GCAP 2019

Since the beginning of 2018, Brendan Keogh has been funded by the Australian Research Council to
investigate the state of game development in Australia. So far Keogh has conducted 150 interviews
with gamemakers in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Tasmania; he also conducted a
nationwide survey that attracted another 280 responses. Across these interviews, Keogh identified a
wide range of identities, challenges, and ambitions driving Australian gamemakers. Some of these
were specific to different local contexts; others were felt similarly across the nation.


In this session, Keogh will report back to the community some of the preliminary findings of this
ongoing research through directly drawing from quotations and statistics from this ongoing research.
The goal of this is to help individuals in the audience to better understand their own local and national
context as game developers, ensuring that collective challenges they face are not felt as solely
individual failings. Further, by presenting this national and local snapshot of the experiences of
Australian gamemakers, it is hoped this talk’s information will help local gamemaking communities
consider collective responses and strategies to the near-ubiquitous feelings of precarity and instability
observed in this study.