Commercialisation,community,and culture: A production perspective on public arts funding for video games in Australia

Abstract

Australia has a small but robust ecosystem of video game development, which has been supported by a patchwork arrangement of public arts funding since the early 2000s. Following Keogh's call for more research on the experiences of games workers situated in their local contexts, this paper investigates the impacts of public funding on Australian games workers and the games they create. The research analyses funding policy, applications and processes, supported by a discourse analysis of annual reports and strategic documents (n:52) from Australian arts funding bodies with a focus on changes in official discourse over time. These findings informed semi-structured interviews with industry workers (n:11) who access public funding for their work, which examined the material effects of public funding policy on games workers. The paper demonstrates that public funding for games in Australia is structured through a language of industry growth and economic imperatives, a framework which generates many tensions for recipients of these funds. I argue that this structure is mismatched to the experiences and ambitions of Australian games workers, who see themselves as artistic practitioners and the games they create as a cultural form. This research highlights this deeply-held value through its attention to the under-examined experiences and perspectives of Australian games workers accessing public arts funding, and thus makes an important contribution to researchers’ and policymakers’ understandings of games production in Australia.

Introduction

In 2004, an anonymous team of Australian video game developers released a prototype titled Escape from Woomera. In Escape from Woomera, the player takes on the role of Mustafa, an Iranian refugee fleeing violent repression who is being held in a virtual re-creation of the real Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre. Mustafa is facing deportation back to Iran, which will mean almost certain death. He and the player are tasked with escape. Escape from Woomera hit the headlines of Australian news media long before its release, igniting a flashpoint of consternation at a time of heightened tension around refugee rights in Australia. The controversy was fuelled by the fact that the project had received $25,000 in grant funding from the then-national arts body, the Australia Council for the Arts.

Part of the uproar was driven by a dissonance between the insistence of Escape from Woomera's creators that the game was a legitimate, ‘serious’ piece of art activism, and popular and political conceptions of video games as either frivolous children's toys or gratuitously violent mass media. Another part arose from underlying tensions between different rationales for public funding of the arts. The game was used in many news pieces (see e.g., Frenkel & Booth 2003) as a hook to ask questions about what kind of art the government should fund, and why: To nurture new artistic talent? To preserve Australian-made content? To build profitable industries? Just for the sake of it?

Escape from Woomera was one of the first Australian video games to receive public funds, and it encapsulates many fundamental tensions underlying the government provision of arts funding. In this article, I examine how these tensions interact with the production context of video games in Australia. I find that public funding for games in Australia is structured through a language of industry growth and economic imperatives, and argue that this framework is mismatched to the experiences and ambitions of Australian games workers, who see themselves as artistic practitioners and the games they create as a cultural form.

To make this argument, I outline the existing literature on public funding for games and the conditions of game production in Australia, and describe the conceptual framework underpinning the study. I discuss my research methodology, which involved a discourse and policy analysis of grey literature from public funding bodies and semi-structured interviews with games workers who access public funding for their work. I then present my findings over three themes which each illustrate the effects of the emphasis on economic success in public funding structures. I highlight competing, unreconciled discourses of public funding within screen agencies; games workers’ experiences of these competing discourses and the tensions they generate; and the unease produced by diversity, equity, and inclusion policy framed via economic imperatives. I discuss the strategies Australian games workers employ to navigate points of friction in public funding structures to make space for their priorities and ambitions as artistic practitioners.

Literature review

There is a significant body of research which documents the conditions of labour in creative industries such as film, music, and game development. This work shows that creative work is often performed under precarious freelance conditions, with little stability or predictability and rife with opportunity for exploitation (see e.g., Banks 2007; Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter 2006). These conditions strip creative workers of collective structures, producing a deeply individualising effect whereby workers must take personal responsibility for all aspects of their working lives (McRobbie 2018). The literature on games work in Australia mirrors these findings (e.g., Banks & Cunningham 2016; Keogh 2023).

Banks and Cunningham (2016) contend that Australian games workers are subject to widespread poor labour conditions and deeply skewed power relations with major game publishers. They argue that poor working conditions lead to high turnover, which means that the historical knowledge of industry veterans has not transferred to younger generations, confusing the already highly complex reality of organising iterative work between “engineers, artists, designers, marketers, and managers” (Banks & Cunningham 2016 p.196). Multiple studies by Keogh document the range of strategies Australian games workers use to strive for financial sustainability – balancing their own original work with external contracts, relying on income from a second job, a partner, their savings, or welfare payments, and employing creative accounting to pay themselves below minimum wage (Banks & Keogh 2021; Keogh 2021; Keogh 2023). Verkaaik (2025) argues that while some games workers rely on community ties to navigate these conditions, the labour of maintaining communities itself creates further burdens.

The literature on Australian games work also demonstrates that the marginalisation of people of colour, women, and gender diverse and queer workers, notorious in the wider creative industries (Ang & Noble 2018; Brook et al. 2020; Nwonka 2015), persists in the Australian context (Keogh 2021, 2023). The unstable, unpredictable, underpaid conditions of creative work, and the extreme amounts of overtime that are endemic in game development in particular, prevent women who often bear a ‘second shift’ of domestic labour on top of their paid work from participating in creative labour (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter 2006; Edmond 2023). These barriers, alongside heterogenous working cultures often hostile to outside perspectives, are compounded by intersecting marginalisations of race, class, and gender and sexual diversity (Edmond 2023).

These conditions present great difficulties for Australian games workers in building sustainable, long-term companies which can provide reliable work to the abundance of talented workers in the industry (see e.g., Banks & Cunningham 2019; Banks & Keogh 2021; Verkaaik 2025). This struggle can be mitigated by access to government funding, which has been available for video game development since the early 2000s, but historically such support has been unevenly distributed and inconsistent (Apperley & Golding 2016; McCrea 2013). Research on public funding for games in other countries shows the wide variety of potential approaches governments may take in supporting game industries, from policies focused entirely on economic development to those with an emphasis on cultural preservation (see e.g., Dyer-Witherford & Sharman 2005; Holroyd 2019; Sotamaa et al. 2020).

Keogh (2023), in his foundational work on the great diversity of game-making activity beyond the commercial and narrowly-defined ‘games industry’, argues for the importance of understanding games production as a cultural field and games workers as cultural workers, and of situating such analyses in their local contexts. The literature reviewed here reveals Australian games development as precarious, exploitative, and exclusionary; indeed, a typical picture of work in the broader creative industries. However, many of the studies cited do not directly address the impacts of public funding on Australian games workers. The research literature on public funding for games itself in Australia is very limited, and what does exist predates important developments in the last half-decade of Australian politics. The study I present in this article addresses this gap in the literature. I map out the discourses which frame public funding policies for video games in Australia and examine how these policies shape Australian games workers’ conditions and the production context of Australian games.

Conceptual framework

I frame this study through two competing discourses in contemporary Australian arts policy: the investment discourse and the discourse of market failure. Caust (2023), in her study of the history of Australian arts policy, identifies the 1986 McLeay Report as a turning point where arts policy came under increasing pressure to justify itself through other government priorities. Belfiore (2004) tracks a similar shift in her study of changes in British cultural policy discourse since the 1980s. She notes a rapid decrease in the use of the term ‘subsidy’ in policy discourse throughout the 1980s, replaced by an increasing emphasis on ‘accountability’. Caust (2023), likewise, finds that following the McLeay report (1986) the language of ‘industry’ came into more frequent use in Australian arts policy, with national arts body the Australia Council making ‘investments’ rather than handing out grants.

Belfiore (2004) argues that during this period, policy discourse began to revolve around the importance of holding government departments accountable for their spending of taxpayer funds. This led to an ‘attachment’ strategy where the arts were constructed as an instrument through which other policy ends might be achieved. Government spending on the arts was increasingly justified through appeals to the arts’ ability to generate social inclusion and community cohesion, tourism, job creation, wealth development, or urban regeneration (Belfiore 2004). For popular entertainment media such as video games, the attachment strategy frames public funding as a matter of investment into a lucrative market (Belfiore 2004; Carter & Kelly 2018; Caust 2023). This policy discourse – that public funding for the arts is in fact investment into large and profitable industries – has become dominant in contemporary discussions of arts funding, particularly for video games and other popular media such as television, film, and music. This discourse also reinforces and accelerates the individualisation produced by contemporary structures of creative work described above.

While dominant, however, the investment discourse exists alongside the discourse of market failure. The concept of market failure refers to a range of conditions that may prevent an economic market from self-regulating in an optimal way, therefore necessitating government intervention (Dollery & Wallis 2007). In the arts, a cultural market forced to generate profit in order to sustain itself will increasingly produce easily marketable variations of the same product, stifling artistry, experimentation, and local content – in other words, the market will fail (Rowe et al. 2018). These qualities which can be understood to lend creative works cultural value also make them more challenging and unfamiliar to audiences, less marketable, and therefore less profitable. Many policymakers and artists believe that arts funding should be used to prevent market failure and support locally produced or experimental projects which may struggle to achieve commercial success (Carter & Kelly 2018; Gilfillan & Morrow 2018; Rowe et al. 2018). This discourse of market failure provides an alternative justification for contemporary public arts funding – namely, that the purpose and priority of such funding should be to facilitate the development of local, experimental, and otherwise culturally valuable creative work.

The investment discourse also frames how games workers and policymakers discuss and respond to issues of marginalisation and exclusion. Appeals to greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in the games industry are often made through the language of profit. Fron et al. (2007) and Consalvo (2008), for example, both claim in their studies of misogyny in the games industry that more diversity among games workers should be prioritised because more diverse workers will produce more diverse games which can be marketed to more diverse audiences, therefore enabling economic growth of the industry. The emphasis on individuality produced by the investment discourse also tends to locate issues of under-representation within the individual. The proposed solution then becomes one of more education, confidence, or professionalism for members of marginalised groups (Edmond 2023; Harvey 2019; O’Brien & Arnold 2024).

The investment discourse ultimately functions to limit the ways that diversity, equity, and inclusion can be understood and resolved. It frames under-representation as an individual issue which can be resolved through intervention at the individual level, and as a result, obscures an understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion as structural issues. Nwonka (2015) argues that this lack of structural analysis effectively obfuscates the class discrimination entrenched in the creative and cultural industries. Edmond (2023) describes how the individualisation of creative workers encourages them to take personal responsibility for their conditions of labour, placing the burden of representation squarely on the shoulders of the underrepresented.

The term ‘diversity’ also contains subtly different implications from its predecessors, such as ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’. Ahmed (2006, 2007) argues that diversity can come to refer to a certain quality located within the bodies of ‘diverse’ people – women, people of colour, queer people – which an institution can obtain through the inclusion of such bodies. An inequitable situation implies a need for some material change; a lack of diversity simply calls for the inclusion of more diverse bodies, like an ingredient in a recipe. In this way, diversity becomes an asset owned by an institution, a marketable quality which can enhance its image and generate profit – an investment.

In this article, I use this conceptual framework of the competing investment and market failure discourses to examine the tensions that arise for Australian games workers when navigating structures of public funding. I show how both discourses manifest in screen agencies’ documentation and shape their policies, as well as games workers’ perceptions. I find that public funding for games in Australia is primarily structured by the investment discourse, and argue that this framework is mismatched to the experiences and ambitions of Australian games workers, who see themselves as artistic practitioners and the games they create as a cultural form. Australian games workers strategically navigate these competing discourses of public funding to make space for their priorities and ambitions as artists.

Methodology

Grey literature analysis

I conducted both semi-structured interviews with games workers who access public funding, and an analysis of grey literature from public funding bodies across two Australian jurisdictions. Almost all government support for video games is provisioned through organisations originally created to deliver film and television policy, which are now known as screen agencies. This research focuses on the federal agency Screen Australia, and VicScreen, which provisions the state of Victoria. For each agency, I examined annual reports, annual disclosure statements, grant documentation, funding agreements, diversity statements, and media releases from the last four years, and conducted an in-depth review of two decades of annual and funding reports from the 2002/03 to 2022/23 financial years. In total, I reviewed and analysed 52 grey literature documents (26 from Screen Australia and 26 from VicScreen).

I chose 2002 as the beginning of my analysis period because Escape from Woomera was funded that year, marking a political milestone in the development of video game policy. My in-depth analysis focused on Screen Australia and VicScreen because of the limited scope of this research and the consistently high standard of historical record-keeping by both agencies. Additionally, the federal and Victorian jurisdictions are both particularly significant within the realm of Australian cultural policy: federal policy influences policymaking decisions across all jurisdictions, while Victoria has the most historically consistent game funding policy in the country.

I examined this literature to identify manifestations of both the investment discourse and the market failure discourse within Screen Australia and VicScreen documentation. My examination of these issues is informed by Bacchi's problem representation method of policy analysis (2009). I use this method to argue that the ‘problems’ of diversity and of games funding in screen agency documents are constructed through the discourse of investment.

There are a wide range of policies aimed at supporting and developing the Australian games industry, including grant funding, tax rebates and incentives, event and travel funding, internship and professional development placements, and so on. I briefly discuss the breadth of these measures but retain a focus on development and production grants designed specifically for video game projects. Here I wish to acknowledge that while there is often ambiguity and overlap between the different categories of ‘video games’, ‘digital art’, and ‘interactive art’ that are defined in policy, for many games workers these ambiguities are comfortable and sometimes productive for their work. Where I make exclusions or define boundaries in my research, I do so for reasons of scope and clarity, and I retain an awareness and appreciation for the blurry distinctions of games workers’ creative practice.

Interviews

As noted above, the second pillar of my methodology involved semi-structured interviews with games workers, as well as workers from screen agencies and community groups, who I reached through snowball recruitment. Participants were provided a participant information sheet and required to sign a statement of informed consent before interviews were conducted. I conducted a total of 11 one-hour interviews over Zoom. All participants were current or former game developers, and in addition one was an employee from an Australian screen agency, and two were members of two different community organisations which support the game development community in Melbourne. Several of the game developers I interviewed also had experience as industry reviewers for screen funding agencies and shared their views from this perspective.

Through these interviews, I aimed to learn how the policies I examined in my grey literature analysis took effect in practice. I was interested in how games workers experienced the process of applying for and receiving public funding, and their opinions on the effectiveness and suitability of these policies. I hoped to learn what games workers believe about the internal operations and motivations of screen agencies.

Findings

Competing discourses of public funding

As noted above, my analysis of VicScreen and Screen Australia documentation began with each agency's 2002/03 annual reports and ended with the 2022/23 financial year. I found consistent instances of both the investment and market failure discourses across this literature, forming a pattern of competing discourses of public funding. Earlier reports from both agencies emphasized the potential of games as vehicles for education and technical innovation. In the 2003/04 annual report from VicScreen, the agency's games funding is described as designed to support the development of “technical, innovative and creative prototypes for market driven game titles”. The late 2000s saw this rhetoric inflected with the investment discourse: Screen Australia's 2008/09 annual report promotes serious games as a “huge growth area on the cutting edge of digital media” which “entertain and educate a player at the same time”, while VicScreen reported in 2009/10 that “In 2009 the number of Australians playing games overtook those attending the cinema… a market growing at more than 500% each year”.

In the early 2010s, there was a shift in language towards the importance of supporting Australian game companies to develop original intellectual property. While this change no doubt occurred due to significant shifts in the landscape of Australian games production at the time (see e.g., Keogh 2023), its framing by screen agencies is firmly in economic terms. The introduction of Screen Australia's games production fund in 2012 had stated aims of “encouraging the creation and retention of original IP [intellectual property]” and “supporting business growth” in its 2012/13 annual report. This language carries through to more recent reports, with Screen Australia aiming to “support Australian independent game studios to increase the quality of their digital games and help them transition into businesses of scale” and VicScreen proudly reporting “the Victorian sector's continuing growth” which “generated $9.7 million of Victorian expenditure, a significant 177% increase” in 2021/22. While the market failure discourse is present here in claims to the importance of original intellectual property, the investment discourse dominates.

VicScreen documentation since the late 2000s also emphasizes the excellence and exceptionalism of Victorian games policy and development, claiming Victoria's as “Australia's centre for digital games” (2021/22). Indeed, this orientation towards games as an integral part of Victoria's screen industry landscape reportedly inspired the agency to change its name from Film Victoria to VicScreen in 2022, with its 2021/22 annual report stating that the rebrand “recognises VicScreen's 25 years of support for the Victorian digital games sector”. VicScreen reports promote Victorian games as “story-driven”, “narrative-driven”, “diverse and complex”, “experimental”, and “risk-taking”. Its 2022/23 annual report states that “Victorian digital game developers and studios continue to showcase their world-leading capability, creativity and skills.” VicScreen reporting also spotlights specific video games far more often than Screen Australia, and emphasis is given to games which achieved significant economic success or which were created by Indigenous games workers.

This narrative of the exceptionalism of Victorian games demonstrates the presence of the market failure discourse within VicScreen documentation. The language I highlight here constructs Victorian games as culturally valuable, the emphasis on narrative, complexity and experimentation implying that Victorian games workers have more to offer than a path to industry growth and profit-making. However, this rhetoric is always accompanied by claims regarding the sector's economic contribution. My analysis shows that Screen Australia and especially VicScreen are clearly influenced by the market failure discourse, but are ultimately beholden to the investment discourse.

Games worker experiences of public funding

In my interviews, I discussed the structure of Australian games funding with participants to understand how their perceptions aligned or diverged from screen agency rhetoric. When I asked participants how they believe screen agencies make funding decisions, they consistently identified the competing discourses which shape screen agencies’ decision-making.

Interviewees believed that the commercial aspirations and viability of a project are important for its success in funding applications. They perceived that to be commercially viable, games need familiar or established genre and aesthetic markers and have a well-articulated target audience to which the game should be advertised. Participants also believed that the quality of a funding application and its supporting materials was an important factor for success. They spoke about professional budgets and marketing plans, articulate writing, and aesthetic polish as important aspects of a funding application that may improve its competitiveness. Both an experienced applicant team and a high-quality application were framed by interviewees as demonstrating capability and reducing the risk that a game project may fail to release. They felt that for screen agencies, the risk of funding a project which is never released is to be avoided as a priority.

Participants believed that screen agency workers attempt to balance these economic imperatives with an orientation towards culturally valuable projects which may lack commercial aspirations or viability. They pointed to a variety of qualities which might mark a game project as culturally valuable, including an emphasis on narrative, particular visual styles, creativity, uniqueness, and Australian content.

During these discussions, participants demonstrated a clear awareness of screen agencies’ broader mandate to support and foster economic development. This increased awareness did not necessarily translate into active resistance; some participants accepted screen agencies’ commercial priorities as a matter of course, while some were more critical. Most used their understanding of the investment discourse to strategically inform their own approach when applying for funding or providing advice to other applicants. What ultimately emerged from my interview data was a narrative of competing priorities within screen agencies. Participants believed that screen agencies attempt to balance their funding decisions between culturally valuable games, informed by the market failure discourse, and commercially viable projects which reflect the investment discourse and therefore ensure the continuity of screen agencies’ funding.

Interviewees also reported both positive and negative experiences with public funding. Participants generally held positive sentiment towards the funding available to them, describing it as a “lifeline”, “fantastic”, and “awesome”. Several spoke highly of the range of funding programs available for projects of various scope. This feeling was at its strongest in conversations around VicScreen. Interviewees spoke of VicScreen as “spearheading”, “the example of success”, “amazing”, “world-leading”, a “trailblazer”, “on the forefront”, “fantastic”, “a shining beacon in the storm”, and “some of the best in the world”. Several participants felt that Victorian game workers have an advantage in their access to VicScreen funding, and some had even moved to Melbourne themselves partly to gain eligibility for its programs.

However, despite the highly positive sentiment towards the design of VicScreen and other funding programs, interviewees also reported frustration with some aspects of the processes involved in accessing these programs. One thread of these criticisms focused on a lack of quality feedback from screen agencies. Participants who had both been rejected and accepted for funding from VicScreen and Screen Australia felt that they feedback they received, if any, was inadequate and that they were unclear on what factors influenced the success or failure of their applications. One participant noted that “it seems almost like a lottery”. As noted above, interviewees felt that the visual polish and quality of a funding application was often used by screen agency assessors as a proxy for the expertise of an applicant team. Some participants were critical of this, arguing that the skills required to produce an impressive funding application are distinct from the skills necessary to create a high-quality game, and that the requirement for formalised application materials is inaccessible for some groups of games workers:

“If you want to go for funding, you're talking about needing to start a company. You need to get a lawyer. People don't know that.”

Another frustration some participants had with screen agency application processes was their extended turnaround times, which can range from eight to ten weeks. This long waiting period exacerbates the precarity that many games workers already manage.

Participants also expressed frustration with the nature of screen agencies’ engagement with games workers’ community spaces, which they reported as centrally important to their game-making practice. Some interviewees expressed the belief that policymakers, particularly policymakers outside of screen agencies, lack an understanding of the cultural and artistic value of video games and the place-based and relational contexts in which games are made. They felt that governmental understandings of the value of community, framed through the discourse of investment, were limited to conceptions of skill development and networking. By contrast, what emerged during my interviews with games workers was a strong orientation towards mutual support, creativity, and passion among their communities. Interviewees felt that existing public support for games worker communities was reserved for larger, established bodies, such as the Freeplay Festival, but that the most valuable community interactions happened at a smaller grassroots level. As one games worker and member of a community organisation said:

“The big frustration there is that most of the good events stuff in games is the grassroots stuff. And there's this really annoying push-pull thing there where the grassroots stuff isn’t formalised enough for the government to want to fund it, but then formalising it is either out of reach without the funding or formalising it will kill it.”

These tensions, around community spaces, overly formalised application processes, and inadequate feedback, all illustrate a fundamental mismatch between the reality of games work and the structure of public funding schemes. There was a consistent and repeated belief from interview participants that screen agencies could better connect with games workers by deformalizing their practices. The formality of these schemes stems from the investment discourse, which assumes or expects that applicants for funding are businesses and operate via corporate practices. Games workers, however, conceptualise themselves as artists, and their work practices are informal and adaptive. To translate these practices into the formal structures of the investment discourse in order to access public funding places additional burdens on games workers, and this disconnect is a clear source of tension.

Diversity, equity and inclusion

These tensions were at their most acute in discussions about screen agencies’ diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Both Screen Australia and VicScreen funding applications ask applicants to submit information about diversity, equity, and inclusion in highly formalised, business-like formats – Screen Australia application forms, for example, present applicants with a series of drop-down menus from which to select their race, gender, and sexuality. During interviews, participants spoke frequently about the experience of filling out this documentation, often without prompting. The games workers I spoke to, most of whom were ‘diverse’ along one or more of the dimensions defined by screen agencies, felt “icky”, “gross”, “weird”, and “uncomfortable” while completing these forms, finding them “tokenising”, “dehumanising”, and “impersonal”.

Some participants extrapolated from this documentation that their personal information would be used as part of screen agencies’ assessment of their funding applications against others, and found this uncomfortable. Others were particularly uneasy with attempting to fit their identities into the highly formalised language and format of these documents:

“The language it asks you to use is so corporate, you know, and it's like, who is this talking to? Who is this for? And the answer is always a company. I’m not a company, I’m a person.”

It was clear from my interviews that participants’ identities – regarding gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, and others – were important and vulnerable parts of themselves, and the way that screen agency application forms operationalise and target their identities was deeply uncomfortable for them. Those interviewees who worked in teams were particularly uneasy with having to apply this process to their friends and colleagues. This feeling again reflects the misalignment between a process framed through the investment discourse and the realities of games work.

Both Screen Australia and VicScreen began to shift their attention and language towards issues of diversity and inclusion in the mid-2010s. I applied Bacchi's (2009) problem representation method of policy analysis to this literature to understand why these policies are so discomfiting for ‘diverse’ games workers who should ostensibly benefit from them. I begin with Screen Australia's Gender Matters program. This program comprised a raft of measures, including a research project to document “the representation of cultural diversity, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity in Australian television drama broadcast over the last five years” (2015/16). Crucially, it also introduced a ‘Gender Matters Key Performance Indicator (KPI)’. The original Gender Matters KPI was for 50% of all Screen Australia-funded film and television productions to employ women in at least half the key creative roles. In its 2022/23 annual report, Screen Australia commits to ensuring “all Australian communities are reflected in the content on our screens as well as those among who make it”. VicScreen, in its 2024 diversity, equity, and inclusion roadmap, makes a similar claim.

The problem here is represented as one of under-representation, that is, that the proportion of women working in key creative roles in the screen industries is not matched to the proportion of women in the Australian population. It follows that the natural solution to this problem is to achieve proportional representation. This problem representation demonstrates Ahmed's argument (2006, 2007) that much diversity and inclusion policy frames ‘diverse’ bodies as holding a quality of ‘diversity’ which institutions can obtain through the inclusion of such bodies. The implication is that proportional representation will have a trickle-down effect, erasing the issues of misogyny, sexual harassment, working conditions incompatible with family commitments, and more which limit women's participation in screen industries (Edmond 2023).

There is scarce mention of these barriers in VicScreen and Screen Australia reporting. Instead, VicScreen's Women in Games fellowship aims to help women “build their leadership skills and professional expertise”, and Gender Matters talks about “targeting the barriers to women's professional growth”, representing the underlying problem as women's insufficient professional abilities. This framing of marginalised communities’ personal limitations as cause for their exclusion from the creative and cultural industries is rife in diversity, equity, and inclusion policy (Edmond 2023; Harvey 2019; O’Brien & Arnold 2024). This framing, informed by the investment discourse, locates under-representation as an individual problem which can be solved with interventions targeted at the individual.

This individualistic approach also excludes consideration of class and economic disadvantage from diversity, equity, and inclusion policy (Nwonka 2015). While VicScreen and Screen Australia measure gender identity, ethnicity, Indigenous status, and sexuality, they do not screen applicants for socio-economic status. This exclusion illustrates the inherent limitations of this approach: if the problem is represented as the individual abilities and opportunities of ‘diverse’ workers, there is no room to consider the structural barriers to inclusion which the creative and cultural industries are well-known to have. I argue that the investment discourse contributes to this individualised approach to diversity policy. This is clear from documents such as VicScreen's 2024 diversity, equity, and inclusion roadmap, which cites a “global demand for diverse content… [which] will increase opportunities for growth”. This statement implies that diversity policy is worth doing—perhaps only worth doing—because it can produce economic growth. This heavily economic orientation to the problem also shapes the possible solutions, restricting policy interventions to individualistic matters of skill development, confidence-building, and performance incentives.

Operating through the investment discourse, screen agencies can only address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion through tracking and categorising the identities of individual applicants, and in the process making marginalised applicants feel singled out and uneasy. The most pointed discomfort my interviewees felt was when strictly categorising themselves and their teammates – in the case of Screen Australia applications, literally selecting their identities from a drop-down menu. A less formal process which allows applicants to express their identities in their own language would mitigate the worst effects of current policies. This tension around screen agencies’ diversity policies clearly illustrates the disconnect between the realities of games work and formal structures of public funding framed through the investment discourse.

Discussion

The games workers I spoke to in this study conceptualise themselves as artists, part of passionate and supportive communities which make culturally valuable work. Even those participants who create games for commercial markets were uncompromising in their view of themselves, their teams and their communities as artistic practitioners, and they expressed their belief in the importance of experimentation and uniqueness in Australian games. This belief may encourage games workers to internalise the market failure discourse because it allows for the expression of their values in ways suppressed by the investment discourse.

In particular, the market failure discourse manifested strongly when I asked interviewees to name a game which exemplifies public funding success. Several participants named games that they identified as successes because of their lack of commercial viability, such as Wayward Strand (Ghost Pattern, 2022) and Paperbark (Paper House, 2018), both explicitly Australian in their settings, narratives, and aesthetics, and Queer Man Peering into a Rock Pool.jpg (Fuzzy Ghost, 2022), which presents an unapologetically queer narrative. These qualities, which give these projects cultural value in the eyes of screen agencies and games workers, also make them unfamiliar and difficult to market to a wide audience and therefore unlikely to be commercially viable. The interviewees who named these examples felt strongly that the purpose of public funding should be to support projects which would be unable to secure funding from private sources and would therefore not exist without government support.

However, by far the two most common answers to my question were titles Untitled Goose Game (House House, 2019) and Cult of the Lamb (Massive Monster, 2022). Both games were international critical and commercial successes, selling over a million units in their first four months and first week of release respectively, and winning over a dozen awards between them. However, interviewees also spoke about each game's distinct visual style and unique game design. My impression is that the perceived success of Untitled Goose Game and Cult of the Lamb as products of public funding lies in the combination of cultural impact and commercial profit that each game achieved. I have already noted the belief among participants that screen agencies strategically balance their funding decisions between projects with high chances of commercial success and those with cultural value which have low chances of being produced without government support. Untitled Goose Game and Cult of the Lamb, then, achieved both goals simultaneously.

These discussions also revealed an interesting separation in participants’ perceptions of screen agency workers and “the government proper”. Many screen agency workers have previously worked in game development, and interviewees viewed them as having a better understanding of the games industry than other policymakers. Participants believed that the investment discourse constrains the terms in which policymakers from “the government proper” think about video games, limiting their understanding to games as economic products and their interest in games workers to matters of skill development. They understood this discourse to subject screen agencies to political and financial priorities out of their control, and believed that screen agency workers navigate this context by strategically balancing their funding decisions.

My interviews demonstrate that where screen agencies utilise the market failure discourse, games workers feel appreciated and understood, and see screen agency workers as members of the broader game development community who align with their values. However, in areas where the investment discourse is more dominant, the games workers I spoke to became much more critical of screen agencies’ practices. The investment discourse is clearly normative and embedded at the level of screen agency policy, but it must still share space with the market failure discourse. At an individual level, my interviews show that games workers are clear-eyed about the influence of the investment discourse on screen agencies’ policy and funding decisions. This awareness does not necessarily translate into active resistance; some participants accepted screen agencies’ commercial priorities as a matter of course, demonstrating some degree of internalisation, while others were more critical. Most used their understanding of the investment discourse to strategically inform their own approach when applying for funding or providing advice to other applicants.

I have argued throughout this article that the investment discourse which structures public funding for games in Australia is misaligned with the realities of games work, and the experiences and ambitions of Australian games workers. While this issue stems from broader forces shaping arts policy and governance in Australia, my data can inform some recommendations for at least mitigating these tensions. Participants in this study advocated for screen agencies to provide example funding applications and information sessions for applicants’ reference, as well as more feedback on both successful and unsuccessful applications. They suggested that funding applications should be more flexible in allowing required materials to be submitted in different formats, particularly in the case of diversity, equity, and inclusion documentation, whose highly formalised nature and business-oriented language cause significant discomfort for applicants. Participants also proposed that screen agencies could better support community spaces through the provision of venue space and smaller, more accessible funding options for community events.

This study makes several important contributions to the scholarly literature. The above recommendations contribute to the evidence base and may inform improvements to public funding structures for games in Australia. Most significantly, the study directly examines how public funding policy impacts the games workers it is designed to support from a production perspective. This approach enhances scholarly understandings of the production context of Australian video games. However, my conclusions may be limited by my small sample of interview participants, who were mostly Melbourne-based and recruited through snowball sampling. This research could be extended through a broader sample and by engagement with creative workers in other screen industries.

I opened this article with an anecdote about the game Escape from Woomera, and the tensions and debates that its receipt of public funding brought to light. What I did not include in this anecdote was its return to the public eye – not as a strange and divisive news item, but as a historically significant artefact of Australian arts activism. Escape from Woomera is now part of the video game collection at ACMI, a museum of Australian screen culture, and was the centrepiece of a performance piece during 2019's Melbourne Knowledge Week. Its embrace by these publicly funded arts institutions signals their recognition of its cultural value. If Escape from Woomera was once a symbol of controversy and tension at the intersection of video games and public arts funding, it is now just as much a symbol of the great capacity of video games as an artform to create cultural impact and inspire discussion.