For those who may have missed the Podcast or are unable to listen to it, here is a full transcript of the interview. For more information on Marcus Westbury, you can check out his website here.
PALGN: Thanks for joining us Marcus.
Marcus Westbury: Thank you, thanks for having me.
PALGN: The first question I really wanted to ask you was, can you give us an idea of your history with games?
MW: Yes, look I guess I'm just of that generation that came of age with games - I think my first computer was an old Commodore 64, and then I graduated to an Amiga in my later years and I've always played games. I'm not a fanatic, although I have lost months of my life on end occasionally, like when I was unemployed with things like the Civilisation series.
But mostly I don't, I'm not a hardcore 24/7 gamer, but I guess I'm like a lot of people my age, I mean I'm in my thirties now, I grew up with games, I still play them and still I take them seriously. When I've been involved in making cultural programs, or festivals, or events, or TV shows or whatever, games are part of my culture, so they've naturally been something that's always featured in that.
PALGN: The Free Play festival in particular seems like a really interesting idea - can you tell us briefly about that?
MW: Yes, Free Play, we started that in about 2003 I think, or 2004. Basically the idea behind Free Play was to try and create a forum for independent gamers to get together - people wanting to make independent games, and people working in the games industry, who wanted it to be more of a cultural form and less a marketing-driven industry.
I think one of the big problems with games at times is that it's been a squillion dollar industry almost since games started, and so at times I think a lot of the potential of games isn't really necessary tapped by people who just make new series of games and put a '3' or '4' or '5' on the end of a series that's been around for a long time. The space for innovation, and the space for exploring new ideas and doing new things in the games industry probably isn't as big as it should be, so Free Play basically started as a bit of a response to that.
PALGN: Because you've hosted a show with the word 'art' in it, I'm afraid you're going to be co-opted into the games-art debate. I was wondering where you think games sit at the moment in a cultural map of the art-world?
MW: One of my pet issues is that I don't really care too much about it...I started a festival called This Is Not Art and I now do a TV series for the ABC called Not Quite Art. If it's not already obvious, I don't care too much whether things are art or aren't. What I'm interested in I guess is the creativity that surrounds us - people that are making things and are inspired by things and doing things.
And games are a big part of that - they're probably a much bigger and more significant part of that then a lot of things, like the Sydney Dance Company or things that we spend a lot more time debating or investing in - or there is a lot more pages in the paper seemingly devoted to critically thinking about dance productions that a handful of people see - then there are people critically thinking and talking about games which are played by hundreds of thousands of people - or millions in some cases - and I think that a big starting point for me is trying to bring games into that.
I think the big problem that we've got is - and it's not just an Australian problem, but it's around the world - is that a lot of policy-makers, politicians and people who make decisions, they tend to put games in the same category as toys, they sort of think of games as a trivial aside that doesn't have much to do with anything.
I think there's been some work in different states of Australia about getting games industry off the ground, but again, they tend to look at it simply as an economic equation, purely about money, and to me, games aren't in that boat, to me games are in the same boat or framework as movies are, or photography is, or any of those creative forms where they're popular and a lot of people are engaging with them.
PALGN: It's interesting that you talk about their popularity. I wanted to talk briefly about something like Escape from Woomera which you used in the first series of Not Quite Art as one of the focus for videogames. Do you think that these types of games - that people might almost condescendingly call 'serious games' - do you think that's where the hope lies or the interesting stuff lies, or will one day people look back at more mainstream hits like the Halos, the Metal Gear Solids and think, 'Wow how did we miss that?'
MW: I think there's a place for all of it. My problem is not trying to...my interest is not in trying to get a bunch of purely sort of indie, arty, political or whatever type of games happening, it's just that games like any creative form should have the full spectrum. There should be, the games industry and the games culture will be much, much healthier if there are people out there making games that are trying everything and going off in every possible direction.
It's really interesting, Escape from Woomera is a really interesting example - Katharine Neil, who is one of the people who was a driving force behind that project, was also one of the people who was very interested in setting up Free Play to start with, and it's interesting that - I've got to be careful quoting her - but the interesting thing about that is, they weren't trying to make a political ... they were trying to make a political statement, but they weren't trying to make an art project or a conceptual kind of thing - they were trying to make a really good game, you know they were trying to make a game that ... their view is that you should be able to make games around and about the sort of things that people are out there talking about, about real issues in society.
If you're looking for a dramatic place to set a game, there's a long tradition of escape games and why not Woomera? Why not put people into that story and why not play with that and I think it's, to me, the analogy I keep using is - it's a bit of an oversimplification - but in films you've got indie films, you've got art house films, you've got foreign-language films and you've got Hollywood blockbusters and in games it's almost like the, everything is Hollywood - everyone is trying to be a Hollywood blockbuster and there should be a spectrum out there or there should be greater encouragement - there is a spectrum out there - but there should be greater encouragement of the fact that people need to work out all the different ways that you can possibly make and explore ideas in games. To me that's my starting point.
There's a world of possibilities out there and we've tapped about five per cent of it. The other ninety-five per cent of it is waiting to be discovered and I think that in Australia in particular, Australia doesn't have the money...current generation console games can cost, you're talking about fifteen million dollars in resources to get some of those games up, now we don't have lots of lots of fifteen million dollars to throw into games in Australia, so as with Australian film I think the way we need to go ahead is about being smarter and making things cheaper and that people want to do.
PALGN: I think that's quite interesting. Possibly the downloadable titles - we were talking about that on the Podcast recently - I think that's where a lot more of the creative ideas and freedom is being opened up at the moment.
MW: That's actually fantastic, because for the first time the current generation of consoles - with the casual gaming and arcade stuff you can download and whatever else - it's actually finally caught up a bit with the PC culture of small-scale gaming and there is a lot more room for innovation and experimentation.
Because I think the big problem with games has long been - particularly with console based games - the distribution of them, it's tightly controlled by a handful of people and you can't even make games and for a long time you haven't been able to make games for the consoles without first convincing your Sonys or your Microsofts or your Nintendos that they want to have that platform. You certainly don't have that problem in the film world of having to convince Kodak that you've got a good idea for a film before they'll let you have access to a camera.
PALGN: That leads to our next question. What role do you think Government has in nurturing our games industry to reach a higher plane of artistic achievement, or perhaps even just recognition?
MW: I think there's a couple of different questions there, I think one is how do you make a more viable games industry in Australia. I went to the 2020 summit and because there was no one from the gaming world invited, I put a call out for people to put forward suggestions and things to take along.
A lot of them were very basic, simple industry things, like there are really generous tax concessions that apply to film in Australia that don't apply to games so there is a really strong set of incentives for people who are making films in Australia, but that don't exist in quite the same way in the games world. Australia, once upon a time, a lot of its game industry was based on the fact that we were just cheaper than other places to make games.
Now we're less and less cheaper, so we have to be more and more smarter and there's a real role for government in making sure that happens. The other side, the creative side, I think one of the roles for government is to create incentives for innovation, just to create ways in which platforms can support people to take risks that aren't necessarily commercial. Sometimes we end up with the worst of all worlds where we have government policy trying to develop things that are commercial when I think maybe a better role for government is to encourage things that in the short-term don't seem so commercial, but in the long-term the research and development might pay off more.
PALGN: So do you think the role of government then perhaps lies more in festivals and funding programs rather than the more typical suggestions like the tax breaks that we've been hearing recently?
MW: I think the tax break is important, simply because people making games are competing with people making films, and people making television, and people making all these other forms for access to a fairly limited amount money to invest in stuff, so it's vitally important that games are at least on an equal playing field with those other forms.
Then there's all the other stuff that government does about education - obviously government funding is crucial to all of the games schools and programs that are out there - and then I think there's another space which is about promoting a degree of risk and innovation but that's a bit harder to sell, because governments kind of like the idea of things that will make really flashy announcements now and get some Minister's picture in the paper, while a lot of these things are much more longer term than that.
PALGN: Our time is up unfortunately, but before you go I wanted to ask if you could give us a quick sneak preview of your second series of Not Quite Art - will games again make an appearance?
MW: A little bit yes, this one's actually kind of interesting. The new series is about culture and about how technology is changing the way culture circulates in the world and there's a little bit about games but it's not so much about games.
I've spent one of the episodes running around chasing after people that have audiences of squillions on the Internet from their bedrooms in Australia, so I went and found Yahtzee Croshaw and spoke to him, so he's kind of flying the flag for games in that episode. But not so such talking about games as talking about that phenomenon of people who can...once upon a time if you lived in Australia and you wanted your work to be seen by people on the other side of the world you had to physically get up and go there and now days there's great potential for games makers and people like Yahtzee who are out there capitalising on it, with great potential to plug into people who are interested in what you're doing from anywhere in the world.
PALGN: It sounds fascinating, I can't wait to see it - it screens later this year?
MW: It's going to be on in October, Tuesday nights in October on the ABC, and it will be available to download too for those people who are stuck in front of their games consoles and don't watch television.
PALGN: [laughs] I'm sure there'd be none of our listeners like that. Thanks for your time Marcus, we really appreciate it and good luck with your series.
MW: No worries, thanks.
Thanks again to Marcus for agreeing to spend the time involved.
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