Talk: What Australian gamemakers told me about making games in Australia
Speaker: Brendan Keogh
Since the beginning of 2018, Brendan Keogh has been funded by the Australian Research Council to investigate the state of game development in Australia. So far Keogh has conducted 150 interviews with gamemakers in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Tasmania; he also conducted a nationwide survey that attracted another 280 responses.
Across these interviews, Keogh identified a wide range of identities, challenges, and ambitions driving Australian gamemakers. Some of these were specific to different local contexts; others were felt similarly across the nation.
In this session, Keogh will report back to the community some of the preliminary findings of this ongoing research through directly drawing from quotations and statistics from this ongoing research.
The goal of this is to help individuals in the audience to better understand their own local and national context as game developers, ensuring that collective challenges they face are not felt as solely individual failings.
Further, by presenting this national and local snapshot of the experiences of Australian gamemakers, it is hoped this talk’s information will help local gamemaking communities consider collective responses and strategies to the near-ubiquitous feelings of precarity and instability observed in this study.
Also featuring final remarks from Sav Emmett Wolfe and the GDAA team.
Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way
Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.
Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.
Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.