It’s going to take me a few days to properly process my thoughts on this year’s GCAP, especially in light of how its emergent themes reflect on what is happening with Krome.
In the meantime though, I thought I’d post a copy of the presentation I gave as part of the government round table to state and federal representatives titled ‘An Insight into Games in Culture’
So, with GCAP 2010 just around the corner, I wanted to share, in no particular order, some of the links that inspired my thoughts on the recent splurge of content here – along with some others that expand some of the points.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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’.
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.
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.