Besides, if the latest surveys about the average gamer being a 32-year-old single male who sits at home and plays games all day are correct, then what I am proposing is not going to have much impact at all.

South Attorney General, John Rau, on his proposal to replace the MA15+ rating for video games exclusively with an R18+ rating

No-one buys a ticket to the theatre or concert hall to witness something ordinary, something that can be done by any reasonably intelligent person with a modicum of application and training – like making a computer game or designing an ear-ring.

Richard Mills, Artistic Director of the West Australian Opera Company in his piece on Artistic Vibrancy for the Australia Council

Comments like these are unsurprising to anyone who has grown up with videogames. Clichés like these persist, despite the fact that surveys describe gamers as a diverse bunch of people who just happen to play games – by themselves, with their partners, with their families – and are also looking for experiences which are far from ordinary, weaving themselves into the fabric of their lives in the same way as the theatre or a concert.

At the recent Freeplay festival, we asked a bunch of people to dig out their recollections of games that they’ve played from the extraordinary, the influential, the shaping, the personal, and then – inspired by a similar Emerging Writers Festival event – present them in a Pecha Kucha night of tiny little talks where each slide lasts for twenty seconds. Despite the narcissism inherent in such a presentation – or perhaps because of it – I decided to do one of my own, and in doing so, I discovered an arc that I wasn’t expecting – my own life filtered through the games that I’d played carried me from novelty to escape to boredom and finally to hope, mirroring some of my personal experiences, and – like all art – shining a light on why I am the way I am.

This is what it looked like.

These are the first games I can remember playing – Pong, Airwolf, Icicle Works, Head over Heels, Uridium, Paradroid, Sabateour, Treasure Island. I would have been about 7 or 8 when I first saw Pong for the first time, and was interested, but not hugely impressed. The first game that hugely impressed me was Punchy where I played a strange policeman jumping over Quasimodo, avoiding arrows, and trying go rescue a princess. It came on a tape with an old machine called a Commodore +4. And there was a chunky drawing program – like Photoshop but with much larger pixels –  branded with Rolf Harris’ name on the other side.

Once I had my first computer – which I shared with my brother – I played indiscriminately. The novelty was the thing. I flew helicopters, jet planes, was Batman or a ninja, a droid or Santa Claus. I plundered treasure and I shot aliens. I rolled around as a marble and I fought crime.

But it was only when I played a game called Elite that I began to think maybe here was something I could do with my life.

Elite cast you as whatever you wanted, in a universe that only half-cared what you decided to do. From your home space station, you could head out and trade – legally or on the fringes – become a pirate, a bounty hunter, an explorer, or any combination of the above. I played as a trader just on the right side of the law, occasionally getting caught and pursued by police, but never enough to threaten my nomadic existence or pursuit of credits and finding out what was at the edge of the galaxy.

It was, for me, the perfect escape.

My family used to go on holidays to seaside resort towns. I wasn’t really a seaside-resort type of kid, but these places always had some sort of arcade where I could take my daily allowance of about two or three pounds, get it converted to twenty- and fifty-pence coins and try to escape the grey cloudy British summers for a little while. This sort of behaviour obviously wasn’t encouraged, but it was my way of dealing with it all, my way of taking a little bit of control over the situation, and finding pleasure in the midst of the boredom.

But then something happened when I finally got my dream job making games. I found myself doing the same thing over and over again. I started out as a programmer and gravitated, partly through choice, partly through necessity, to writing visual effects code. Sounds kind of exciting, but there’s only so many times you can solve that same problem on different consoles – PC, PS2, PS3, Xbox360 – before it becomes uninteresting, to me at least.

And I found myself having the same responses to games. I was bored. Bored of the same fantasy tropes, the same space marines, the same endless stream of sequels.

But then, I had a rare moment of epiphany when playing Dragon Age. What if, for some of these games, creating boredom was the intent? What if there was a richer and broader range of expression available to us than aiming simply for ‘fun’?

Dragon Age wasn’t doing it deliberately, but Bioshock 2 & Limbo, I think, are. Bioshock 2, in particular, very deliberately uses repetition, drudgery, tedium and boredom in its opening stages to significant emotional impact when it twists in its second half into something wholly unexpected – and something that carries such great emotional impact because as a player you’ve pushed through that boring beginning into something new.

I think we’re in the beginning of a golden age of videogames where technology is no-longer the limiting factor, where we’re moving away from What can we make this new console ‘do’? to What can we say using the structures, rhythms and shapes of games? New designers are appearing, who have grown up in a world where videogames are a fact of life. Artists from visual arts, film, literature, music, or sculpture are becoming interested in the form and they’re creating things that may only peripherally resemble the games of my childhood, but which create emotional experiences unlike anything that’s come before.

And that gives me hope.

– Paul Callaghan is a freelance writer, developer, educator, and the director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival.

Please join us for an evening where your obscure (and bleeding obvious) literary knowledge can win you not just the bemused admiration of your peers, but prizes too!

When: 6 for 6:30pm, Thursday 29 September

Where: The Pumphouse Hotel, 128 Nicholson St, Fitzroy

How much: $15 at the door

Food and drinks: available at the bar

Booking recommended — our trivia nights always sell out!

For all group/individual bookings and enquiries emailinfo@killyourdarlingsjournal.com.

Join us as Mark Rubbo (Managing Director of Readings), Michael Heyward (Publisher at Text) and Matthia Dempsey (Editor-in-chief of Bookseller+Publisher, the Weekly Book Newsletter) nut it out. Chaired by Rebecca Starford, editor of Kill Your Darlings.

Readings welcomes gold coin donations at all Readings events, with proceeds going to the Readings Foundation.

When: 6:30pm, Thursday 16 June (please note, this is a new time for this event)
Where: Readings Carlton, 309 Lygon St, Carlton

All welcome. Bookings: (03) 9347 6633 or RSVP on Facebook.

The Pitch

Our panel of publishers and editors – from diverse publications such as literary journals, newspapers, magazines and online – are here to give you  no-holds barred tips and advice about how to successfully present your work. With time for Q&A, this is one panel you don’t want to miss.

Date/time: Date: Saturday 4 June, 3.30pm-5pm

Venue: Wheeler Centre, 176 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne  Prices: $15 full/$10 concession

Living Library

Got a question about developing plotlines, dialogue, finding your voice, structure, criticism or collaboration? Be mentored by the best at our  Living Library professional development event. Borrow one of our experts for a fifteen-minute one-on-one mentoring session, to discuss issues about the craft of being a writer. Including Kill Your Darlings Associate Editor Jo Case (editing).

Date/time: Saturday 4 June, 10.30am–5pm

Venue: Experimedia Space, State Library of Victoria, Swanston St  Prices: $10 per 15 minute session with a Book

Podcasting

Podcasts and literary programming is all the rage, and these guys do it so well. Find out how literary podcasting works with MYKE BARTLETT and ESTELLE TANG.

Date: Sunday 29 May, 12:30pm

Venue: Melbourne Town Hall

Kill Your Darlings contributors including Mel Campbell, Bethanie Blanchard, Greg Foyster and Peggy Frew will also appear at events across the festival. See you there!

When: 6 for 6:30pm, Thursday 7 April
Where: The Pumphouse Hotel, 128 Nicholson St, Fitzroy
How much: $15 at the door ($25 for entry and a copy of Issue Five)
Food and drinks: available at the bar

Please note that we are very nearly booked out. If you haven’t already RSVPed, please email info@killyourdarlingsjournal.com to secure those last few spots. View the Facebook event page here.

With Amazon.com, ebooks and print-on-demand, are we seeing the end of the traditional bookstore? In the first Meanland event for 2011, a panel of retailers, e-traders and industry insiders discuss how book selling is changing and what that evolution means for readers, writers and literature.

Tuesday 8 March, 6.30pm

Readings Carlton

Bookings: 9347 6633

Check out the Facebook page here.

Tuesday 8 March, 6.30pm

Readings Carlton

Bookings: 9347 6633

Check out the Facebook page here.

If you thought that Open Days were only for awkwardly introducing your parents to your Grade Four teacher or figuring out where you’d like to embark upon your university bar-hopping-slash-education, you were wrong. Melbourne’s hub of literary activity, The Wheeler Centre, is having an Open Day on Sunday to showcase its resident organisations and programming. Kill Your Darlings, as well as Extempore and Aduki Independent Press, will be in residence from 1:30 pm. We’re all members of SPUNC, which has its headquarters at the centre.

Come along and say hello!