Earlier this week our Online Festival came to a close. In case you missed them, here are the panels that happened in those last few days, archived for your convenience. Every panel from the Online Festival can be found here.
If you’re in Melbourne, don’t forget we have in-person events happening all weekend, including tonight’s Board Games Up Late, Saturday’s fete and Hovergarden party, and Sunday’s unconference and symposium.
The Interview Game: Chris Johnson
Journalist and former Freeplay Director Katie Williams interviews Adelaide-based game developer Chris Johnson while Chris plays some of his own games. They discuss Chris’s design philosophy and the tensions between commercial and artistic ambitions among other things.
Videogames and Indigenous Cultures
Rae Johnson talks to Amy Fredeen (USA) and Alan Gershfeld (USA) about using videogames as a medium for telling the stories of Indigenous, Aboriginal, and First Nation communities around the globe. They discuss the process of creating the critically-acclaimed Never Alone, and both the importance and difficulty of conveying such culturally significant stories through videogames.
Collective Intelligence
Members of a range of videogame and artist collectives from Australia and New Zealand discuss the advantages and difficulties of forming creative collectives, drawing from their own experiences and offering advice.
Games and War
Dr. Malcolm Ryan talks to Hugh Davies, Dr. Helen Berents, Dan McMahon, and Stephen Coleman about the relationship between war and videogames, particularly in regards to ethics. Can videogames depict war in an ethical manner? How can a videogame speak meaningfully to the experiences of war? How do they get it wrong?
Curating For Diversity
Academic, curator, and founder of IndieCade Celia Pearce gives us 12 steps towards curating a diverse event, drawing from her own extensive curatorial background.
Free Play 2004: Co-Founders Look Back
Eleven years and ten festivals later, the founders of the first ever Free Play festival, Katharine Neil and Marcus Westbury reminisce about what the world of games and festivals was like back then, and how Freeplay fit into it.