I’ve had a terrific fourteen months running Game On here at Crikey. It’s been a privilege to write about videogames for Crikey’s informed, generalist audience, but the time has come to move on. Apart from the regular freelancing that I do, I’ll be shifting my online home for my writing over to ABC Arts, where some exciting things are happening.

By way of saying goodbye to Crikey and Game On, I thought I’d do a bit of a recap of the moments and the articles that I feel like have defined my time here. I hope you’ll forgive a bit of self-indulgence.

I’d like to thank my editors at Crikey—Luke Buckmaster, Sophie Black, and Jason Whittaker—for taking a chance on a videogames blog and my writing, and all of Game On’s readers for being swell. This will be my last post at Game On.

Politics

The thing that I’m most grateful for in my time at Crikey is that I’ve had the latitude to explore the politics of videogame culture in a generalist publication. This is unfortunately still quite unusual, and I’m still surprised that my editors at Crikey gave me a chance to prove that taking videogames seriously in this way was not just worth a shot, but was absolutely necessary in developing the media’s engagement with games and conversations about games culture in Australia.

There is still far too little engagement by games journalists with things like the National Cultural Policy and the way that videogames work in the broader cultural and political sphere. The same could be said of journalists generally and videogames, though I feel like that at least is improving gradually. It’s not good enough, and it needs to change fast.

Early this year, Screen Australia engaged in public consultation about their $20 million Games Fund. I spoke to some developers and commentators to get a picture of how the fund was being received. Christian McCrea told me that he hoped for “a project or two to bring home the terrifying reality that videogames aren’t maturing or developing, but that they’re already culturally dominant. That they constitute Australian cultural life in a rudimentary, vernacular—but widespread—way.”

In November last year I reported that Australian console gamers can now gamble in a fairly unregulated way on videogames like FIFA 13, and that no Australian regulatory body seems interested in the situation. “Gambling on videogames is now not only possible, but easy, integrated and encouraged,” I wrote. The situation is still unchanged.

Sexism is still a huge issue in videogame culture, and it’s seemingly not going away. In June last year, I wrote that “the deepest irony about videogames culture is that as much as popular gaming stereotypes are decried and challenged, much of videogame culture does in fact live up to the cliche … The violence, the sexism, the racism, the homophobia: it’s all there. Gamers have brought this upon themselves.”

I also wrote about the R18+ classification, and how the unchanged rhetoric of the debate—of protecting children from a dangerous medium—indicated that little had been gained through the debate. “The serious question is about on whose terms the debate has really been conducted and settled,” I said. “It is difficult not to conclude that this victory is less than it seems.”

The R18+ processes in parliament also provided latitude for Australian politicians to publicly speak about videogames, which was fun to track. My favourite was Ewan Jones, MP for Herbert, who used the opportunity to comment on Australia’s wildlife: “I was driving to Ayr recently and for only the second time since I have been in Townsville I saw a brolga, Townsville’s emblem. It is a beautiful flighted bird; it is the largest flighted bird in Australia. I looked out the window and said, ‘Look, kids—a brolga.’ They were all just sitting there gaming away. Anything could have happened. So, look out the window, go and kick a ball, go and throw something, go and play with someone, go for a swim, do something with your lives other than just gaming.”

Events

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed being able to focus on is the increasing public presence that videogame culture has through events, exhibitions and conferences. There have been some really incredible successes over the last year.

I really enjoyed Robin Hunicke’s playthrough of her own game—Journey—at ACMI. Hunicke’s depth of intelligence and ability to articulate what the Journey team’s goals were as well as the problems with contemporary videogame culture was breathtaking: “‘People can love one another through this mediated interface,’ she said. ‘They can feel connected. The world doesn’t have to be about dying and killing. You can actually love one another.’”

The annual Freeplay Independent Games Festival remains the most reliable highlight of the Australian games calendar, and in 2012 put on one of its strongest programs yet. “At Freeplay,” I wrote, “conversations seemed less focussed on the surface comparisons we often make between media, and instead were interested in the deeper dialogues that encompass all creative forms.”

My time at Game On also saw the launch of Game Masters, ACMI’s impressive exhibition of videogames and the people who make them. The world class exhibition is now touring the world, and is currently at Te Papa in Wellington. “Far from feeling out of place with these more traditional institutional attractions,” I wrote in my review, “Game Masters is the natural progression for a city interested in culture as a living and changing entity.”

As well as the successes, there have also been some deeply problematic videogame events while I’ve been writing at Crikey. The standout here has to be the first Australian Games For Change conference. At the time, I said that “As long as events like Games For Change continue to emulsify such disparate threads under a single brand, it will remain a dead-zone: too establishmentarian for progressive politics, and too hollow for game-makers.”

I also remain skeptical about the approaching Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) Australia, of which I said last week: “PAX Australia shares their brand with people who actively do damage to videogame culture.” I remain hopeful, however, that the local context, as well as sponsors iGEA and GDAA can present “these groups with the opportunity to prove that they are less tolerant of the exclusionism and harassment that has recently defined Penny Arcade and its related projects.”

Reviews, interviews, and editorials

I won’t inflate my own writings any further in this already self-indulgent exercise, but I would like to simply list some of the other pieces of writing for Game On—reviews, interviews, and editorials—that I really enjoyed writing and that in my memory define my time here.

• Thirty Flights of Loving and the invention of videogame space

• REVIEW: Fez, and the backwards glance

• REVIEW: L.A. Noire

• Videogames are not a young media form, so stop saying they are

• And finally, my interview with Bill Gardner, the design director on the deeply flawed BioShock Infinite

So, thanks for reading my work here at Crikey, and for indulging me in this final post. It’s been a great year.

I’m similarly thrilled that Australia continues to be a highly visible part of videogame culture globally, and the arrival of PAX Australia represents a big step for Australian videogames. PAX East in Boston and PAX Prime in Seattle attract tens of thousands of people. Three months in advance, PAX Australia is already sold out. PAX is a big deal.

So it is vital that we think about what PAX means for Australia.

Penny Arcade, founded by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, is the incredibly popular webcomic that is the original force behind PAX, though today, there seems to be a growing distinction between the webcomic and the event. Yet it is still important to look at Penny Arcade—the comic—and its impact on its associated events. Penny Arcade may be central in videogame culture, but it is also a hub for its worst elements.

Some background: in 2010, Krahulik and Holkins published a webcomic that presented rape as a punchline, and responded to criticisms with childish belligerence, mocking trigger warnings, recreating elements of the webcomic for cheering live audiences, creating a women’s t-shirt featuring the comic (since withdrawn), and generally ridiculing their critics. Others rallied under the Penny Arcade banner (some of whom were disavowed by Krahulik and Holkins, to their credit), using twitter handles like @teamrape and @rapefatchicks. Later, inspired by these events, MIT’s Gambit Lab created a ‘Hate Speech in Game Communities’ project, stating that, “Many of our staff and colleagues will not be presenting their work at PAX East this weekend because they feel uncomfortable attending the expo this year.”

An incredibly in-depth timeline of the awful affair can be found here.

Krahulik and Holkins have also continually acted as the biggest bullies in videogames culture. In late 2011, they led an internet mob against one PR worker and released his personal contact details for anonymous attacks. That the PR worker had acted appallingly himself did not take away from the ugly spectacle of Krahulik and Holkins orchestrating public humiliation. Earlier this year, Krahulik tweeted his support for the card game Tentacle Bento (in which players attempt to rape high school girls as a tentacle monster) after its Kickstarter campaign was shut down. Krahulik and Holkins also run a yearly competition to see who can bake the most genitally-explicit cakes.

But how does this translate into PAX? A vile webcomic and personal actions do not necessarily tell us much about an associated event, though it may have something to say about its organisational culture.

It’s true that throughout its short history, PAX has often been claimed as an open and welcoming place. When it was founded, PAX’s slogan was “E3 for everyone,” positioning themselves as against E3, which was open only to press and industry professionals. In his keynote in 2010, Wil Wheaton declared that for gamers, coming to PAX is “like coming home.” It’s a sentiment that is frequently mirrored in writing about PAX, even in criticisms of the events.

Having never been to a PAX—they’ve all been in the USA so far—I can’t comment. It’s worth noting, however, that there are also accounts of exclusion and alleged outright harassment at PAX, too.

There’s also the direct line between Krahulik and Holkins and the expo, and how their actions in part shape what kind of event PAX is. Recently, Penny Arcade ran a strip intended to make light of so-called ‘creepers’: those men at gaming expos who routinely fail to understand, or deliberately ignore the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and harass women expo attendees. As others have noted, Krahulik and Holkins’ once-lauded decision to keep ‘booth babes’ out of PAX reads in retrospect more as a move to ‘respect’ core, male gamers, than one to avoid the use of women as props to sell videogames.

Krahulik and Holkins will not have full control over what happens at PAX Australia. Perhaps they will have no direct input at all. Yet they still play an enormous role in defining the conference’s culture, from their foundational comic strip to their individual actions. Make no mistake: PAX Australia shares their brand with people who actively do damage to videogame culture.

Whether the actions of Penny Arcade’s founders will translate to PAX Australia remains to be seen. The event is run by ReedPOP, the same group that has organised PAX East and PAX Prime. However, a new event is a new event, and PAX Australia brings with it a new set of local organisers and groups, such as sponsors Interactive Games and Entertainment Association (iGEA), Game Developer’s Association of Australia (GDAA) and the Victorian State Government.

PAX Australia presents these groups with the opportunity to prove that they are less tolerant of the exclusionism and harassment that has recently defined Penny Arcade and its related projects. It is an opportunity for Australia, for Melbourne, for the local videogames culture to stand and say that videogames can here be defined through inclusivity and welcomeness, that it can genuinely be “like coming home.”

But with Penny Arcade’s history in mind, Louise Asher’s “major coup” is one that should be watched closely.

Early last week, some Australian journalists, myself included, played through the first four hours of BioShock Infinite in at an event held in Sydney’s Town Hall. Midway through my session I was also able to interview the game’s director of design, Bill Gardner. The transcript of our chat follows below.

I focussed mainly on the historic influences of BioShock Infinite, as much has been made of the game’s use of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and other events such as the Massacre at Wounded Knee and the Boxer Rebellion in China. Gardner was kind enough to talk about the historical influences of the game, but many significant questions about the game remain open, in my mind.

In particular, the use of Wounded Knee and the Boxer Rebellion in one sequence (which I had not encountered when I spoke to Gardner) left me feeling unsettled and apprehensive about the game’s approach to real-life events. BioShock is a series that many hold up as an example that mainstream, expensive videogames can still do things right, but with BioShock Infinite, the evidence of this is not yet clear.

I have more thoughts on BioShock Infinite coming soon. For now, this interview deals with some initial questions.

Dan Golding: I wanted to talk about the history of the game, the setting of it. Obviously the main thing is the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Can we talk about that?

Bill Gardner: There’s a big part of the team that’s really enamored with the time period. We have a lot of history buffs on the team, Ken [Levine, creative director] being one of them, of course. The turn of the century has always been a topic of discussion in the office, and a point of fascination. There’s a natural draw to that location or that timeframe for when we were talking about where to set BioShock Infinite.

So 1893, the Chicago’s World Fair, man, oh man. It was a showcase of so much that was going on in the world, of the amazing feats that were being pulled off, seemingly every day. The world was constantly changing, with all the new technologies. The airplane, the fascination with flight, the sort of naive belief that everything was going to be in the sky.

We were talking about setting BioShock Infinite in a city in the sky, and our artists dug up some art from the time period, that was supposed to be a vision from the future, and they actually had floating cities, and I was like ‘Holy shit, that’s it, we’ve got to do that’.

Then again, the time period had all the strife, all the political upheaval, the social changes that were going on, mixed with the technology, with everything coming to a head, right before World War One. It was an amazing time, I argue the most amazing time in history, and I think most of the people on the team would agree. It was a no-brainer [to set BioShock Infinite there].

DG: With the political themes that came out of the World’s Fair—just playing through, there’s the idea of Columbia as a ‘New Eden’ in the game already. If you take the Columbian Exposition, with the historian Frederick Jackson Turner proclaiming the end of the Frontier at the exposition, are we talking about Columbia as a new Frontier for America?

BG: Absolutely. With BioShock, there’s a level of interpretation when you look to history, when you look to all of our inspirations that come up, hopefully, in the game. But also there’s the unique things that we’re doing with the story—there’s so much to discover there.

This is what excites me the most, to hear this level of interpretation, this level of discourse. But absolutely, it’s safe to say there isn’t a single square inch that hasn’t been thought about in how it ties into the overall narrative, in how it ties into the story we’re trying to tell. Columbia is meticulously crafted.

So the themes, going back to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, of all of the sources of inspiration, that is probably the truest, the one we continually looked back to. But there’s such a wide array of inspirations in this game, I think it’s impossible … with the exception of that one source, it’s next to impossible to say ‘this means that one thing’.

DG: Well what are some of the other inspirations?

BG: Well we’re very much students of the media. I think a lot of games tend to draw from the same inspirations, the same sorts of movies over and over again. With us, it’s always changing, it’s always a wide array of things.

Let’s put aside history for a moment. There’s tonal inspiration, like from Spielberg, in the way he builds up pacing, and tension, like the boat scene in Jaws. Then there’s everyone from Soderbergh, the Coen brothers … those I guess aren’t all that diverse, I guess, they come from the same sort of philosophies there, in terms of how they build up their narratives.

I’m trying to think of something a bit more ‘out there’… like, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, you know? We looked to that for costume inspiration, and the car itself, in the industrialised world. So it’s all over the place.

DG: I noticed in the game that some of the women’s outfits in the posters are sort of Gibson Girl-esque?

BG: Sure. I’ve heard that thrown around a bunch. My fashion design comes from Project Runway, [laughs] so I’m very modern in that regard!

In terms of the specifics of the dress of the time, one of the challenges of this project is trying to stay true to the time in terms of the aesthetic, but also trying to make it fresh and make it appealing to today’s aesthetic. You can’t just do a straight retelling of it.

Look at Elizabeth’s outfit. Originally we had a very different outfit for her, and it was a little bit more true to the period. And I thought, ‘a user is going to look at this and be like, why the hell would I want to hang around with her?’ She wasn’t attractive at all. Revisiting that to keep it true to the time, but also so it has a little bit of appeal to the modern eye.

Same thing with the architecture, with the dress… it’s not just a straight retelling. Look at this room [Gardner gestures to the neo-classical vault that we are sitting in at the basement of Sydney's Town Hall]. This is 1890s or so, but it’s … kind a boring! [laughs] So we’re just trying to walk that line.

DG: With Elizabeth’s dress—did you change that?

BG: There’s two dresses. There’s one that comes in later in the game that I think we’ve shown in trailers. There’s the another one in the beginning of the game here [that journalists had been playing that morning] that was changed.

DG: So going back to the setting—I think the architecture and the design of the game is amazing, but where does the violence sit with that? Because it’s quite a gory sort of game.

BG: We’ve had conversations about this, and we had extended debates about this with the first BioShock. The reason we were okay with it in BioShock Infinite, was, that if you think about the time period, things were brutal. You think about this stark reality, you think about getting your arm caught, in the gears of a conveyer belt, or an assembly line, or what have you, it’s brutal. We wanted to capture that brutal reality and contrast it with this idyllic vision. It was something that we were able to justify and that made sense for the game.

Frankly, there’s also the element of, as a gamer, I play everything. I find it very rewarding to be able to get that hit reaction, when you’re hit with a melee weapon, and there’s a variety of reactions that can happen there. Obviously it comes down to that, that it wasn’t a stretch. The gamer will be the final arbiter of that.

DG: In terms of the historical context for that, I’ve heard Wounded Knee mentioned in the game already—I don’t know how much of a role that plays in the game…

BG: If you go back, you’ll see it more and more as part of Booker’s history…

DG: He’s not a Native American character, though, is he?

BG: I shouldn’t answer that, just for the sake of spoilers. That will be answered for sure.

But it is an important part of his history. It’s interesting, because there’s history, and there’s Columbia’s history. You have to sort of peer through the veil of Columbia’s propaganda in the game.

But it is an alternate reality, obviously there was no Columbia at all. There was no Columbia that interceded with the Boxer Rebellion, but Columbia basically ended that encounter. That was part of the reason that Columbia succeeded from the Union, from America, because they overstepped the bounds, and put an end to it with violence.

DG: That’s an interesting choice, the Boxer Rebellion. I was surprised that the War in the Philippines didn’t play a similar role in the game. Or maybe it does?

BG: I would say play the game…

DG: Okay.

BG: Not quite the same as the Boxer Rebellion and Wounded Knee, but there’s reference to a lot of these events. More in spirit, really.

I mean, in a lot of ways, Columbia is the ‘Great White Fleet’, you know, that showing of American might and ingenuity, and military power, so I think it’s more in spirit, I would say, with the Philippines.

DG: Okay. So the interesting thing about my play this morning is that, I play games, I’m totally fine with violence. But I’m also really excited by history, and I want to show friends the setting of the game, the way it’s really evocative of history. But at the same time, I’d probably shirk away from doing that, just because of the violence. What do you think of that tension?

BG: That’s interesting.

So, two things. Number one, obviously it’s a shooter, so there’s going to be violence. In terms of the over-the-top violence, the executions, the thought there was that you can opt out there, or opt in. It’s important to stick to the BioShock philosophy of letting players approach the experience how they want, whether it’s talking about their tools, figuring out which tools are right for each combat situation, or with the options. We have the option to lower the gore, and we have the option to opt out of using executions.

So yeah, I’m sensitive to that. We have to stick true to a, that’s a shooter, and b, that we have a specific story to tell, and that we decided early on that it was right for the tone that we thought.

But yeah, I think it would be a shame if someone thought that it was too much, and that they couldn’t enjoy the game because of it. But ultimately, there’s enough—hopefully!—in the game, and in the world, and in the richness of the world that people can look past the violence.

DG: And you’re right in that there is some historic justification for violence. I’ve also read that The Devil In The White City is an influence? With H. H. Holmes, the serial killer in Chicago during the fair…

BG: I didn’t even know about him until I read the book, I was like, ‘holy shit’. I actually spend a lot of time researching serial killers, and I hadn’t even heard of him! But yeah, The Devil in the White City is a huge influence. Mostly tonally, just to get the voice right, and what was going on in the world, and to immerse people in the world. But yeah, amazing story.

DG: Absolutely. I’m just reading it at the moment, actually. The other thing is, of course, that the Mayor of Chicago was assassinated only a few days before the end of the Exposition.

BG: Yeah, I know right? Unbelievable. The way things are set up in the book too, like the building of the Ferris Wheel, this monolithic structure.

DG: Was that a mechanical influence? With the transit system throughout the city of Columbia, is that where that comes from?

BG: Believability is a very important part of a BioShock world. Trying to make the skylines believable was a very difficult part to get right. So yeah, it was definitely looking at the architecture of the time, of the trams of the time, at Ferris Wheels, and even roller-coasters.

I mean, do you know where the baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, got their name from?

DG: No.

BG: They had street cars at the time in Brooklyn, and the lines they had that powered them, overhead, would occasionally fire bursts of electricity off them. And occasionally, people were hit in the street! So people in Brooklyn would dodge them, and so they called the team the Brooklyn Dodgers after that.

Again, though, it speaks to the brutal nature of the technology of the time, going back to what we were saying about the violence. But the technology was amazing, too. The craft that went into things was amazing, but it was so dangerous, too.

Not many videogames are launched on the 46th floor of an office building at the Paris end of Collins Street by a state Member of Cabinet.

Once a tiny and unheralded studio working out of a three-bedroom apartment, Melbourne’s Firemint is now EA’s Firemonkeys, the new mainstream of Australian videogame development. Their games—especially the Real Racing series—are now highly visible and are routinely used by Apple to demo new iPhone and iPad hardware as gaming devices.

On Wednesday last week, the Firemonkeys launched the third installment of Real Racing for free (the game is designed with a freemium system) on iOS devices. That the launch event itself was so luxurious—yes, in Collins Street, overlooking all of Melbourne, and yes, launched by Louise Asher, Minster for Innovation, Services and Small Business—was a marker of how much things have changed for the mobile studio.

I had a chance to sit down and talk with Firemonkeys producer Kynan Woodman about the Firemonkeys history, their adoption of realism, and—of all things—how Claude Monet inspired Real Racing.

Dan Golding: I’m really interested in Firemonkies as a studio now, and how you see yourself in the Australian development landscape. 

Kynan Woodman: It’s interesting—when we were acquired by EA, we thought it was just going to be us, but they put us together with IronMonkey, and it’s been great.

We’ve always known Tony [Lay, former Managing Director of IronMonkey, now General Manager of EA Mobile in Australia], and we’ve always hung out at game conferences together being Australians, you know, when you go over to [the Game Development Conference in San Francisco], you’ll hang out with the Australians instead of talking to everyone [laughs]!

We’ve always been good friends, and even rivals. We’ve got different strengths, and they’ve got a lot of freemium experience. It’s definitely been a great match for us.

DG: I’ve heard it suggested that Firemonkeys, along with Halfbrick, have become a ‘new mainstream’ for Australian game development.

KW: It’s definitely the go-to place for a job [laughs]!

Yeah, they’re big. We were in a three-bedroom apartment when I started out. Now we’re in a whole floor of a building. Mobile has taken that ride and you see where it is now when you look at those games. People come in and look at our games and say to me, ‘Oh, you’re on console!’, but no. It just looks like it. And that’s the amazing journey. The teams are bigger.

To be honest, when I first went out and got a job at Firemint, originally, it wasn’t my first preference, because they were a small mobile games company. Now, we’re the go-to people. Everyone wants to be here. People are making their own apps at home, and then if they want to go do it as a job, they come to us because we’ve got the experience and we know how it works.

DG: Do you think that that’s changed the way that you make games, with the re-centering of the industry around mobile?

KW: We’ve always tried to make the very best games possible on the platform—always. Even when it was a 64k little thing, we were making the best. If you go back and see all the awards we got in our past, the Iron Monkey Firemint past, we were basically alternating awards around the world.

The fact that these devices can do so much now means we’re world leading, regardless of platform. It’s always been about making the best game possible, and that’s what Real Racing 3 is.

DG: So let’s get directly to the game, then. One of the things that intrigued me about the game is that you’ve said you’ve spent one month designing each car. What is it about the need for detail in these sorts of games?

KW: For us, the car’s a character. There’s the track, which is the environment, and the car, which is the character. That’s who you’re playing as.

Car fanatics, our fans, they love these cars. They know if that bonnet pin is in the wrong spot. So they’re going to tell us. They’re going to ask why we haven’t got that bonnet pin. We go through licensing approvals, but that helps us because the consumers are going to know better.

We’re creating a real thing, emulating what’s in the real world. That detail—manufacturers’ care, we care, because we want to get it right, and customers care, and they love it.

DG: Yeah. For me, one of the interesting things is that emphasis on realism, as opposed to the stylisation of cart racing games, or other genres.

KW: Real Racing is about a broad community. Even when it was paid for, we weren’t making some esoteric fantasy that only targeted a very small number of people. Everyone gets racing games, and kart racing is even a stylised version of that. And even some people can baulk at that, thinking, ‘Oh, it’s cartoony’, but it’s very accessible.

So [in Real Racing] you just turn the device to drive the car. I get that. It looks real. It’s not some weird fantasy I have to get my head around. I’m driving a car on a track against other cars. You can tell anyone that, and they get the game. That’s what’s great about it.

We’re making it realistic so it’s not some strange world we’re I’m driving on Rainbow Road, it’s a Melbourne track. I’m in my car, I’m driving, got it.

DG: But then again, it’s taken to another level, it’s not just the appearance of realism. As you were saying, you’ve got the quality of the car to the point where no individual parts are out of place. Even your Melbourne track is quite believable in that sense.

KW: So why go so far?

DG: Yeah.

KW: We do and we don’t. There’s a no compromises approach, which is very expensive, and there’s the thing that makes you believe it. We want you to believe it, and we do the things that people care about. We don’t need to install a full muffler system. It’s about putting in detail where it matters, and where people care about it. So we make sure we don’t spend too long making these things, but we get everything that people care about.

If you watch the developer diaries, a thing that the artists had was ‘Project Monet’. We were asking the question of ‘how do we get more detail in?’, but that was going to be the wrong approach. So we asked, ‘How do we make it look more real?’ You look at Monet and his brush strokes, they’re just splotches, really, but when you stand back and look at it, it’s amazing. That could be a photo if you squint your eyes, but he’s done it with dollops of paint.

And that’s the approach we took. What are the details that matter, that convince me that this is real, to build that immersion? So while we have spent a month on the car, it’s on the bits that matter. I mean, we only spend a month on the car—Porsche spend years! So it’s an abridged version.

DG: I think the Melbourne track is a really interesting case in that argument. Before I saw it I was fairly blasé about the idea, but then on seeing it I was struck by the familiarity of it, and having the feeling of ‘I’ve driven down these streets’. What do you think the appeal is of setting a track in such a familiar location?

KW: It is just that. It is familiar. It’s reinforcing the realism, I think. That’s what’s good about it. You haven’t driven in Indianapolis, you know? That’s the great thing about matching expectations that makes you get over that line of realism.

Even I was astounded by the detail. I’m sure there’s things missing, but you don’t notice them. You see Flinders Street Station, you see the [Arts Centre] spire, you see the tram, and you think this is Melbourne. It’s putting in the things that people expect, and then it feels familiar and it feels believable.

DG: That’s one of the interesting things for me, in that not only do the buildings seem familiar, but the spacing out between the buildings feels familiar too. It’s different from, say, the Assassin’s Creed games, where the individual buildings are very accurate but the spaces in between are almost entirely fictional. Maybe the needs of a racing game kind of changes that a little?

KW: Well, yeah. The cars perform accurately, the zero-to-sixty times are accurate, the top speeds are accurate, the breaking distances are accurate. So the statistics of the car and the tracks need to be accurate.

There are people on our forums who’ll say, ‘You can’t take that corner at 50 miles an hour.’ So we’ve gone back and ensured that we’re right. So if those straights were longer, or the corners were sharper or looser or wider, it’s not going to match what the car does on that track. So again we’re matching expectations of that track and also deliver to the casual audience the fun, and the fantasy of driving.

Since then, Screen Australia (the fund’s organising body) has been in a consultation stage, releasing an options paper for public comment, and holding a number of seminars around the country. Consultation closes today, Friday 25 January.

To sketch an overview of how the fund is being received, I spoke to some key figures in Australia’s videogame culture, and drew on the publicly available submissions to Screen Australia.

Funding games in Australia

The $20m for the AIGF is not the first time that governments (state or federal) have intervened in the funding of Australia’s videogames industry.

Christian McCrea, Program Director for the Bachelor of Design (Games) at RMIT University, in a chapter in the recently-published Gaming Globally, describes previous Australian government funding for games as “piecemeal and disorganized.”

I asked him whether the same applied to the AIGF. “Australia does not have a set of guiding principles about culture or cultural production,” said McCrea.

“When I say this, I don’t mean to say we don’t have a National Cultural Policy, because I think that’s the tip of a very different iceberg. Governments do not have a serious, embedded apparatus for the expenditure of public funds for cultural purposes.

“Each organisation has a set of outcomes it’s looking for, since so many overlap when the time for recognition comes along, it is often a case of which organisation makes a compelling case to put their logo on a creative work as much as who funded it,” argued McCrea.

“Games, to many arts organisations, just means ‘the digital’, all interactive things, all new technologies—however broad you can make it. You can see precisely what I mean in the submissions from some of these institutions. Experimenta’s submission suggests that ‘public exhibition, media art projects, online creative content, locative media and hybrid projects all belong within the Interactive Games arena.’ Terms such as ‘screen culture’ are thrown around liberally.

“So it’s not that the outcome is piecemeal; it’s the idea of games that’s piecemeal. Games are everything digital and nothing in particular. They’re entertainment (we think), so they’re definitely a ‘creative industry’ (we think). It begins with good intentions and with consultation and if the money goes to people who can actually develop games of worth, then as vague and disjointed as the process is, it will do some good.”

Concerns for the AIGF

More than anything, Screen Australia’s public consultation process has revealed the diversity of what stakeholders and interested parties in Australia’s games community want for the future—and the fund.

“I think one of the things that [Screen Australia’s] options paper doesn’t address is why people—programmers, artists, musicians, writers—choose to make games a part of their lives and their career,” Paul Callaghan, former director and current board member of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival, told me.

“The paper has a very long prelude where it discusses the local and international markets for games, how many people own consoles, how much the whole thing is worth in dollars before then going on to talk about what can be done to get a piece of that. In effect it’s saying: a market exists, therefore we should make games for it,” continued Callaghan.

“[It] doesn’t reflect the contemporary reality of how many people engage with games,” he said. “In 2013 games form a part of our broad collective experience, both for good and bad, and supporting cultural infrastructure creates spaces to explore what that collective experience means as players and makers in as many contexts as possible.

“Festivals, awards, exhibitions, collectives, communities, and other events and activities showcase the things that we have made, and for anyone who has been inspired to make things, it’s that thing which is of fundamental importance,” argued Callaghan.

A snapshot of the publicly-available submissions also reveals a range of concerns with the proposed fund.

“Of potential concern is that the approach proposed for the Interactive Games Fund is modeled off how the Film & TV Funds are run, which is not always appropriate for games,” says Luci Temple, a Sydney-based marketing and communications strategist, in her submission.

“Let’s for a minute throw out this idea of ‘enterprise’ funding and project-by-project ‘pre-production/production’ funding (a funding model essentially borrowed from the film and TV funds),” Temple continues.

“Would a think tank propose this funding model if they approached it from scratch? Everybody wants ‘funding,’ but what do they really need?”

One theme that emerges from the public submissions is avoiding a return to the ‘work for hire’ model that dominated Australia’s videogame industry in the early 2000s. Craig Duturbure, industry veteran and Creative Director of Grapple Gun Games, argues in his submission that “Licensed games sank our industry … If the Screen Australia funding goes towards subsidising costs to attract publishers back for more licensed work, then it will work—for a time. When the funding runs out, so will the publishers.

“Supporting this type of spending will be throwing good money after bad and will result in a lack of growth for the industry,” continues Duturbure. “The model was tried for many, many years. The model failed.”

In contrast, Anthony Lawrence, Studio General Manager at 2K Australia, argues in his submission that “it is difficult to see where the fund will help a studio with the caliber of 2K Australia to continue developing console titles which are internationally competitive.”

2K Australia is one of the few remaining major console-oriented studios in the country. However, as Lawrence points out in his submission, as their central management is in the US, it appears unlikely that the AIGF will support 2K Australia. “The development of [BioShock Infinite, 2K Australia’s current project] will be completed in February 2013, and from that date the future of 2K Australia is uncertain,” Lawrence concludes.

Caswal Parker and Andrew Lamb, of Melbourne’s Camshaft Software, suggest in their submission that the AIGF may not nurture emerging studios and practitioners. “One of [our] main concerns [is] the eligibility for the funding, namely the credits, and senior role requirements on a commercial title, and how a successful new company like ourselves would not qualify,” said Parker and Lamb. “Instead the fund appears to be favouring ‘the old guard’ who have whittled away various previous government funds and achieved very little in the process.”

Yet there is also plenty of positivity about the structure of the fund from important quarters of Australia’s games industry. Morgan Jaffit, Founder of Brisbane’s Defiant Development, told me that he thinks “the fund is (at least as proposed) hitting the right areas.

“I’d personally love to see a little more resources available for bootstrapping new developers, but we’re already in an amazingly positive environment for first time devs in Australia,” said Jaffit. “The overall framework is very strong, and we’re seeing the fund sitting on top of that in a productive way.”

David Surman, of Melbourne’s Pachinko Pictures, agrees. “In the main, we welcome the proposed structure and can see how it offers a range of capital investment opportunities for companies of various sizes,” he told me.

Measures of success

But what would a successful Games Fund look like? What does the cultural space for Australian videogames look like in three years time if the Fund has performed well?

Paul Callaghan told me that, “A successful fund doesn’t chase accepted wisdom or current trends, it looks to the future and accepts that the games that will be successful in three years time don’t exist yet (just as Train Conductor and Fruit Ninja didn’t exist three years ago).

“Looking back, we should see the risks and experiments, the gambles that paid off and those that didn’t, and the ways in which those decisions created a uniquely local and interesting development scene,” added Callaghan.

“I can think of nothing worse than looking at everything that the fund has gone towards in 2016 and just shrugging my shoulders,” said Callaghan.

Morgan Jaffit argued that while funding is key to the industry at large, the goals for Defiant Development don’t hinge on the fund’s success. “If funding is available it will enable us to do more faster in terms of reaching our goals, for sure,” said Jaffit. “Our plan is to head there regardless, though.”

For David Surman, however, the fund could have a transformative effect on development culture beyond its financial impacts. “The most sustainable and transferable form of capital is confidence, and with more people in Australia creating original work we think the most noticeable impact will be one of increased confidence in our game development,” said Surman.

“Well resourced opportunities to show work domestically also help to build this confidence, and ultimately confidence feeds back into the quality of work-for-hire output and products.”

Christian McCrea offered a similar perspective on the non-tangible effects of the fund. “The process is the result, for me,” he said. “It would help people applying professionalise in the process. Let people put in rich applications of serious depth, of several stages. That refines and develops the game idea or prototype.”

McCrea also argued that reversing the search for a hit would skew the fund towards a different kind of success. “If the fund develops into something robust, current and genuinely driven by games-specific needs, it will help one or two games find a substantial audience—that’s great,” said McCrea.

“However, real success to me would be a game turning around and waking up the Fund organisers, the Government, the hundred hungry arts organisations looking to draw some blood, and showing them there’s so much more to be done, and there’s so much already happening.

McCrea is hoping for “a project or two that bring home the terrifying reality that videogames aren’t maturing or developing, but that they’re already culturally dominant. That they constitute Australian cultural life in a rudimentary, vernacular—but widespread—way.”

Feedback on Screen Australia’s Options Paper closes today. The full document, as well as public feedback, can be viewed here.

The Best Games of 2012:

5. Mark of the Ninja [Klei Entertainment: Xbox 360, Windows].

A game about sensation: seeing, hearing, smelling, and how all translate into touch and reaction in the fingers of the player. And of course it is also a game of thwarting those same senses: of avoiding sight, escaping smell, and muffling sound.

4. The Walking Dead [Telltale Games: Windows, Mac, PS3, Xbox 360, iOS].

A game that understands that the fascination with the zombie apocalypse is not a base dread of monsters, but the panic of societal breakdown. It managed to manifest that panic in four terrifying words: “Clementine will remember that.”

3. Dear Esther [thechineseroom: Windows, Mac, Linux].

A memory palace of melancholia. The experience of staring at a landscape for so long, of being drawn in beyond the details of grass and rock and cliff to the point where you are no longer sure if the form you thought you saw was ever there at all.

2. Journey [Thatgamecompany: PS3].

A leaf in the breeze and a friend on a lonely mountain. One button to soar, one button for love, one analogue stick to journey.

1. Dys4ia [Anna Anthropy: Web browser].

As I said: “Dys4ia is moving and genuinely emotional (while not being manipulative), and possesses an economy and pace that should shame the producers of the next 50-hour role-playing game about nothing. The fact it’s a free browser game, playable in five minutes, reminds us those conservative corporations who have held the keys to video game culture for so long have done so little.”

Not the games of the year, but worth talking about anyway:

Assassin’s Creed III [Ubisoft Montreal: PS3, Xbox 360, WiiU, Windows]. A main meal made out of side dishes. The American Revolution for “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” has never before been so ruthlessly evacuated of romance and significance.

Fez [Polytron: Xbox 360]. An empty gesture, a wistful backwards glance. Fez is a warning for what indie games become when subsumed by nostalgia and mannerisms: pretty, but unsatisfyingly hollow.

The Last Express [Jordan Mechner/DotEmu: iOS]. One of the great overlooked adventure games finally found a modern and accessible home on iOS. The Last Express plays with the traditional confines of space and time for videogames, limiting and accentuating both in its miniature world of a passenger train on the eve of World War One.

LEGO Lord of the Rings [Traveller's Tales: Windows, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii]. The familiar LEGO formula may have worn thin some time ago, yet this Lord of the Rings adaptation imbues the formula with life, style, and a holistic sense of completeness missing from previous games. Not simply the best LEGO game so far, LEGO Lord of the Rings is easily the best film adaptation of the year.

Letterpress [atebits: iOS]. In a year of excellent competitive mobile puzzle games, Letterpress stands out for its originality and elegance. For players, the compulsion for competition is neatly balanced between the skill of seeing words, and the skill of realising and controlling space.

Mass Effect 3 [BioWare: Xbox 360, PS3, Windows]. An encyclopedia of fan service masquerading as a videogame. The original ending was bold and refreshingly reckless, and was correspondingly denounced in the need for a universal catharsis to match the game’s universal scope.

Quantum Conundrum [Airtight Games: Windows, Ps3, Xbox 360]. One of the year’s most overlooked videogames. The storyline may have been bunk, but the puzzles bring with them Kim Swift’s Portal-like thrift and grace.

Rayman Jungle Run [Pastagames: iOS, Android]. While Jungle Run is absorbing in its console-quality beauty, it is the rhythmic precision of the game’s twist on the endless runner that makes it one of 2012’s best iOS games. Jungle Run is the memory and exactness of a fighting game, translated into delightful running and jumping.

Ski Safari [Defiant Development: iOS, Android]. The game that I spent the most time with in 2012. An elegant and delightful endless runner that was absorbing in its simplicity—until the game was updated several times later in the year with the predictable bulk of excess levels, costumes, abilities and microtransactions.

Slender: The Eight Pages [Parsec Productions: Windows, Mac]. As I sat in a classroom with my group of otherwise composed students reduced to a screaming mess, I realised Slender had captured something interesting. Slender might not be anything near a game of the year, but it does a lot with very little.

Spec Ops: The Line [Yager Development: Xbox 360, PS3, Windows]. Self-critique is the only logical endpoint for the self-loathing military shooter. After the failings and success of that criticism in Spec Ops, there is no more room to maneuver for the genre.

Super Hexagon [Terry Cavanagh: iOS, Windows, Mac]. Perfectly balanced between frustration and challenge. It also makes me feel hopelessly queasy after under a minute’s play.

Unmanned [Molleindustria and Jim Monroe: Web browser]. Molleindustria continued to be one of the most substantial presences in videogames in 2012 with Unmanned, a disturbing censure of the mundanity of military-sanctioned murder and technology. Actions become indistinguishable in their monotony: finding hair on your face and shaving it; finding ‘insurgents’ through a drone interface and killing them.

ZiGGURAT [Action Button: iOS]. A game that is wholly committed to economy and minimalism, yet also a game that contains more than anyone has ever seen, owed purely to its towering difficulty. This is the extraordinary contradiction that fuels ZiGGURAT—it takes absurdity unconditionally seriously.

Finally, the games of 2012 that I probably should play, but haven’t yet (but will):

Binary Domain, Cart Life, Dishonored, Epic Mickey 2, FTL, Kinect Star Wars (really), Lim, Manichi, Papo Y Yo, Tokyo Jungle.

The Museum of Modern Art reinvigorated tired debates of videogames as ‘art’ when they recently made games part of their permanent collection. Such debates are limited, and tend to gloss over the significance of the deeper relationships between games and art.

We tend to think of videogames and art through definitional questions, but another way to think about the relationship between videogames and art is through a historical framework. What is it that videogames have inherited from older art forms? This approach enables us to conceive of the “artistic” aspect of gaming as something that originates historically, rather than something that originates in the thematic or visual content of any given game.

In other words, the art isn’t in the game, but in the activity of gaming itself. And the activity of gaming possesses an art history that can be illuminated by thinking archaeologically. The goal here is to uncover moments in art history that speak to our contemporary gaming experiences. Media theorist Siegfried Zielinski puts it succinctly: “do not seek the old in the new, but find something new in the old.”

We are quick to talk about ‘play,’ when it comes to videogames, but it is also a concept that has had extensive theoretical and historical presence in art more broadly. This gives us reason to think that the videogame inherits one of its key properties from the art world—an art world which has, perhaps unfairly, pushed the videogame towards being a cultural outsider. By looking at the trajectory of playful aesthetics throughout art history, the videogame seems less like an estranged media object and more like an historical continuation of artistic media.

There are playful qualities to art even as early as the baroque period. Works such as Pietro da Cortona’s Triumph of Divine Providence draw the viewer into labyrinthine narratives that drive multidirectional forms and frames of reference. This painting is a great example of how baroque artists were rethinking the idea of perspective in art, by inviting the viewer into a more labyrinthine model. Media theorist Angela Ndalianis neatly summarises the affect of such works by arguing that they engage viewers in a ‘game of vision,’—asking the viewer to playfully navigate the artwork and its iconography.

Play was no less prominent in art throughout the long stretch of the modern period. German philosopher and Enlightenment writer Immanuel Kant was one of the first to observe the mysterious connection between art and play in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. He theorised that art, like play, was essentially a ‘disinterested’ activity: we find pleasure in art without necessarily needing it to fulfil a practical purpose. Additionally, for Kant, pleasure in art comes only from the ‘free play’ of the viewer’s mental faculties—a kind of harmony between imagination and cognition.

Twentieth century art brought with it an array of new themes and directions in artistic practice: the nonserious, the playful and the experimental. Surrealists saw the playful properties of games as an impetus for opening the imagination to unprecedented creative possibilities (the ‘exquisite corpse’ game was a favorite among Surrealist painters). Cubism allowed artists to play with form and subvert established modes of perception, instead presenting viewers with challenging visual puzzles. And later in the century, the radical French avant-garde group, The Situationist International, attempted to bring about a free-form, unstructured ideal of play and art in the city space.

However, by the 1960s, conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth and Piero Manzoni began to undercut the playful characteristics of modern art by asserting the centrality of the artist’s ‘idea’ to the creative process. Their goal was to eliminate many of the concepts we traditionally associate with art—form, colour, shape and line—in favour of an art that took the pure ‘concept’ as its medium. It is an intriguing coincidence that videogames emerged in the same timeframe—further situating play as a separate concept to art.

What does all this mean for videogames? Perhaps English sociologist Graeme Kirkpatrick put it best in his recent work Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. Instead of claiming games for art, Kirkpatrick argues, why not turn the question on its head and claim art for games? The objective is not to raise videogames up to the perceived status of art, but to discover the links between games and art by looking closely at what has defined their core experiences throughout history.

The Museum of Modern Art’s incorporation of videogames into their permanent collection allows us a moment to reflect on a deeper relationship between games and art.

By focusing on the way players engage with videogames through the aesthetic concept of ‘play,’ we can better understand how the medium speaks to the history of artistic experience. Videogames have never been separate from art. Instead, they are part of a deep lineage of playful aesthetics that has evolved throughout art history.

Benjamin Nicoll is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. Find him on twitter at @bcnicoll.

I’ve been aware that my play and work spaces are male-dominated for quite some time. I’ve witnessed people being treated unfairly and I’ve been treated unfairly. My friends have horror stories, I have horror stories, we talk about them together. It’s a thing and it’s been a thing for a while.

When #1ReasonWhy happened, I breathed a sigh of relief. Luke Crane of Kickstarter (and himself a game designer) asked innocently on twitter:

“Why are there so few lady game creators?”

When Filamena Young responded, ending her tweet with the hashtag #1ReasonWhy, it began. Soon, this hashtag was populated with tens of thousands of tweets, all horror stories doing their best to explain why videogames culture may be a problematic place for us to work and play.

I was glued to my computer. Look at all these brave women! Check out all that fortitude! Oh god the fortitude. It’s oozing out everywhere. War drums started, and I heard chants under all the tweets: “Enough. is. enough.”. My heart was racing.

Quickly, the #1ReasonMentors hashtag appeared, for women wanting help to find someone to help them. It was followed by the #1ReasonToBe hashtag, to remind us of why it’s a kick-ass job enough for us to put up with this crap in the first place.

As we carefully curate our personal space and who we associate with, we can start to forget certain behaviour exists. Horror stories remind us of the existence of our bubble, that there’s a big world out there, that there are people out there who are still blatant misogynists or unknowing sexists, and that women still exist who don’t associate with the term feminist, despite enjoying all the tasty cake feminist movements have provided them thus far. #1ReasonWhy was a call to check your bubble, and it was goooood.

I’ve felt like it’s been necessary for quite some time to organise myself in a feminist capacity to be there for the culture I love so much, but I didn’t really have many ideas how to go about it. All I knew is that horror stories can only get us so far, even though they had their place. A few months before the #1ReasonWhy hashtag I started brainstorming and asking experienced feminists and women in digital culture what I could do to help. I was shown how other fields are offering support systems to women creatives, what works, what doesn’t. I particularly like the notion behind nochicksnoexcuses.com.au, a rolling database of women experts that broadcasters, festival organisers and curators (and the like) could access so there was no way the excuse “We just couldn’t find any women” would fly when confronted about lack of diversity of opinion.

But I didn’t feel like that was the right fit for creatives in the game space. A framework of “experts” can also exclude a lot of people who have meaningful things to contribute, in our domain. Students and emerging practitioners still have a lot of wisdom to share.

I want to set up an online hub where women creatives can share the personal epiphanies about their craft they’ve been having, the lessons they’ve learned, and get help when they need it. A space that showcases amazing women game developers locally and from all over the world, asking them to write a blog article about something they’d like to share. A space where women can share their #1ReasonWhy, and be greeted with a knowing hug and reminded of #1ReasonToBe. A space that also welcomes non-games professionals to dip their toe in and see what this whole videogame malarky is all about—a safe space where they don’t have to prove “nerd cred” in order to earn permission to make something cool.

I want there to be a place to go to feel energised and not alone as a woman working in videogames, like I did when I was reading #1ReasonWhy. Both online, and in person. I want something steadfast and durable.

The hashtag felt so ephemeral. I was scared of losing it. “Where are we all going after this is done?! I don’t want to lose you all,” I tweeted. The groundswell behind movements lead by social media can seem so fleeting. There needs to be concrete action afterwards to make sure a difference is actually made.

I want to make a space where there’s a focus on the personal relationship between maker and craft. Where industry experience isn’t a nucleus, people still learning their path are valued and heard, and other people can help them. The maker’s journey is a fascinating one, and one that requires a lot of support, both moral and otherwise. Throw in a harsh gender imbalance and the need for support is even greater.

So I’m going to make this space. Horror stories can only get us so far, after all. So, women in digital culture: start writing down things you’re needing some help with. I’m going to try and put some women in front of you that will try to help. Don’t lose the momentum, don’t lose the urge to say enough is enough, and don’t lose contact. #1ReasonWhy was an important cultural moment. One we shouldn’t let disappear.

Leena van Deventer is a writer, editor, and game developer from Melbourne, Australia. Follow her on twitter @grassisleena

The final few sessions of this year’s Freeplay Independent Games Festival had a strange feeling about them. They were Paul Callaghan’s last as festival director, signalling another shift for a festival that has already grown and altered significantly since it was founded in 2004 by Marcus Westbury and Katharine Neil. The mood through the sessions was reflective and circumspect at Callaghan’s departure (who will move into a position on the Freeplay board), but also intensely curious about the future.

Today, it was announced that two co-directors will be taking over the helm of the festival: Katie Williams, freelance games journalist, writer, critic; and Harry Lee, independent game developer.

Both have growing international profiles—Williams for her work at Hyper Magazine, PC PowerPlay, Atomic, Kotaku Australia and GameSpy, and Lee for his award winning games Midas and Stickets.

The new co-directors are young and exciting appointments that offer the promise of a fresh and important voice for Freeplay over the coming years. Neither has particular affiliation with either the mainstream games industry nor the status quo of independent development—with Williams’ appointment in particular serving as the first time a non-practitioner has been at the helm since Westbury in 2004. It also continues an interesting tradition of co-directors for the festival—from Westbury and Neil in 2004, to Callaghan and Eve Penford (who stepped down in 2011), to today.

“Freeplay has a very personal meaning for me,” Williams told me earlier this week. “Before I first attended Freeplay in 2010, I was a directionless games student. It was coming to Freeplay that made me realise that games are something I want to be an active part of, something I want to influence—something I want to spending my life working with.”

“Since then, I’ve tried to pursue that kind of writing, those kinds of ideas that I found at the festival,” continues Williams. “Freeplay was that turning point for me, so I’m really happy now to actually be a part of it. I hope, under our new directorship, that Freeplay will continue to be as influential and inspiring to its visitors.”

Lee also argues for the agenda-setting power of the festival. “Freeplay aims to address a lot of the balances and tensions of the videogames world. It’s a conversation that needs to be had to develop richer games, so that we develop a better culture, so that we can have better conversations.”

“The word ‘independent’ [in the festival’s title] is super important, in that it describes not just the games we focus on but the festival itself,” argues Lee.

“We feel we’re offering something different to other conferences in Australia,” adds Williams. “Freeplay has generated some quite serious discussions that have not just taken place here, but all over the world. I’d love to be able to continue doing that same sort of thing, and to explore other issues that we’re not really discussing right now.”

Issues of diversity and openness within videogame culture are an area that the new directors hope to continue to press. “At other events,” says Williams, “I’ve often been the only girl in the room, or the only non-developer in the room; I felt like I didn’t quite belong there.

“We’ve talked a lot about accessibility, about getting non-gamers involved too,” she continues. “If there’s still a barrier by the time we finish our time at Freeplay, we would be really depressed about that.”

Lee agrees, suggesting that one of the challenges the new directors are setting themselves is to continue to break down obstacles that cause more demanding explorations of videogame culture to hesitate.

“We need someone to champion these causes, and we need these avenues to exist,” says Lee. “If we don’t have these avenues, and we don’t have these particular voices, then we run the risk of developing a monoculture.”

Callaghan was in the job four years (three of which were with Penford). If Williams and Lee are to last the same length, what would the festival look like in 2016? What would they hope to have achieved after four years at Freeplay?

“Paul [Callaghan] has always been behind the line of ‘We don’t all want the same thing’,” says Lee, after some consideration. “But my addendum to that is that we can all celebrate the differences and diversity that we have. That’s what I think Freeplay is about.

“It is about community, it is about culture, and it is about challenging all of us to be better,” he adds.

“If we lose that voice then we’ve lost something very important.”

The man was hovering over a box, looking awkwardly in at its jumbled contents. “It’s a videogame thing, is it?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s a Nintendo Wii,” replied the young girl behind the stall. She looked about 16. “It’s $60 for all of it.” There were several controllers and game cases all stuffed into the box with the console.

“And I just plug it into my TV?”

“Yeah, it’s got this sensor thing, too,” she said, digging into the jumbled mess to produce the Wii’s black sensor bar. “You have to put that in front, but it’s pretty easy.”

“Well, okay. The kids will figure that out. $60?” He got out his wallet.

The girl was visibly excited, and began to fish the shoe box out from underneath the collection of Barbie dolls, tennis balls, and other childhood ephemera at the garage sale.

“Thank you so much,” she said. He gave her the money.

“Thank you so much,” she repeated.

I put my own Wii into a box in a cupboard several weeks ago. It was time, after what must have quite literally been years of denial, to admit that I was never going to play it again. The fact of the matter was that I, like many I know, hadn’t touched it for more than a few days since sometime in 2008.

This isn’t necessarily an indictment on the console. The fact that many Wiis lived out their lives unloved and unpowered next to television sets tells us relatively little. With the recent release of the Wii’s successor, the Wii U, maybe we can start to think about the life and death of the Wii a little more seriously.

*

More so than any game, it’s the Wii’s little white plastic remote that entered pop culture.

The enduring image of the Wii is not of Link soaring above the clouds on a bird in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and it’s not of Samus narrating to herself in Metroid: Other M. It’s not even of four Miis trading shots across a tennis court, though that must surely come close.

The enduring image of the Wii is of photogenic people holding Wii remotes and smiling, looking into an imagined television set. Gazing outward onto these advertising scenes, we note the diverse selection of players and just how non-traditional the scene is. The Wii was nothing if not an excuse for the feigned discovery that people other than young men could love videogames.

But the console-point-of-view also has the effect of leaving the Wii unseen. The very thing that is being advertised is actually not present at all in these scenes. It’s easy to forget that this is what Nintendo wanted—to regain a place in living rooms by erasing the console itself.

Herein lies the great paradox of the Wii’s lifetime, and perhaps the explanation for why most Wii consoles eked out a slow death of unused existence. In the process of erasing the console, they multiplied it. Nintendo made the invisible, visible.

The Wii remote was supposed to disappear. It was supposed to let players into the game world in a way they’d never experienced before, by translating their physical thrusts and swings and flails into digital commands. It was supposed to be natural, empowering those who were otherwise intimidated by the plethora of buttons on a standard controller. If you know how to play tennis, so the line went, you know how to play tennis for Wii. Out were the intimidating thorns-of-buttons of old; in was the new play.

Beyond the mind of the player, the controller was supposed to be invisible, designed to look at home alongside television remotes—a kind of urban camouflage for the living room. Here was a videogame controller in disguise, concealed in plain view.

It is easy to forget that there was once a time where Nintendo imagined that the Wii would slot into the rhythms of daily life. Users would get up in the morning, have their cup of coffee, switch over to the Wii, and check the weather and the news. These things were sold as channels, and in this light the Wii itself became an extension of the television set. Here was your new remote, and here was your new set of channels to navigate. It was not the aim of the Wii to redesign life, but to extend it through a set of casual metaphors that would melt away once the Wii gained traction. The television was not replaced. It was upgraded.

Is it any surprise, then, that it was the little white remote that became the icon, rather than any images on screen?

There it was, next to my television remote and my DVD player controller, blending in, comfortably at home.

There it was, in my mind’s eye, being held by four attractive young people as they looked at the console-point-of-view, smiling, enjoying their own company as much as the Wii’s.

There it stayed, virtually unplayed for four years.

Yet few other consoles have been as defined by their sense of touch. The Wii remote is a slightly stubby, almost plain little device, but it is perfectly sculpted for most hands. It is a pleasurable thing to hold, and in this way, what was intended to be invisible becomes visible—we think as much about this thing in our hand as we do our in-game gestures.

So the era of the Wii was not one of Boom Blox, of de Blob or of Super Mario Galaxy.

It was the era of your middle finger on ‘B’ underneath, your thumb on top of the ‘A’. It was the sharp clack of a wristband colliding with hard plastic. It was the satisfying density of the protective sheathes that later Wii remotes were provided with.

It was the conduit-like remote, too, a connection for nunchucks, for classic controllers, and for the dumpy little Wii Motion Plus box, a reminder that the basic task for which the remote was designed—capturing gestures—could only be properly fulfilled three years after the fact. And it was a conduit for movement, too, some kind of weird promise for the future.

It was the era of four people laughing and smiling and pointing their little white remotes at the us, the console, the thing that was supposed to be invisible that ended up being at the forefront of everything. It is for this reason that the Wii U is an interesting change in tack for Nintendo—it is not another gesture towards (failed) invisibility, but a conscious multiplication of visibility, with its use of Wii remotes and a very present touch screen device.

In the end, it was the very idea of the Wii that captured the public imagination so fluently. No game and no amount of hours spent with the console could ever hope to compete with that.