Andrew Gleeson / Thursday 4pm

In an age of rent-seeking software-as-a-service models and deteriorating resources of information, digital creators have increasingly less control over the tools they use to create.

This talk explores how we can take back control and become more empowered as independent creators; embracing open source software, simplifying our requirements, and sharing knowledge to help others do the same.

Through a community-oriented, non-profit approach to software development, we can build a more sustainable, engaging & fulfilling practice that everyone can benefit from.

Siobhan Dent / Friday 1:15pm

One day in 2017, my high school friends and I decided to explore a random suburb just for the hell of it. Six years later, we’ve been to every suburb in Melbourne – all 333 – with memories made, in-jokes spawned, spreadsheets judiciously filled in, and the Suburb Game complete. This talk is a casual romp through the many ways I have made grand, low-budget adventures out of regional bakeries, long walks, and towns with funny names.

Tash ‘FriendlyCosmonaut’ / Saturday 1pm

Most forms of media represent linear narratives which land at a single ending, but games’ interactivity and responsiveness afford possibilities of narrative branching. Multiple endings are common, especially in role-playing games, where they are often used as selling points: evidence of narrative depth, meaningful player agency, and value-adding replayability. During this talk, I will argue that the notion of many endings being superior to singular conclusions is fallacious; often, multiple endings dilute, confuse, and even contradict each other and/or the entire game’s narrative. ‘Good’ endings, in contrast, feel inevitable, like everything prior has led up to that point, directly or meanderingly. This is not to say that the particulars of a good ending are necessarily predictable – rather, that the events, tone, and thematic resolution feels cohesive with, and an answer to, the rest of the narrative. In this way, ‘good’ endings “feel right”.

I will draw on games and media that do endings effectively, and others that feel unsatisfying, traitorous, or otherwise incongruous – and importantly, examine where/why/how such narratives start to fizzle. I will also delineate the specific problems and challenges of branching to multiple endings; the unique ways they can warp and fracture gameplay narratives.

Charlotte Galvin / Friday 4:15pm

I’ll talk about the process of making my recent game My Dream PC, reflecting on the design of the game and development in an academic context. My Dream PC is a small dollhouse decoration game that allows a player to customise a cute virtual PC, inspired by both research and the online ‘Pink PC’ community. The design of the mechanics and aesthetics can be found in the intersections of research, dollhouse play, PC builds, as well as my own passion for simulation games and feminine play. Reflecting on the development process, I will touch on practical steps I took to scope and deliver the game to a high standard in a tight timeline (2 months). Finally, I will talk about success and how working within a research centre allowed me to make this project without the need to make a commercially viable product. My understanding of personal ‘success’ has also changed from a more traditional aspiration (working on a commercial title/in the games industry) to creating works on the periphery.

Benjamin Ee / Saturday 1:30pm

I want to guide folks as I walk them through the demon concepting for Malys and how personal of a journey it can be. I intend to talk about breaking down fears into concepts and tying them into visuals, how confronting the demons in our own head can create horrible and disgusting things, and how I think that can be good for us. I’ll talk about using art for therapy and as a form of expression, and the importance of that in our bleak times.

Rusaila Bazlamit / Saturday 4:30pm

In my talk, I will reflect on my creative practice alongside other creative case studies that respond to the question of how can we exist at the edge of elsewhere? What happens in the liminal space between showing our vulnerability, being design activists and accepting our failure to stop horrific events from happening? As a Palestinian living and working on stolen lands, I grapple with the universal constants of love, death and fortune while also navigating displacement, survival and solidarity.
In this talk, I will look at how those of us working from diasporic or marginalized positions, hold spaces for contradiction: for care and resistance, love and mourning, hope and rupture. Through the creative examples, I will share, I will look at how activist spatial storytelling is a practice of staying with the trouble, of existing on the edge of elsewhere. And how we can meet at a place of grieving, making and still dreaming of a better future despite it all.

Nellie Seale, Josiah Lulham / Friday4:30pm

What does it mean to build games for love? Josiah and Nellie will reflect on the strange, joyful burden of building and sustaining our respective LARP and megagame communities (Dance of Ribbons and Melbourne Megagames) alongside completing our PhDs on immersive play and games in museums.

We’ll talk about the passion that drives the often unpaid community work we do, why we can’t or won’t chase more commercial models for the games we make for these communities, and how this sits (sometimes uncomfortably) alongside our professional lives. Particularly as the two of us are about to launch a new games company together, we want to reflect on how our practices straddle multiple worlds: academic, artistic, and communal, but often feel out of place in the traditional games industry.

We’ll also unpack how our particular communities have become sites of care, chaos, entitlement, and exhaustion, places where our love for the work must be carefully managed. This is a talk about the deep love we both have for making games with and for people, even when the work is Sisyphean.

Leura Smith / Thursday 3pm

My practice as a designer has always been heavily set in the act of looking. The way a people sit on the tram. How water puddles on the balcony. How long it takes a stranger at a cafe to finish their iced latte. Sitting and looking is probably one of my favourite things about being alive.
But as my career has changed from game developer, to architectural designer, back to game dev, I’ve noticed my relationship with looking has changed dramatically, too.
In this talk, I’ll be discussing the way my practice of looking has changed dependant on my career, and how I’m still developing techniques to look as a game dev, an architect, and something in between. I’ll also be discussing how looking has influenced my work, across disciplines.

Althea Francisco / Friday 2pm

Why are the games being released today an endless regurgitation of remakes, remasters and psx graphics? When was the last time a game felt like it was ahead of its time?

It’s not news to anyone that nostalgia is safe and profitable in an industry where developers die off without tangible sales. But when art is a marker of time, the curation core to nostalgic products should not be overlooked.

Through the lens of hauntology, I investigate:

-Remakes stripped of the innovation that made them beloved in the first place.
-The weight of defining games of the past and the “-like” subgenres that actively compete with them.
-Truly novel games of this era
-Gen Z developers, whose generation has been shaped by nostalgic consumption through VicScreen funded game, REAPRIEVE.

What is the future of games when it’s haunted by nostalgia?

(Spoiler: REAPRIEVE has PS2-inspired graphics)

George Mak / Friday 3:30pm

This will make you groan, but it will be about my whole life story. From when I was growing up, too embarrassed to tell anyone I wanted to make games as a living, dropping out of comp sci, to years later, finally having the courage to study games. When the course finished, only a handful had the fortune of getting jobs, while many gave up and moved on. It was heartbreaking to see so many of my talented classmates give up on making games. I would talk about my own struggles, especially living with Bipolar II, from bombing interviews and getting fired. It has been nearly 8 years since I finished studying. I still haven’t gotten a full-time position making games. Is it time to let the dream die?

Vidya Rajan , Ruby Quail, Sam McGilp, Quinn Franks / Saturday 3:15pm

In Edge Case Love , the team behind new multi-art work Crisis Actor share how their joy for finding the bumpy boundaries of their diverse art-forms allows them to make work together. And how following this instinct helped them explore the thorny, urgent feelings and politics of the current moment in ways that standard art-practices don’t always easily unlock.

We took as our starting point questions like: what should you not do in theatre? what are the seams of motion capture? what assumptions do we bring to UX and game design that can be undone in a live show? And found that this curiosity about the margins of our practice allowed us to make a work about difficult things – like marginal bodies and the way power wants us to behave in these overwhelming times – with delight and surprise.

We’d love the share these insights and thoughts with everyone also grappling with the corners of their art-forms, or the limits of expression at this time.

About the work: Crisis Actor is an interactive performance work blending physical theatre and simulated reality where suffering is a vibe and resilience is celebrity. Premiering at Now or Never 2025 (late August), audiences will arrive each night to find they have survived a future speculative crisis with two actors ready to audition to become the symbol of our collective memory of the event.
In an escalating competition for our empathy, they pit body and feeling against each other. Via our phones, we offer them options and pathways to win and start to share in making the show ourselves.
Exploring the attention economy, marginalised bodies and victimhood as spectacle, Crisis Actor brings together conventions of contemporary performance, motion-capture technology, reality television and game design.