Paul

Reframing the Australian game

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In writing and thinking about these posts on games and their place in the Australian cultural landscape, I found myself digging into the notion of what makes uniquely Australian content, and more specifically what might make a uniquely ‘Australian Game’.

There have been attempts at games that focus on Australian elements, most notably Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, Escape from Woomera, or some levels in Flight Control, but in the main the bulk of the work done here in industry and independent development contains none of that, making us easy fodder for those who maintain the argument that games have no cultural relevance – an argument that, at least in my research, never seems to meet with much resistance beyond ‘more people play games than ever before’ or ‘other mediums are supported so we should be too’.

I think there is an answer, but it requires a reframing of the entire question of what might make an Australian game.

Read moreReframing the Australian game

Neither a screen nor a technology culture be…

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Ken Levine from Irrational Games, and creator of Bioshock and the upcoming Bioshock Infinite was recently interviewed by Develop magazine and in it he talks about his life in games, and some of the key differences in film. It culminates with him being offered a chance to work on a hollywood film – an offer he flatly refused.

Read moreNeither a screen nor a technology culture be…

Audience engagement

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As part of presenting on games & culture at GCAP next week, I dug into some of the recent research on audience engagement from the Australia Council and mixed in the latest stats from iGEA and Screen Australia to see how audience engagement in games measured up to other forms.

Here’s the result:

Edit: To clarify what the graph is supposed to show: the percentage of population who participated according to the Australia Council’s reports for Music, Literature, Theatre, and Dance, percentage of population who attended the cinema from Screen Australia’s stats, and the percentage of population who play computer games according to the iGEA’s report.

RUOK?

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I had planned to post my thoughts on Heavy Rain today, focusing on a specific chapter in it.  Chapter 16 to be precise.  The one titled Suicide Baby.

My deconstruction of it takes a considered narrative approach to it, mainly because  I wanted to avoid my own personal discomfort with the portrayal of both mental illness in the broader game and it’s depiction of suicide in this particular scene.  It raised difficult questions for me as I felt it trivialised the trauma of suicide and encapsulated the frequent criticisms of our medium’s emotional immaturity by using it as a tactless and complexity free plot-device.

But today is RUOK? day in Australia and I think it’s worth taking a break from all this cultural and critical naval-gazing and letting the personal bleed through the sometimes impersonal cracks of the digital.

I’ve been in difficult, dangerous, empty situations, as I’m sure many people have, and I’m incredibly grateful for the people who stuck around to help me through it, and the people who have come afterwards to make things better.

While it is a cliche, and one that is more than unbelievable and can appear to be an immutable lie, other people have been through this, and have survived, and have tools that might be able to help.  In the thousands of generations and billions of people who have walked this earth, who have struggled and survived and have passed their knowledge on, there may be seeds of ideas that might help.  This is the brilliance of other people and their need to connect and share and endlessly try to make the world a better place than they found it, and I think too often we forget this.

Last year, that connection was what I needed.  I’m glad I got it.

Thanks to those people who helped; hello to those people who have made things better.  You all know who you are.

Anyone still interested in my thoughts on Heavy Rain can read them tomorrow.

RUOK?  is a national day of action that aims to prevent suicide by encouraging Australians to connect with someone they care about and help stop little problems turning into big ones.  For more information, visit www.ruokday.com.au

The need for rockstars – Part 3

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Maybe rockstars aren’t even rockstars in Australia.

Bernard Zuel asks why Australia hasn’t produced one strutting god since Michael Hutchence.

The English do them regularly, the Americans do them comfortably but where are the Australian rock stars? The classic rock star, that semi-mythical figure born of bedroom fantasies, fed by music-magazine intensity and crowned in tabloid frenzy.

Bernard Fanning from Powderfinger, you say? Nup. Big-selling but self-effacing and deliberately ordinary. Chris Cheney from the Living End? Workmanlike is not exactly what women like. Shannon Noll? Two words: soul patch. John Butler? You can’t be a rock star sitting down. Jimmy Barnes? Too blokey, too matey, too old. Gareth Liddiard from the Drones? Too unknown, too inner-Melbourne.

From The Age.

Ten, Twenty, Thirty

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This is one of two posts I wrote for Invest Victoria’s gaming blog, reposted here because I think it gives some context to both the ‘social misfits’ post and also to my ongoing question of games & culture.

The gaming community is obsessed with numbers.  According to the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association, the average age of a gamer in Australia is 30 years old; 68 percent of all Australians play video and computer games; the average adult gamer has been playing for 11 years; and 80 percent of parents in game households play games with their children.

But what do those numbers actually mean?

Read moreTen, Twenty, Thirty

I.P. and the language of game development

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The language that we use to discuss things also influences our ability to think about them because the frame of reference becomes inherently bound up in that language.   Locally, one of the main ways we talk about games, from the industry side at least, is bound up in the idea of original I.P. versus work for hire, with that discussion also spilling out into our audience.  You don’t have to dig far on tsumea to find a heated debate on the perceived merits of original I.P.

But film-makers, novellists, and musicians don’t talk about creating original I.P., so what makes us different?  I’d argue nothing – just the frames of reference we’ve built around the discussion.  Those other mediums might talk specifically about engaging audiences, but they also have their strong creative voices saying ‘make the sorts of things you want to see’.

Read moreI.P. and the language of game development

Play, not just games.

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This is one of two posts I wrote for Invest Victoria’s gaming blog, reposted here because I think it gives some context to both the ‘social misfits’ post and also to my ongoing question of games & culture.

Beyond just the technical shift that digital games have brought us, there are also cultural, academic and experiential shifts taking place all around us as more and more people are exposed to games and game-like thinking into their teenage and adult years.

Obviously, digital games have benefited from the constant evolution of games and game technology. In a relatively short time, they have become one of, if not the, dominant media and entertainment forms in the world, and they have changed significantly. We’ve gone from Pong and Space War to cinematic 3D games like Mass Effect or Heavy Rain, and most recently, we’ve seen the emergence of a vibrant indie scene delivering personal visions like Braid, The Path, Crayon Physics, and Passage.

Read morePlay, not just games.

The need for Rockstars – Part 2

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Following on from my post on why we need more rockstars locally, this link showed up in my Google Alert for Freeplay and reminded me that Kieron Gillen had said very much the same thing in 2005.

Rock Star is just used as short hand for fearless. It’s worth remembering that there’s all manner of Rock Star archetypes to follow. There’s Rockstars known for their piercing, caustic intelligence and puritanical rage as much as those who are just a byword for narcissistic excess. Some already do it – I had the rare pleasure of interviewing an independent developer who argued that the conservative critics were right: games /were/ murder simulations. However, since we live in a world where such power is centralized in Authority who regularly use it oppressively, it’s important that we’re able to train ourselves to resist them if required. Essentially, the videogame reinvented as a part of the revolutionaries toolkit alongside the trusty AK-47.

You can read the whole transcript of his talk here.