Commercialisation, community, and culture: A production perspective on public arts funding for video games in Australia

Abstract

Australia has a small but robust ecosystem of video game development, which has been supported by a patchwork arrangement of public arts funding since the early 2000s. Following Keogh's call for more research on the experiences of games workers situated in their local contexts, this paper investigates the impacts of public funding on Australian games workers and the games they create. The research analyses funding policy, applications and processes, supported by a discourse analysis of annual reports and strategic documents (n:52) from Australian arts funding bodies with a focus on changes in official discourse over time. These findings informed semi-structured interviews with industry workers (n:11) who access public funding for their work, which examined the material effects of public funding policy on games workers. The paper demonstrates that public funding for games in Australia is structured through a language of industry growth and economic imperatives, a framework which generates many tensions for recipients of these funds. I argue that this structure is mismatched to the experiences and ambitions of Australian games workers, who see themselves as artistic practitioners and the games they create as a cultural form. This research highlights this deeply-held value through its attention to the under-examined experiences and perspectives of Australian games workers accessing public arts funding, and thus makes an important contribution to researchers’ and policymakers’ understandings of games production in Australia.