia‟s Digital Games Industry” and there’s some great stuff in there for anyone interested – including what other countries think of Australian development – but there’s also this very concise description of what the Games Industry is:
I think that’s a pretty good start, and I think it narrows things down into what I would describe as the studio system, and which also excludes things like festivals or education, or the audience, or journalism. It also puts itself separate from people who make games because they care about them or because they are trying to create an artistic statement or anything other than making games for audiences and getting those games into the hands of consumers either through bricks & mortar or digital distribution, along with marketing them.

I like this definition because it focuses on the ways that Industry is a very specific thing, designed to solve a very specific problem, and which tells a very specific story about itself. What is the story that Australian industry tells us? Well, it used to be that we were good at licenses and handhelds. Now it’s that we’re good at mobile or iPhone.

Except that’s not really true, I don’t think. The reality is that some companies are good at iphone or mobile – skills don’t transfer through osmosis – and that other companies are good at other things, and others are good at different things, and we’re all pursuing, hopefully, the things that we’re good at and the things that we want – perfect illustration of what I said at the start!

I think the more we reach for a unified industrial story, the less likely we are to tell a more nuanced, perhaps larger one, but perhaps one that doesn’t connect with that industrial line, and which might not carry the same weight within it, and which might be at odds with what developers want.

In that same report that I mentioned, it has the most brilliant box out that shines a light on the differences between what we frequently want as developers and what the industrial system wants:

We all want different things. That’s okay. But not everyone wants to be part of the industry.

And lest anyone things I’m just complaining for the sake of complaining, here’s a specific example taken from The Age’s Screenplay blog.

I return to this line quite a lot in writing and thinking about these ideas because, while it’s just a single opinion, it does reflect a narrow view of development. It didn’t take me long to come up with a list of games that don’t fit into this thin measure of success – either Flight Control or LA Noire – Machinarium; Limbo; Sword and Sworcery; Stacking; Costume Quest. All with strong story-telling elements, all critically succesful, and all neither AAA nor a mechanically driven iPhone title.

I think it’s really important that we challenge that narrow band, both in how we think and critique public voices, but also in the games that we make. Plenty of people want to make – surprise – those different things that might be small scale story-driven games.
But it isn’t just industry that struggles along with what might be incorrect assumptions that we’ve carried with us. There are others.

Government in particular views games through two different lenses, both of which carry baggage – and both of which encourage developers to think along certain lines.

The first of these is the technology metaphor.

We are not a technology sector. We aren’t even a technology industry really when you think about it. We’re only partly a software industry too. Sure we make use of technology, but it’s kind of like arguing that car companies are in the road industry or that book publishers are in the paper industry or that the filmmakers are in the camera or set-building business. It’s a broken metaphor, but one that we persist with.
Technology is absolutely part of digital creative economies, but it’s only part of the presentation layer.  It’s also restrictive, both in terms of how it puts the mainstream coverage of a creative industry in a box, but also in how we think about it as practitioners because we end up attracting people who care about the tech.  This was fine back when we had limited technical resources, but technology has stopped being the limiting factor in our ability to make games. Technology now has become about the creation of tools for crafting experiences.

The other side of the technology metaphor is that in all of our mainstream media, games find themselves nestled up against stories about televisions, internet bullying, security, twitter, or mutant genes. And amidst that confusion, games are covered in the same sort of homogenous way that industry is. Issues of business, culture, development, players, commentary, and reviews, are all shoved together as though some of these are technology related. It’s a strange lens to view them through – although understandable – at least until things go wrong and technology writers find themselves writing about tragedies with only tangential links to both technology and gaming culture as they did earlier this year when writing about the tragic Oslo shooting and connecting it to our local R18+ discussions.
One of the other broken metaphors is Screen.

Film began around 1895, as a sort of technological curiosity.  Those first few decades weren’t particularly interesting from a storytelling or expressive space, it was really just a curiousity – and strangely as we see with all emerging forms, people were convinced that it couldn’t be Art.

As the technology stabilised, people began to experiment with the form & the medium, including lighting, staging, framing, etc, but it wasn’t until the development of editing & cross-cutting, pioneered by D.W. Griffith that film properly established the process of building its own grammar.  From there, film evolved into the dominant cultural storytelling force, becoming industrial, influencing everything it came into contact with.

Television is obviously one of the primary influences of that, building as it did on ‘screen’ as one of, if not the, dominant cultural and creative metaphor of the past 100 years

But in 1961 – 66 years after the experimental film capture of a running horse -  some researchers in a lab created a game called ‘Space War’ running on an oscilloscope and what we would consider video games were born.  And now, 50 years after that, games have evolved into a massive commercial industry (worth $50 billion), and have taken from, and added to, the screen culture that came before them.

And this is both a good and a bad thing.
Because since 1895, what people think of as screen culture is defined by its storytelling abilities, the grammar adopted from theatre, and the unique language of film.  Games on the other hand, don’t really have the same strengths as a storytelling medium as theatre, film, and television, which makes it hard to engage with the unique properties of the medium – because screen remains the dominant metaphor, and is also part of the presentation layer of the medium.  It also makes it difficult because where the majority of funding & focus for game projects is embedded with the traditional screen industries, who have a much broader mandate, and one which is dictated by the shape of that ‘Screen’ metaphor.And the core of that metaphor is what causes trouble between game developers and the gatekeepers of film, but at the same time game developers locally haven’t really presented an alternative argument for why games should be treated differently or receive similar treatment. In previous calls for government support in particular, the argument hasn’t really gone beyone ‘well, film have it, so we should too,’ which isn’t a particularly compelling argument.

However, I think there are two really good ways of engaging with that.

The first is to look at the language that’s used and reframe it slightly. Screen Australia just did some research that showed 9 out of 10 people thought that ‘it was important for Australia to have a local film and television industry producing Australian Stories’. Hard to disagree with that, but if we reframed that for film away from ‘telling Australian Stories’ to ’Helping Australians tell stories’, it shifts away from the storytelling metaphor that sits at the heart of screen thinking and also lets us frame our own argument away from ‘making Australian Games’ to ‘Helping Australians make games’ – which is something far more achievable and engages the heart of what the medium might be capable of.

The other way of engaging with it is to strip the storytelling piece away entirely. Games might not be great storytelling mediums, but other artistic and creative forms such as dance, opera, visual art, or sculpture aren’t necessarily storytelling at their core enjoy government, creative, and cultural support, so it seems weird that we’d focus on that particular dividing line.

But this requires us as developers to commit to that, and to push it forward.  The removal of the screen metaphor is a good step forward in us attaining greater cultural acceptance – or at least sidestepping the well-trodden criticisms of established gatekeepers.

The idea that we’re even, necessarily, part of a digital culture is, sometimes not that useful. It creates a narrow view of what we are, what games are, and how we fit into that mode of thought and philosophy when there are other modes of engagement that exist in a more analogue world that might be more useful. It also binds us to technology arguments – again, publishers focusing on the properties of paper rather than what’s printed on them.

Which isn’t to say that digital technology doesn’t offer us the opportunity to create amazing audience experiences, because it does, but it is a tool – and a tool that has so many facets, from distribution to creation to engagement to communication – that summing it up under just one banner isn’t helpful from a creative industry perspective. Even looking around this conference we totally miss out on some of the brilliant playful stuff that’s happening in other sectors: played at GDC, the Metagame was a card game on top of the overall conference; Hide and Seek in the UK who recently launched The Show Must Go On and who also run Sandpits and create large-scale games; The Agency of Coney, also from the UK, who run Playdays and create playful experiences; The Copenhagen Games Collective who do everything from card games to the Dark Room Sex Game; and lastly Freeplay’s recent Game/Play exhibition at NGV Studio that combined art, digital, physical, and pervasive games.

There’s a lot that can be learned from digging away from the digital side of what it is that we do – and through which we could expand our cultural and intellectual reach. Original IP is one of those things that, I think, sounds like it has a lot of meaning and is one of those things that the industrial voice has long championed as the holy grail of development which would naturally emerge from increased investment or government support – something I’ll come back to in a bit.

Stepping sideways though, having been through other events with filmmakers, writers, poets, animators, artists, and critics, I’ve discovered that they don’t really talk about ‘IP’ in the same way as game developers. Sure, they harbour the same desires to make money out of their creations and to make unique things, but most of the conversations I’ve had have been about the thing itself – the book or poem or film or song – but for some reason game developers have attached themselves to this particular frame of reference, which I’d argue means very little when you actually have to produce something.

When you pull a wikipedia, there’s nothing that really illuminates what is being talked about.  Is it the characters, the world, the game mechanics itself? Is it some sort of exploitable elements that can transition into other forms, something frequently touted but which rarely if ever materialises?   It’s potentially all of these things – or none of them – which is a real danger because this call for original I.P. has become an abstraction from the final artifact itself itself.
Just like industry and screen and technology, this use of language sets up certain expectations – whether intentional or not – in how we discuss our work. Original IP conjures up, at least in my mind, images of nothing because it is something inherently intangible. It has no boundaries, and that’s what makes it a difficult thing to discuss.  If I’m writing a novel, I know the strengths and weaknesses of what I can do within the form.  If I’m creating IP, what are the edges?  What are the strengths and weaknesses of what I can evoke?  What do I really mean?  Tell me I’m making a game, and suddenly, I know the parameters, have 30 years of history and over a decade experience to draw on with a clear sense of the possibilities.

And I think this is important because cultural product – or Art – isn’t defined by I.P.  There may be elements within a title or a franchise such as a character or a moment or a story that could be described as I.P., but audiences respond to things in a far more visceral, experiential way to how they were moved or transported or affected emotionally.  Movies can do that, books can do that, songs can do that, and games can do that.  I.P. on its own can’t.

The other side of that desire for original IP, is the question of where it might come from. Historically, the industry has championed the creation of original IP, but the amount of it has remained consistently pretty low even as the number of total games has increased. Obviously, this has changed in the past few years as the App Store has changed the landscape and local developers have seen significant success with original titles, but over the preceding 10 year period, the amount of original titles generated by Victorian companies remained pretty low – and actually shrunk as a proportion of total games as we moved towards 2009.

Which raises the question – where would the experience to create these original titles come from? Is there a culture of original product? Of ideas? Who should we listen to when they say original IP is the way forward?

The other aspect of the Original IP is the idea that if there were only more funding around, creating it would be so much easier, the implication being that either a) there aren’t any government funds for it for studios or b) if there were simply more investment, it would magically appear.

There probably isn’t enough information to properly question the second part, but you can find out enough to figure out the first as funding agencies are required to publish their funding decisions. I dug through Film Victoria’s annual reports for 2008/2009, 2009/2010, and 2010/2011 to see where the money had gone. Here’s what I found out:
Game projects – not including some digital content funding projects in 08/09 – received a total of $4,401,820.00, covering 46 projects from 39 studios & individuals, and of that I’d say $2,223,455.00 – just over 50% – went to original projects from established studios. By established studios, I mean those ones that have been around for a while, have built a base on licensed IP projects, and which are trying to break out of it.

To say that there’s no support, or it isn’t enough in light of that, seems a little weird. The money is there, and has been pretty forthcoming in terms of what is out there. Sure, there could be more, and I’m sure more studios wouldn’t mind, but it’s there.

And I’ve only done this for Film Victoria, which was more a question of the availibility of their reports, not any sort of comment on their choices, submissions, or anything like that. I just wanted to point out the disconnect between a call for funding for original IP projects and the amount of funding that actually does exist.

And leads quite nicely into…
This is another of those long-term refrains that has tended to focus on bringing parity to games investment and development with film. This centres around tax breaks and how the Canadian development industry has thrived with them. The most recent piece of movement here was the introduction of the new R&D Tax Credit which replaces an old R&D Tax Concession, and should hopefully be a pretty important step in helping econonomic growth.

However, one of the main things to bear in mind when comparing the Australian environment to Canada’s is that economic policy is only a part of the whole equation. Although it’s rarely reported, the studios who set up in Canada are very aware of this and are also quite open about it.

THQ’s Danny Bilson in an interview over at gamesindustry.biz late last year said:

There’s more than one reason! There are actually two main reasons – first of all it’s a phenomenal digital development community. There are 2000-3000 game developers there that have been working in studios over the years, and they’ve been building out a really robust talent community there.

 

Also their university system offers a lot of training in the digital arts, so the province has a world class community there and they’re determined to grow it.

 

And along with that comes a fantastic subsidy to make it more economically feasible for us – they’re giving us thirty-seven and a half cents in every dollar of labour there, which is a huge win in the world of blockbuster games, which is what the core division of THQ is about.

or more succinctly:

“It’s the combination of talent, resource and then funding.”

As the local development community, it’s our responsibility to support those first two. How do we grow talent? How do we increase resources? If Australia was on the same footing as Canada, what would seperate the two? How can we create a culture that encourages inward investment? If that’s even what we want to happen? It’s also worth thinking about what other support government could offer outside of these economic incentives. If you look at the shape of other creative industries, there’s a raft of initiatives and programs that support creatives at various stages of their careers in ways beyond helping them to startup development studios.

Writing has the Wheeler Centre, which runs events throughout the year and also houses the Victorian Writers’ Centre, the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and other organisations.

Brisbane have The Edge as part of the State Library of Queensland which explores digital culture in a really expansive and inclusive way.

Film funding agencies have a much broader range of options including short-film funding, support for festival attendance, script development, and internships.

In Victoria, there is Open Channel which hires out equipment and runs short courses for film-makers

There are also things like education partnerships, artists in schools programs, cultural exchange programs, regional partnerships, and a whole bunch of other models beyond simply looking at building or expanding studios. My day job is as a writer, and one of the things you learn as a writer is that stories are instruction manuals for life. The way characters – and archetypes – deal with problems is supposed to show us ways of dealing with problems. Years ago I read The Writers’ Journey by Christopher Vogler and he discusses how the structure of the monomyth and jungian archetypes helped him make sense of his life. At one point, he found himself in conflict with another writer and realised that the man was acting as a threshold guardian in his life – someone who stood on the edge of one state of being to another. He knew that the way to deal with threshold guardians was to fight and defeat them or learn the lesson they were trying to teach. He chose the latter in this specific case.

The story of Australian development is at a tipping point. There are threshold guardians everywhere who want to tell you what to think, what to do, how to operate. They want to tell you about marketing and free to play and microtransactions and gamification. They want to talk to you about product over culture or they want to talk to you about building studios rather than making art. They want to tell you the story of the past 30 years of industrial development and how it’s going to save the future.

And they might be right.

But we can take a look back over the past 30 years in a post-constructed narrative of what has and hasn’t worked, of the stories and metaphors used and whether or not they’re still useful. We can also look to the rest of the world and see what they’re doing and pick and choose the best parts. We can also look beyond videogames to an emerging creative culture that wants to play with us in theatre, in literature, in museums or galleries or libraries or schools.  And we can start telling our own story of development formed through our own personal philosophies and reasoning. Maybe you disagree with everything I’ve said. Maybe your personal development philosophy is completely orthogonal to mine. Maybe we agree on some stuff but not others. I’m okay with that because I think the important thing is that we find ways for a wider range of distinctive, critical, informed, and individual voices to be heard.

Creative industries thrive on disagreement. On argument. On evolution. I want to hear more voices. I want to hear more challenges to the status quo. I want to question existing gatekeepers – myself included – and I want to be able to do it publicly. I want different people doing different things in different ways. I want the options and opportunities for people to create the type of creative and professional life they want. And I want more people to make more things and then to reflect critically on what they’ve made  to go on and make better things.

But like I said at the start. maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about.

But that’s what I believe. And that’s what I’ll be pursuing.

This year’s GCAP continues that. At the tail end of a year which saw countless studios shrink or shut, there was a danger that the conference itself would be downbeat and introspective, but from what I saw of the two developer days – I didn’t attend the Serious Games Forum – what we actually saw was an industry gathering that was pragmatic, self-assured, optimistic, and engaged with itself in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen at local game development conferences.

For me, the highlight was seeing – perhaps for the first time – a real change in how games and developers engaged with the wider culture. My journey through the conference event was mainly through my own sessions – a talk on evaluating some deep rooted industrial myths, a panel on government assessments, the Government Round Table, and the GDAA AGM – the incredibly diverse keynotes and conversations between sessions with old and hopefully new friends. In each of them, I saw sparks of conversations continue from last year about games and culture, about storytelling and art, and about the need to make things that you care about, and they seemed to come from deeper places as though the ideas and possibilities of games and their developers had taken root in everything from students to government.

There is still work to be done as a community of makers and as a creative industry in how we communicate, build new businesses, make new games, and connect with the wider creative culture, but if GCAP is any indication, I think we’re on the right track.

Specific highlights for me were:

• The inevitable disconnect you seem to get at creative industry events between those who promote the necessity of branding and those who tell – for me the far more engaging story – of finding success through making what you love.
• Screen Australia’s economic modelling of their new funding proposals, and getting to discuss policy, creativity, and where the skills for original IP development will come from with them.
• Mike Acton’s opening Keynote – which hit similiar beats (I hope) to my talk that followed.
• Amir Rao’s talk on the Journey of Bastion, including showing off early versions of the game, and sharing the sheer number of systems they implemented that never made it into the final build.

Over the next few days, I’ll be putting up the slides and text from both my ‘Turning off our Screens’ session and my Government Round Table talk. Souri from tsumea recorded video from The Assessment Panel, so hopefully that will be up online soon too.

Finally, this year’s GCAP saw me step down from the board of the GDAA. The past few years have seen huge shifts in games both industrially and culturally and I think the organisation has really refocused itself and engaged with government policy in clearly tangible ways. I’m proud of the small contribution I made to that dialogue. At this point in time though, I think there are additional thoughts and voices that need to be heard as part of the change I’ve seen this year through both Freeplay and GCAP, and I hope to be able to champion some of those – beginning with my slides from my GCAP session and expanding on some of the Film Victoria funding decision data I dug out for that.

Over at the Australia Council’s Connecting Arts Audiences online (back in July!), I wrote some pieces on technology & playful engagement.

I wrote an essay for the literary journal Meanjin on games and the expressive potential of boredom.

I was born in 1977—the year Star Wars was released—and I grew up with video games. I remember a time when they didn’t exist for me. I fought with my parents about pursuing games as a career, but along with books, films, music and magazines, video games defined my sense of cultural belonging, my formative places, experiences and relationships. I remember coming home from school at lunchtime to load up a game from a tape and race around a pirate-filled treasure island. I remember on holiday trying to stretch my daily allowance for as long as I could in the local arcades. I remember eight friends huddled in front of a tiny screen, passing the controller around in an easygoing tournament of Street Fighter. I remember a Star Wars game etched out in glowing green lines and the crackly voice of Alec Guinness telling me to trust the force as I blasted apart TIE Fighters.

Over at the ibrary, part of the Brisbane City Council library’s website, I did a month long blogging residency about game development and writing. In one of the posts, I realised that pretty much everything I was playing in September was a version of a game from my formative years.

Going back even further, I’ve been playing the remake of Another World on my iPad. The original was released on 1991 – 20 years ago – on the Amiga, which is where I played it originally. It was the first game I’d ever seen that felt cinematic. The opening sequence – which is completely silent – blew me away at the time, and I still got goosebumps watching it again sitting on my couch.

Still in Brisbane, I have a blog post up at The Edge about words meaning what we choose them to mean, and another upcoming one about the relationship of games to other art-forms.

In Freeplay related news, we’ve been working with the National Gallery of Victoria Studio to curate the Game/Play exhibition running from September 23 – Nov 5. As well as the exhibition component, we’re also running some events across the whole 6 weeks:

• Late Night Board Games Every Thursday night during the Exhibition
• A Game Jam on the weekend of the 15th & 16th
• A Playday on October 29th

Head over to the Freeplay site for more details.

At the Kill Your Darlings blog, I wrote a piece summing up my pecha kucha slides from Freeplay’s The Games That Made Me.

I think we’re in the beginning of a golden age of videogames where technology is no-longer the limiting factor, where we’re moving away from What can we make this new console ‘do’? to What can we say using the structures, rhythms and shapes of games? New designers are appearing, who have grown up in a world where videogames are a fact of life. Artists from visual arts, film, literature, music, or sculpture are becoming interested in the form and they’re creating things that may only peripherally resemble the games of my childhood, but which create emotional experiences unlike anything that’s come before.

 

And that gives me hope.

I took part in Kate Lundy’s recent Public Sphere Consultation on the National Cultural Policy. first through submission to the game development section of the Wiki and secondly because I sadly couldn’t make it up through a short video presentation.

And lastly, I’m going to be talking at Pause Fest on November 8th at 6:30 about Systems as Art, and will be taking part in this year’s Game Connect Asia Pacific from November 14th – 16th talking about cultural language, and taking part on a panel about assessment procedures.

If you’re anything like me, the two words games and literacy don’t really belong together. In my head they feel a little bit like 2 magnets vibrating as they try to repel each other, and I suspect it’s the same for many of you.

What I want to talk to you about this evening is not only how they do go together, but why it’s important that they do, as well as taking a look at the innovations that have made that necessary.

I’ve been playing games for almost my entire life and there’s an obvious level of technological innovation there. In my lifetime, I’ve gone from playing pong on a black and white TV to the PlayStation 3s and Xbox 360s with motion control and hi-definition displays and gaming hardware that fits in my pocket that is more powerful than the hardware that took men to the moon. By the time I retire, we’ll have gone through another 5 or 6 generations of console hardware. Pong to PlayStation3 all over again only this time, starting from the Playstation3.

Alongside those really clear technological innovations, I’m also aware of the wider cultural change that videogames have ushered in. I’ve gone from being the only person in a class full of about 50 computer science students to working with teams of hundreds of people. They’ve gone from a garage industry to a multi-billion dollar one, and one of the dominant cultural and entertainment forms on the planet.

And on top of all that, I guess what I think you’d call a fairly recent innovation is that increasingly we hear that they can be used to save the world or make us happier or make us more productive if we can just find a way to make everything more like a game.

And all of these changes have happened in an incredibly short period of time. Pong home consoles were released in 1975, 2 years before I was born. The PlayStation3 was released in 2006. All that separates them is 31 years. To put that in perspective, the second world war ended in 1945. The release of Pong is closer to that than it is to today.

And it’s exciting inside that whirlwind of ideas, the technology, the emerging culture, the idea that maybe games aren’t a social ill but a social good, but over the years I’ve become far more interested in looking at how these innovations provide a lens to answer the question – what can videogames teach us about what it means to be human?

This graph brings together research from the Australia Council, Screen Australia, and the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association and shows percentage of population who engage with each art-form. You can see how close games are to cinema there. And this research is a few years out of date so it’s likely games have exceeded film. 68% of the Australian population plays videogames – 14 million people…

And like I said before, this has happened in only a few decades. 31 years between Pong and the PlayStation3. A single generation. If you grew up with videogames, they’ve changed dramatically in that time. Even for someone like me who works in the sector – both industrially and artistically – I struggle. So, if you’ve been doing something else with your life, perhaps something that you consider more meaningful, then it’s obviously hard to keep up with the rapid innovations in technology, in art, in culture, in society, until eventually you’re standing in your own area of expertise in a world that isn’t connected to gaming and telling those who play to get off your lawn.

And there must be a reason for this engagement. Something in the form and the content that engages with people in ways that the critics can’t appreciate, and figuring out what that reason might be is about exploring what a games literacy might look like.

Because as games become more and more pervasive in our entertainment, our businesses, and our lives, that literacy will become increasingly essential, not only in rebutting those critics, but also in asking whether or not this pervasiveness is in fact a good thing.

Literacy covers two components – one that connects to something innate in us as humans, and another that reveals the systems we’ve constructed around that innate understanding.

In our written literacy, the innate characteristics are the particular rhythms of structure and story, of how words sound against each other, of our need to communicate something of what’s in our heads. At the systemic level we’ve created letters and words, classes of words like nouns and verbs, a grammar for how those classes interact with each other – all in service of amplifying our ability to communicate rhythm and sounds and communication.

And videogames are the same. Far from being indicators of the downfall of civilisation, we could just as easily look at them as examples of what is good about being human. And from that we can create a better understanding of the structures we have built, that we are building, and that we might need to build in the future.

They tell us that play is just as much a part of our makeup as telling stories. If stories are how we communicate about how the world works, then play is how we actually figure out how it works. From a kid playing with a box to someone on a quest in World of Warcraft, there is a common thread of experimentation and exploration – and that thread extends out into our lives. Every one of us is constantly trying, failing, learning, and that is the very essence of play, and is what we’ve been doing since the very dawn of our species. We might have given it different names, but that doesn’t change what it is.

They tell us that we like to make things out of what has come before. Videogames are an evolution of games. Just as opera was an evolution of theatre and music; film was an evolution of photography and theatre; videogames are something new built out of existing systems and structures. People are always solving problems or looking at the world in a slightly different way, jamming together what might appear disparate, or which might not work, but they try it anyway – playing almost – to create something new.

They tell us that, where possible, we invariably build tools to communicate experiences, to create art, to entertain, to explore the world, to amplify our ability to interact with the world just as the printing press amplified our ability to create books or a hammer amplifies our ability to produce force. And the effort that videogames amplify is our ability to imagine systems, modeling them, running simulations, experimenting within their confines – which reflects what our brain is designed to do. It constantly creates models to imagine the outcomes of a race or a conversation or asking the girl you’ve had a crush on out. We create art as imperfect models of those imaginings. And we build tools and technology to amplify that art.

They tell us that we will always innovate. That progress is inevitable. Again, 30 years between Pong and Playstation3. No time at all. Sure there are economic pressures in there, but at the essential end, at the creative end, people are endlessly pushing to try and find new genres, new tools, new ways of expressing sentiments that are as old as humanity in new ways for new generations.

They tell us that continuous communicative experiences are important to us. There’s something addictive about losing ourselves in a book or a film or a game and feeling the emotional communicative power, reacting and responding in real-time to a conversation between author and audience, entering that receptive flow-state in which so much art and experience resides. Contrast to the staccato experience of games like chess or monopoly or hungry, hungry, hippos, and you can start to see why videogames have become so popular in such a short period of time – and why it becomes easier to dismiss people who say videogames are just extensionsof board games. They aren’t. They’re something new, something continuous, something communicative.

And they tell us that we want to share our thoughts of how the world works with the tools that we have. Videogames are fictional, are rhetorical, are metaphorical, are persuasive and expressive. They are all of the things that other art-forms are and they are just as communicative. From Portal to Assassin’s Creed, or Red Dead Redemption to the Marriage, or World of goo to Braid, there are people behind these games, with thoughts with feelings, with ideas.

This is only a fraction of the innate elements of our literacy. We could be here all day exploring and dissecting, but there isn’t enough time.

So, what of the amplifying structures of that literacy? The grammar of videogames.

Here we butt into the problem of that 30 year gap. The youth of the form. Those structures are still evolving. Our best and brightest designers are still learning – which becomes a little bit worrisome when we start to see these structures bleed out of videogames and into our real world.

Because in the same way a printing press can produce works of staggering beauty, it can also produce propaganda. In the same way a film can transport us, it can also convince us of things that may not be true. In the same way games engage us in new ways, they can instil in us behaviours that might not be in our best interests. There are more game designers than at any other point in human history. More people thinking about games and about play than at any other point. That’s exciting. But inevitably, some of those are just going to want to make money, or market a product, or push some political agenda.

And it’s only our level of literacy that works to inoculate us against that. The stronger our understanding of how stories work, of how films work, of how games work, the more easily we can see through to the heart of what they’re attempting.

When someone says ‘let’s gamify our wallets,’ we’d be able to say – is that a good idea? Do I need to add an extra abstract system on top of a whole bunch of already abstracted systems? Why would they want us to do that anyway?

When someone says that they want to gameify our workplace to make us more productive, what’s that actually about? Sure there are parallels with levels and job titles and xp and amount of money, but those systems exist already. Why would be build a game layer on top of that? And is it about making the workplace better, or about getting more work out of people.

When companies design loyalty systems that exploit psychological conditions to cause people to take action for a brand against their own best interest, going so far as destroying relationships; When the same structures are used by magazines to get more college girls competing for photo-spreads, by beer companies to buy more beer, or by gambling companies to drop more and more money, we need to stop and ask ourselves – are these things making us more or less human?

The only thing that lets us combat these things – and they are happening right now – is improved literacy.

So here’s the good thing.

We already have at least half of the understanding of what it looks like – because we’re all individuals, we’re all human, and we all have that innate piece of literacy inside of us.

What we’re perhaps missing is the language of that amplification layer. But luckily it doesn’t take much for us to find that

I recently ran a project with the Department of Education here about teaching teachers games literacy with the aim of helping their kids to create games. One of the first things we did was to sit down and play some board games because their rules are exposed and you can far more easily see how they’re connected to each other – and also because the barrier to entry is lower than handing someone an xbox controller and saying ‘play.’

We had a range of games – from something pretty easy like Zombies!! To a game about industrial era Lancashire that the group playing barely managed to set-up let alone play.

And, I’ll be honest, there was some resistance to this at first. They couldn’t see what it had to do with videogames, how they might use this in the classroom, why they were wasting their time with this exercise.

Luckily, they didn’t lynch me, and over the next few hours of play, they came up with the most incredible reflections of what the emotional experience of the game was, what did and didn’t work for them, how the rules interacted with each other, and how those rules drew out certain responses from them. Some of the games were fun, and others weren’t, but in the end, everybody in that room could talk coherently and intelligently about how the games worked.

And from that grounding and just a little bit of reflection and coaching, we designed some games. Simple ones at first involving playing cards and tiny rule sets, but building up to a pretty complex plan for a digital game including the characters, the level designs, the player actions, and the rules.

And then, we brought their students in and together we broke games down, discussed how they worked, designed some, and pitched completely new ones. And by the end of it, both students and teachers had the start of a common language about risk and reward, about gameplay actions, about characters and space, about verbs and nouns, and about how the games they liked work and how the ones they were creating were going to work – all told to each other in the beginnings of their new systemic understanding of games literacy that built on what they already had but perhaps just needed permission to talk about.

And that’s where I want to leave you this evening: play games, think about them, and perhaps most importantly, talk about them – how they make you feel, what they’re saying, what they mean to you, and why they matter.

Because they do. And will continue to do so. And because they might help to teach us a little bit about what makes us human. And because they might help us fight against those who would make us less than that.

Thank you.

On Saturday, A Norwegian man let off a bomb in Oslo that killed seven people and shot and killed another 80 at an island retreat.

These events have nothing in common.

Other than the attempts of some media reports to connect them. I won’t link to them here, but Brendan O’Connor was asked about this on the ABC and The Age and Sydney Morning Herald both ran stories with this as their throughline.

This isn’t a question of him training using videogames, or of whether or not violent videogames create real-world violence, or whether or not media influences our behaviour, or whether or not the proposed classification reforms go too far or not far enough.

It’s a question of basic human decency.

People were killed. In terrible circumstances. That is the unwavering fact at the heart of what happened in Norway, and I’m appalled at any attempts to conflate that with some other story or prebaked narrative.

Sometimes it is useful to be part of a tribe, a group, something on the verge of being a monoculture, but other times it is important to stand up and say ‘those people over there. They do not speak for me’. As someone who plays games, who creates them, who agrees with classification reform, and who uses technology in their everyday life, I feel it’s important to say that those conflating the two, muddying the waters of both, sensationalising this tragedy, and creating stories where there is in actuality no story at all, do not speak for me.

And I hope do not speak for others as well.

The ATOM Screen Futures conference on Sunday 10th July, 12:00 – 1:00

Teaching games and games literacy

While videogames sit firmly in the limelight, there is a whole world of games out there that are more accessible, more easily read, and which teach tangible skills that can feed into digital games and interactive development.

Drawing from a recent Department of Education and Early Chidhood Development research project into teaching games and games literacy, this session will look at games and design from physical and pervasive games, board games, improvisation, experimentation, and design exercises with the aim of separating out the creative skills from the technical and providing a base to support greater games literacy in the classroom – whether or not the final outcome is a digital game or something else.

Monash University’s Computer Games Boot Camp on Thursday July 14th talking about writing for games and indie development.

The next TEDxMelbourne event on the evening of Tuesday July 19th talking about Gaming and Innovation.

VITTA‘s annual ICT Week event at BMW Edge on Wednesday July 27th talking about the changing shape of the industry and what that means for students & careers.

Here’s the video. A full copy of the talk – which isn’t really a transcript, but it’s what I wrote to say amidst a flurry of other deadlines – is beneath the fold.

One of the things about running a festival that I didn’t expect was how much it enables you to sort of frame the present as a function of the past and the future. I suspect the reason for this is that it happens over a specific weekend, giving a really clear focal point. Sure, there’s a lot of planning and thinking and wrangling that goes into it, but there’s also that crystalised moment where all of that same planning and thinking and wrangling coalesces into something pretty tangible.

Freeplay’s been going since it was started by the arts organisation Next Wave in 2004. Now, try to think back to 2004 and what game development was like then. Seven years ago. It’s almost inconceivable, right? I recently wrote a piece for the IGDA newsletter and so I can tell you exactly what it was like:

The first Freeplay took place in a converted karate dojo in the city in 2004. Back then there was no PlayStation 3, no Xbox 360 and no Wii. The PSP had just come out, and the original DS had only just been released in Japan earlier that year. Gaming was dominated by the PlayStation 2, with the Xbox taking second place, and the GameCube kicking around in the background. On the PC, Half Life 2 was finally released after ten years in development, and World of Warcraft was unleashed on the world.

Next Wave did 2 more festivals. One in 2005 and another in 2007. Similar sort of changes took place in those years and by 2007, we’d properly entered this console cycle – and the iPhone was released. Only four years ago. Weird, right? How the hell did any of us survive?

We took it over from Next Wave in 2009 and in doing so, we reflected on the significant changes that had happened in the 5 years since it had started. Technology had changed dramatically; the culture was embracing games properly; Independent development had become economically and creatively viable, and we wanted to capture a bunch of that change – and I think we mostly succeeded. The feeling coming out of the event was one of a strong creative desire, but perhaps not the clearest sense of how to express that. When we sat down to plan 2010, we wanted to harness that, looking at the opportunities for creators as part of the wider creative and artistic culture. And, again, I think we mostly succeeded. Over 1500 people came through the whole event and if the feedback is any indicator, it was a significant success. Not bad for two people running out of their respective homes…

A lot has changed since then though. The local scene has tilted and shifted pretty dramatically, and in talking to people over the past 6 months, I get the feeling that there’s a caution in getting involved – or staying involved – with games, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why that is and what can be done about it.

And the first step is to talk about how I stopped having fun.

Middle of last year, I borrowed Dragon Age from a friend to play. I’d just completed Mass Effect 2 and enjoyed it – other than the slightly mental end boss and the strange overlap in character issues – I thought it was well writen, mechanically strong, and I wanted more of that.

But Dragon Age bored me. Seriously bored me. And it became a war of attrition to complete it. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about all of these tiny little quests. There was a massive army massing, goblins and dragons and blight, and all people seemed to care about was whether or not I could help them find the lost little snuffling pig creatures that they’d let escape. It’s essentially a game of petty politics and unbridled self-interest and it lost me very early on.

But, after about maybe 10 or 15 hours of play, I started to wonder something strange about it – perhaps boredom was the point of the game. In capturing and encoding the actions and the fiction of an exiled king, I wondered if Bioware were doing something incredibly experimental in the trappings of a multi-million dollar AAA game? Surely the experience of politics is summed up as travelling around trying to convince people to join you, keeping them onside, occasionally slicing them open with swords.

I don’t really think that at all. But there was a reaction to Dragon Age that got me thinking – why doesn’t this game work for me? It should. I like Bioware’s other games. I’m kind of interested in the world, in the moral framework, in the story they’re trying to tell.

But nothing. Except for boredom. After about 24 hours or so, I finally finished it. Still bored. And I spent a lot of time thinking about why? And whether or not games could use boredom well.

Few months later, I was playing Bioshock 2 – which brilliantly uses the familiar settings of the first game, the drudgery of being a big daddy, the endless haranguing of Lamb and her disciples to tell you that you’re an abomination, that there’s something wrong with you, that you should just give up. When you think about it, that’s a pretty brave thing for a game to tell you to do – stop playing it. And in the first few hours, I was, not exactly bored, but sensing familiarity in the setting and the mechanics. I pushed on – and I’m glad I did because there was a moment of catharsis, a turning point both similar and different to the first game that drew the majority of its emotional charge from the juxtaposition of the initial boredom and the following accomplishment. The game simply wouldn’t work half as well if the first half hadn’t felt like a chore.

And this, along with my reaction to Dragon Age, got me thinking about my own expectations of games because games are supposed to be fun, right? That’s their purpose. They are entertainment. We might want them to be Art with a capital A, but it’s right there in the name. They’re games. But why should that be? Why shouldn’t we look for something more?

And then it all came together when I finally got a chance to play Limbo.

At Freeplay last year, Brandon Boyer, the current chairman of the IGF was talking about Limbo and someone stuck their hand up and said ‘they couldn’t understand why anyone liked it because it was just a trial and error platformer’. Brandon thought about that for a moment and replied that maybe it was, but that it was also the first game to give him a serious Lord of the Flies vibe.

I played it recently  and discovered something really interesting. It is just a trial and error platformer. But it also succesfully communicates that Lord of the Flies vibe. Both are valid opinions of the game, but require a certain perspective in order to view the game as one or the other or as both.

I didn’t have fun for a lot of my time playing Limbo. I was frustrated, exhausted, confused, but I persisted because there was something beyond just having fun in the game. A gestalt experience that said something through it’s mechanical nature as a trial and error platformer and a uniquely aesthetic work.

These three games, as different as its possible to be – from an RPG to a FPS to an indie platformer – taught me an incredibly important lesson

My games literacy, and I assume the literacy of the person asking that question at Freeplay, had evolved alongside the technology of games. When you think about it, it’s only really been what, around 30 years that videogames have existed in their current form. I’m 33 and what I consider a game has been shaped by the evolution of the medium up to this point. My tastes have formed at the same time as games have formed. And the sorts of games those were tend to skew towards mechanics over aesthetics.

What a curious revelation. So curious that I wrote a great big essay about it that you can hopefully read when it gets published later in the year.

But what does that have to do with anything? And what might it have to do with Freeplay?

Games have only existed as both a cultural form and a creative industry for an incredibly short period of time. Pong was released around the same time as I was born – 1977 – and in the 33 years we’ve gone from a cottage industry to a multi-BILLION dollar one, from a technical curiousity to an almost mainstream cultural and creative form.

And if my own games literacy has evolved alongside those massive changes in technology, culture, industry, and art, then other people’s probably have too, and maybe there’s something happening at a macro level that is reflected in my own personal experience.  Which leads to the question of – are some of those changes ready for re-evaluation? Can we find better ways of thinking and talking about things that we take for granted? If we can reframe what games are and what they’re capable of, can we also do the same for industry? For community? For culture?

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice meets Humpty Dumpty and they have a weird conversation about the meanings of words that has the following exchange:

I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master that’s all.”

Lets ignore for now whether or not Humpty Dumpty like almost everyone else in Through the Looking Glass was on drugs, and also that he fell off a wall and nobody could really fix him up – which could be used as a slightly defeatist metaphor if I was that way inclined – and instead focus on what he has so clearly figured out.

Words have meaning. They’re important. They have both intrinsic and extrinsic value. With them, we frame our thoughts, have conversations, discuss what is in our head, and turn those thoughts into action and then into the things we make.

And words can restrict or empower, either by accident or through intent. We can use them to hold us down, or we can wield them as swords, as tools, as modes of thought, as enablers of action.

But we can also allow ourselves to be used by them, by the masters of them, again either by accident or through intent.

Let’s start with the Games Industry.

In October of 2010, MTV Games interviewed one of the developers of NBA Jam and they asked him the question “What do you think is the biggest problem current games suffer from?”

To which he replied:

“I think there are a number of problems we have with the way games are being developed today, but honestly, I think one of the biggest problems right now is the actions and attitude of some of the gamers out there. You know who they are. If they spent less time spewing ignorant hate on the boards and in online games, and more time rallying behind the great games they love and helping to build a thriving community that welcomes everyone that shows up to play with them – everybody wins. Nothing wrong with a little smack talk here and there, just wish gamers respected each other more. I just got back from PAX Prime down in Seattle. I am of the opinion that if the people of PAX ran the world, it would be a much better place. Costumes optional.”

Pretty reasonable response, right. And he makes the pretty clear distinction between the development process and the audience.

This was picked up by a number of blogs in a weird game of chinese whispers…

One had:

“What’s the biggest problem facing the games industry today?

According to NBA Jam’s Creative Director Trey Smith, who just put the finishing touches on the slapstick sports game for Electronic Arts, one of the biggest problems right now is “the actions and attitude of some of the gamers out there”.

…

What do you think is the biggest problem facing the games industry today?”

Slightly different, I think. Trey from EA makes a pretty clear distinction between what I’d describe as the development of games – their industrial component – and the audience. I think it’s a fairly fair statement to make that for most of us, the audience isn’t part of the industrial process. People who read books don’t think of themselves as part of the publishing or writing industries; people who go to see films don’t think of themselves as part of the movie industry; people who wear clothes don’t think of themselves as part of the fashion industry.

On another blog:

“I would like to respond to this sentiment by stating that this is not the biggest problem facing the games industry. The internet is synonymous with idiots, and this does not just restrict itself to gaming, but the internet as a whole. Hell, just step outside during the day, or night, and you’ll find your share of selfish idiots wandering around.

No, the biggest problem facing the games industry at the moment is suits. Corporate suits. Worn by people whose first thought is to their shareholders above anything else.”

And another wrote in response:

“That’s what’s wrong with the games industry. Not the suits: they’d disappear in a month if we stopped supporting them. Not the angry ranty geeks: for all their lack of social graces, they often reserve their passion for the things that deserve to be supported. No, it’s the ordinary people who keep handing over their money for overproduced, soulless shit that doesn’t need to exist, either because they don’t know any better, or worse: even though they do.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

So, this might not seem important – just a bunch of bloggers commenting – and I half agree with you, but this is a problem I see again and again. To bring it back to Freeplay – the reason I am here at least – Australian Gamer recently had an article titled ’10 reasons why the future of the australian game development industry is looking awesome’, which is a noble thing to write in the face of such seemingly all pervasive negativity.

Except, Freeplay is on it along with the Global Game Jam and Lubi and Truna’s 48 hour game jam.

I don’t have a problem being on a list about why things are awesome, but we’re not Industry. Not by a long shot.

So, I want to define what the games industry probably is, because if we define it, we can take control over it, and we can have a conversation about what it is, what it isn’t, and whether or not we want to be a part of it.

The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation recently released a report titled “Working in Australia‟s Digital Games Industry” and there’s some great stuff in there for anyone interested – including what other countries think of Australian development – but there’s also this very concise description of what the Games Industry is:

According to the UK Department of Trade and Industry (2002), the digital games industry for console and stand-alone PC games consists of at least seven sub- sectors:

• Development
• Publishing
• Middleware and tools
• Outsourcing and service companies
• Format holders/console manufacturers
• Distributers
• Retailers

No mention of festivals in there, nothing about audience, nothing about games reporting or reviewing. Industry is a very specific thing, designed to solve a very specific problem, and which tells a very specific story about itself.

And that specific story, coming from an industrial space, can be incredibly limiting. I’m surprised, but I shouldn’t be when I hear things like this in games reporting:

Another prominent games industry executive, who declined to be named, also says the narrative elements “places funding outside the realm of most Aussie games developers”.

“Strong story-telling elements are found in AAA titles – like the recent LA Noire by Team Bondi – (but) the budgets for these projects are beyond what most independent games developers can expect to secure,” the source says.

“It’s no accident that Australia’s recent success has been on the iPhone platform – Flight Control and Fruit Ninja are examples, and there’s been a shift towards developing games for social media networks like Facebook.

“The program is a bit dated and will probably benefit traditional media producers and not games developers as I am sure was intended.”

I’m tempted to pick this apart line-by-line, but I won’t. All I’ll say is that it didn’t take me long to come up with a list of games that don’t fit into this thin measure of success – either Flight Control or LA Noire – Machinarium; Limbo; Sword and Sworcery; Stacking; Costume Quest. All with strong story-telling elements, all critically succesful, and all neither AAA or a mechanically driven iPhone title, and having worked with their innovation division, I reckon would totally be the sorts of thing Screen Australia would be willing to support.

But I think this is a good example of the story the Australian Industry sector tells itself at the moment is – we’re good at mobile; we’re good at licensed titles; iPhone is where it’s at – but the more we talk about ‘Australia is expert at mobile’, or ‘that coders in their bedrooms are beavering away on the next Fruit Ninja’, or that ‘the games industry is this or that or whatever the hell it is this week’, the less we’re talking about anything specific, and it in turn becomes more difficult to have conversations, which then restricts our ability to imagine new things when we come at them from an already established perspective.

As Humpty Dumpty taught us, it’s about being the master of the words. So we need to ask ourselves – who controls these words? And why does that matter? Are there better words to use? Is there a better story we can tell ourselves? About where we are and where we want to go?

A few years ago, 2009 to be exact, I was having a really difficult time of it. I was working through a whole bunch of personal issues and my therapist at the time suggested two books for me to read that she thought might help me get things in perspective.

One was a book called The Happiness Trap by Dr Russ Harris and it’s a mix of philosophy, cognitive behavioural therapy, and practical advice that sets it apart from almost every other self-help book.

There’s a lot in the book, and a lot in it that helped me, but the two things that have stuck with me the most – and which are the most applicable to this discussion – are the idea of choice and the idea of following values over goals.

At our core, our very core, the only thing we have any real control over is the way we choose to act. There are always things outside of us that we can’t control – a shifting industrial landscape, a global financial crisis, the whims of a senior design director, the games other people are making which might steal your carefully planned PR thunder -  but, what we can control is how we choose to act in response to those things. I’m not suggesting that all choices are easy or have no risk associated with them, but their are always choices and alternatives. Just because they’re unpleasant doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They just mean that they might not be a choice you want to make. You can choose to rail against the industry or try to build something alongside it. You can choose to work somewhere you don’t enjoy or you can take steps to find somewhere else. You can listen to prominent industry executives and choose whether or not to believe what they have to say or dig a little deeper and form your own opinions on it.

This very much influences how I see Freeplay. We have chosen to make it a very specific thing. Our theme is a choice; the speakers are choices; the panels & lectures & workshops are all choices, and they’re all designed to achieve a certain effect. More abstractly, we have chosen to build something rather than provide a space to bitch about how horrible the industry is, and we try to encourage other people to do the same. At the same time, we’ve chosen to try as much as possible to avoid being all pollyanna-ish about it, because we believe that the best way to make good choices is to know pretty clearly what those choices look like.

And in the end, all we have any control over with this piece of work are those choices. When somebody comes along and sets up what they describe as Australia’s Biggest Independent Games Festival, what can we do about that? Sure it’s tricky to wrangle, but it’s outside our control. The only thing we can do is choose to behave a certain way, build the thing we want, and hope people respond to that.

And in the end, those choices fundamentally reflect our values – and the Happiness Trap is interesting because it encourages a shift away from looking at life as a collection of goals into one of values.

Most of us want to make games, right? Maybe we have a game in our head, maybe we want to work at Blizzard or Valve, or maybe we want to create something incredibly innovative that wins the IGF. These are goals. Working in games is a goal. It’s something with an end-point, something clear.

But what if you don’t end up getting a job at blizzard or Valve. What if your game doesn’t end up winning the IGF or even being a finalist? What if that idea you have turns out to be not that great after all?

Disappointment, right? The existential angst that accompanies failure – are you wasting your life? Were your parents right? Is it time to get a real job? Are you good enough?

What if you reframe those experiences in terms of the values that matter to you. That way, even if there are things you can’t control, or if things don’t go as planned, you can always be acting in accordance with those values – and you can reframe your sense of satisfaction.

But figuring out what those values are can be hard. Making a game is something clear, but why do you want to make the game is tricky. Do you want to make beautiful things? Fun things? Do you want to communicate something? Do you want to explore technology? Do you want to connect with people? These are value judgements and they’re far more individual, but in the end they’re far more important because they reflect us – and they reflect the people we choose to associate with and surround ourself with.

And values help to answer the question of: what is a community? It’s a collection of people bound together by something common. In many cases, it’s a geographical thing, the culture of a town or a city, in others, it might be a shared practice or experience – a sporting or company culture – or it might be the mythology that is constructed  – the Wild West cowboy mythos, or the Australian fair go larrikin – but in all cases, it’s something difficult to define, but shared at some level.

But the larger the group, the more abstract those values have to become because – by necessity – they include more people with greater internal conflicts.  A great example is  when you hear people like Julia Gillard say things like ”The Greens will never embrace Labor’s delight at sharing the values of everyday Australians, in our cities, suburbs, towns and bush, who day after day do the right thing, leading purposeful and dignified lives, driven by love of family and nation.” Kinda insulting, I think, and in a population of 22-million people what are the shared values of everyday Australians?

Closer to home,  when Robert Clarke, the new Victorian AG says the community should have a chance to discuss the draft guidelines — which have not been made public — and see what sort of games would be legalised. ‘‘The Victorian government will decide our position based on our assessment of whether the final proposal will adequately protect the community,’’ or when in the same article has “Backed by a groundswell of support from the gaming community, the Gillard government is determined to fix the classification system for computer games, which allows unsuitable games to be rated for 15-year-olds, yet bans popular games for adults.” What are the values of the gaming community? The whole gaming community? As though they’re an amorphous blob – and as though the community they’re protecting doesn’t look like a big venn diagram with a massive overlap between the two.

The values of Freeplay are about community, communication, creativity, sharing. We could do that in a million different forms, from a single workshop to a 2-week long festival. We can manifest them no matter what we’re doing and feel good about what we’re doing in that space. Some of those values are my own, and others are the festivals. And it’s the difference between taking a top-down approach to things like building a community where a festival says ‘this is what you need’ where they are goal driven – and those goals could quite conceivably fail – to a bottom up approach to things where a festival says, ‘here are options & ideas & we’ll work with you.’

The values of the reasons we are here are because we have something in common – we care about play, about games, about the community that surroundes them and the culture they inspire. And those values let us be part of something larger than ourselves, something shared, but perhaps not something easily articulatable.

If there is a gaming community, the only real common value is that ‘they like playing games’. Beyond that, You’d be splitting into smaller and smaller groups (with heaps of overlap) of ‘first person shooters’, ‘facebook games’, ‘DS games’, ‘Family Friendly games’, and then into parents, children, people who support and don’t support the R18+ stuff, developers, indie developers, writers, doctors, nurses.

So, let’s bring it back then to our original questions about the stories we tell ourselves and the language we use and dig out what the values of an industry might be.

Going back to that APO report that drew out the definition of industry, there’s a brilliant little boxout that shines the brightest of lights on that question.

There is an observable difference between the career paths and skills of the entrepreneurs founding and growing enterprises in the games market, and the profile of specialist workers within the industry. Enterprise entrepreneurs in the industry are characterised by some eclectic mix of publishing passion, entrepreneurial flair and a commercial incentive to try and recoup a return on the investment of their sweat equity.

…

The employee labour force is very different. As in film and television, the games labour force is motivated by the buzz of the current project, the attractiveness of being part of a specific team environment, and the ability to recoup intrinsic creative rewards.

This section is really telling. It tells us what I think many have suspected – that the people who start studios frequently have different values than the people who work there – but it also gives us a look into the answer for the question of what’s an industry for? And the answer is: it’s about making a return on an investment; it’s about making money.

An industry solves a very specific problem of controlled and manageable production, and in the main that’s a problem that the games industry solves pretty well, and has solved locally pretty well for a while. Studios gathered people together and figured out art and technology pipelines; game designers experimented within the confines of external producers and internal politics; management structures evolved, taking from existing companies and adapting them to games’ strange mixture of technology and creativity. But it’s still about solving that problem to make money. Even those companies that we all respect – your Blizzards and your Valves – do it, they’ve just realised that they can make more money by making better games and build their companies and their cultures around those values of quality.

So, with that in mind, with that core, why do we talk about ‘industry’ as though it is something else, as though it’s the audience or games reporting or education?. The reasons we do that is because industry has, very successfully, figured out how to be the master of the words and how to be the master of their stories.

None of which is to criticise industry, I think it serves a really important role as part of a bigger creative development culture, but things are in flux at the moment for a whole host of reasons and suddenly industry doesn’t quite mean the same thing that it did in the past – and if the LA Noire / Fruit Ninja comment is any indicator, they might not have a great grasp of how the world is changing around them.

But, industry is where the jobs are, right? Sure, for a very long time. And when there are jobs, when there is clear economic value, it isn’t that surprising that they’ve been the dominant voice of the sector for such a long time, and in doing so that industry voice has bled out to encompass everything from production to audience, dictating the terms of our creative and cultural story.

And I think there’s a better story, one that doesn’t need to be confined by the values of the industrial model, but which can extend out beyond it, we just need to figure out how to reframe what exists and exactly what we want to go to.

The second book my therapist suggested I read was Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. It’s about a psychiatrist who survives a concentration camp and the treatment philosophy that comes out of that experience. For me, the whole thing can be summed up by one story from it.

A man goes to see Victor. He tells him he’s distraught, and has been since his wife died five years ago. Every day he feels the pain of it, that loss, colouring every day and night as he goes about his life, such as he feels it is. Victor thinks for a minute and then asks the man how his wife would have felt if he’d died instead of her, how she’d have gone through the past 5 years. The man quickly responds that she’d have been as distraught as he was, and Victor tells him that he’d saved her from that, the pain and the loss. This was the price he had to pay for their relationship and to keep her from that. The man left and never went back to see Victor.

When that unnamed executive talks about how games with strong storytelling elements are AAA like LA Noire and ignores the smaller scale titles like Limbo or Machinarium. When the measure of success promoted by our government agencies and our industry voices are all Fruit Ninja or Flight Control, it encourages people to try making games like that in order to secure funding or because they think they can ride the Apple cart to success, even if it might not be the game they want to make. When we talk about how Australia is good at mobile, we should ask if that’s true or if it’s just Firemint and Halfbrick who are good at mobile. When we say that we’re full of ‘world-class’ talent, we should take a look at ourselves and go, what the hell does that even mean?

So what would Victor Frankl tell us as a creative sector or an industry?

He’d tell us that the world has changed significantly since that first Freeplay in 2004, and he’d tell us that the internet means that our creative peers and our audiences are no longer just the people in Australia. He’d tell us that we don’t need to be constrained by the small measure of success established by those in industry. And he’d tell us that this change is scary, sure, but that there are opportunities in it for those willing to take the risk. And he’d tell us, I think, that what’s going on might just be the price the sector needs to pay in order to build something better – and he’d tell us that we can choose to view it that way if we want to.

There’s so much negativity, there’s so much the industry is screwed up, the sector is screwed up, Australian developers aren’t innovative enough, they don’t take enough risks, they aren’t creative enough, they don’t listen to feedback enough. Everyone, it seems if you go online, knows what to do to fix things. But here’s what I think Victor Frankl would tell you if you said that to him – he’d say: You can’t control these things. You can’t change an industry or a sector or a company or a studio, all you can do is choose how you’re going to behave, how you want to act, the sorts of values you want to embody and the people you want to surround yourself with who also, hopefully reflect those values too.

And this is what it boils down to – people and values and the social constructs we design and build that support and enable those.

This year’s Freeplay is sort of a realisation of a lot of this stuff.

A festival is a designed thing. Or at least it should be. I’m sure a bunch of people here have been to events or conferences or attended talks or classes and left wondering – what was the point of that? There are sometimes factors outside of a person’s control, but for something like Freeplay to exist there has to be a reason for it to exist, and then that reason is articulated through what we program, who we ask to talk, what the sessions are.

Because the event reflects a part of me in a very real way. It’s strange to be talking about a however many day long thing Freeplay ends up being as being representative of me, but that’s what design is – it’s a series of choices you make that try to communicate something in my head. So, last year when we chose to look at play as part of the wider cultural, artistic, and personal community, that was something that I was interested deeply in. This year, when we’re looking at the individual as part of the creative process, it’s again something we care about, and something that we believe we can explore through the structures a festival affords us.  I make choices about sessions, about order, about people, about marketing and about audience every day that shape it and hopefully give it a voice.

And the best structures around us enable us to do the same. Our friends, our families, our communities, our studios, our cultures reflect our values – consciously or unconsciously. You look at Valve and they can tell you what their culture is, what their values are, why they’ve made the choices they have. Same for Epic, for Blizzard, for Rockstar, for Naughty Dog, for Double Fine. The studios that we all respect, the individuals that we all respect in this field, have clear values that can be articulated and shared.

And it’s about making the choice to follow those values – even if it’s hard, and it frequently is. I’ve given up a lot to do Freeplay. Time, money, some relationships, have all suffered, but I’ve chosen to make those sacrifices. And in the end, that makes following them easier for me.

I have an existential streak in me. I believe that you can’t control your thoughts, that you can’t control your feelings, you can’t control the world outside your head all the time, so the only thing you have control over is how you choose to act in response to that. I can choose to follow the values that matter to me or I can choose to ignore them. I can choose to follow a path of building a community that matters to me or pursue financial rewards. I can choose to be honest about that or hide my true intentions. I can choose to become more aware of those values or choose not to.

In the face of a shifting industry, I can choose to respond to the reality of it or rail against how I think it should be. I can choose to build systems or communities that reflect my own values. I can choose to surround myself with people that I want to work with, who I know will have my back when the shit hits the fan. I can choose to make beautiful things. I can choose to be part of an industrial system – accepting that their values aren’t the same as mine – or I can stay outside of it. I can choose to go overseas and create AAA titles or I can stay here and try to make it happen. I can choose to make money or culture or find the middle ground that might let me do both.

And in doing all of that, perhaps I can surround myself with people who share my values, who want to tell a better story, and maybe we can show people that such a thing is possible, and that story and those values can get larger and louder and maybe drown out some of the others that are out of date or not so useful or whatever it is. But if not, that’s fine, because I’ll have built things that I’m proud of. And I am very proud of Freeplay in its incarnation on my watch.

I want to finish up by asking a few more questions – there’ve been a lot, I know, but hang in there, almost done:

What would you do if nothing changed? If the industrial side of things didn’t suddenly explode with jobs? If there were no government tax breaks like Canada? If the R18+ rating didn’t come through?

These are things that you can’t control. Maybe influence. Maybe a little bit. But they’re kinda outside you’re sphere of influence.

Would you still make games? Because that’s a choice. And it’s a choice that matters.

Thank you for your time.