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https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/mar/06/finally-australia-sees-video-games-are-important-but-it-cant-be-only-because-they-make-money>
"If you head to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Acmi) in Melbourne
right now, you can visit
Out of Bounds, an exhibition that “explores the
limits of videogames”. There you can watch
The Grannies: a documentary about
four game developers and friends in Melbourne who, while playing as a posse of
elderly cowboys in the Playstation game
Red Dead Redemption 2, went looking
for adventure in the glitchy out-of-bounds areas beyond the game’s map.
Alongside
The Grannies at Acmi, attendees can play
Red Desert Render, which
was made by game developer Ian MacLarty, one of the four Grannies.
Red Desert
Render takes the experience of exploring weird, glitchy virtual spaces. It’s
not dissimilar to many of MacLarty’s other games, which are often free, very
Australian, and experimental, like
Southbank Portrait and
Ned Kelly. But
MacLarty is also a highly successful commercial game developer: his next game,
Mars First Logistics, takes all these strange spatial experiments and turns
them into a highly-polished commercial product.
When video games are talked about as having cultural value in Australia,
typically that value is measured by how much money they make ($284.4m in
2021/2022, a 26% increase on the previous year) or how many jobs they create.
But MacLarty’s career is a great example of why video game development can’t be
understood as an art form based on how much money they make alone. Just like
musicians, painters, writers and all other artists, video game developers
develop a practice through constant experimentation, with only some projects
evolving into something that mainstream audiences will ever actually see."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
