The Albanese government promises to treat video games as art – but developers must also be treated like artists, and supported to experiment, fail and flourish
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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.
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