High
art and video games might seem like strange bedfellows, but not to
Australian Siobhan Reddy.
When
her company Media Molecule's BAFTA award-winning game Little Big Planet
exhibited at London's Victoria & Albert Museum a few years ago, it was
perhaps a sign perceptions were changing.
"It's
giving me goosebumps," Reddy says, remembering the first time
the games development studio she co-founded and directs exhibited.
"We
all got a bit emotional."
It
was yet another feather in the cap for Reddy, 36, whose successes are
seeing both Australia and the UK fighting to claim her as their own. (The
36-year-old spent her formative years in Sydney, moving from South Africa
when she was four, and departed for the UK at 18.)
In
2013, BBC's Woman's Hour listed her as one of Britain's 100 most
powerful women. Last year, she was awarded Qantas Australian Woman of the
Year, and also named in Fortune's 10 most powerful women in gaming.
More recently she was nominated as a finalist in the Advance Global
Australian Awards, which celebrate talented Australians living overseas.
There
are few people better placed than Reddy to rewrite games' place in society.
For
her, the opportunity to present beautiful, digital artwork from
award-winning games in a prestigious exhibition space means
being able to reach new audiences.
One
moment that stuck out for her at last month's showing of Tearaway Unfolded was
when a visitor relayed his epiphany that games could provide a meaningful,
shared experience for him and his young son, whom he'd brought along to the
exhibition.
Reddy
explains: "He was saying to me, 'I'm really into my children being exposed
to a lot of alternative views of the world and … really artistic things, and
I'd not really thought about games as being that way before. I should be doing
them with my little boy!'"
But
if the fusion of games with high art creates new audiences, it also elevates
the games into new territory by inviting traditional audiences to view them in
a new light.
"Seeing [the
game] in the context of that space – that is beautiful … almost like
seeing games again for the first time," Reddy says.
Media
Molecule's titles are a far cry from your average shoot-em-ups or car racing
games. The artwork is both distinctive and wildly creative, deliberately
pushing boundaries and transporting players into completely new worlds.
"One
of the central missions of the studio is to do creative projects which flirt
with metaphor of the connection between physical materials, physical creation
and digital creation, a beautiful craft aesthetic," Reddy says.
"With
Tearaway Unfolded we wanted to make a beautiful tactile world that you
could stick your fingers in."
The
V&A exhibit included a craft station for visitors to make paper art,
extending the paper cut-out artwork of the game into the real world.
Meanwhile,
a promo for Media Molecule's next release, Dreams, which
is still in development, features polar bears doing belly flops, killer
teddy bears, and creepy robots soaring through the sky on what look like flying
jetskis.
A
key ingredient in the studio's ability to remain agile and creative is its
size. The company deliberately maintains a relatively small staff of
around 55, despite its considerable successes. In contrast, the biggest games
studios in the world – the likes of Ubisoft and Electronic Arts
– boast several thousand.
At
the other end of the scale, however, are small independent developer studios,
and it's their rise in Australia which has Reddy excited. When she left
for London, there weren't many opportunities in Australia to make games, other
than to join a big blockbuster studio, she says.
"It's
a different way of thinking now, it's more indie, and that's where people
begin making games and how they get practice, and there are more ways
to do that than ever before."
Heralding this
new era of game development is Melbourne's Arcade co-working space,
which in the two years since it launched has grown quickly to host nearly
30 games development studios of between one and 14 staff each.
One
of these small companies is Hipster Whale, whose incredible
success with Crossy Road saw co-founder Andy Sum
invited to grace the stage at the recent Apple iPhone
6s event alongside chief executive Tim Cook. The studio also
recently took on the honourable task of remaking a famous arcade
classic, Pac-Man.
Reddy
says these kinds of collaborative spaces have just the right "level
of chaos" to foster creative ideas, and says the Arcade is
"setting a standard".
"I
think the Arcade is one of most exciting places not just in Australia but
in the world," she says.
"It's
a bit more of a growing trend [game studio co-working spaces], but I always
hear the Arcade being referenced." Hannah Francis
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