Material Play: Exploring Gaming Through Tactility, Physicality, and Community

While Melbourne International Games Week is best known for digital gaming and its cultures, the programme platforms a range of exhibits, events, and conversations around play ranging from technologically-dependent to purely analogue. This year, I’ve spoken to experts interested in the tactile, physical nature of their play practices; from table-tops, to live-action roleplaying, to museum, and game installations.

Museum Curation 

The playable exhibition, ACMI Game Worlds, has recently opened thanks to the tremendous collaborative effort of many people, including Director of Programming Emily Sexton. Having worked in the experimental arts space of Melbourne for much of her career, Emily is used to seeing unique overlaps between play and the curatorial design practices which bring installations to life.

While she thinks there is currently a large focus on digital interactivity in exhibition spaces, the objects in Game Worlds, such as D&D sheets, old computers, and hand-drawn sketches of Hornet of Hollow Knight: Silksong fame, are the real stars for her: “People love looking at them… There's a connection there that is very significant to them, to be able to see these tangible materials.”

What excites Emily about these spaces is the physical presence of people and the social effect that playing games together can create. While museums are also about education, she makes comparisons to something like documentary, which although may achieve similar effect is different depending on whether you watch at home or watch it with other people in a cinema, saying “the shared experience is what makes it meaningful.”

In particular, the interactive D&D simulator at the start of the exhibition is her favourite opportunity for these moments, an installation she wasn’t so sure would work as an intimidating introduction, “actually we were wrong, we didn’t need to worry.” When I visited it was also one of my favourite moments, where I joined a handful of strangers and began deciding on which path to take, taking turns rolling the dice:

 “This is something that we understood in a very deep way during covid, just being proximate to someone else's experience and hearing what they're saying is powerful. I think you can really underestimate the value of that until you're in-person.”

One of her jobs was to balance people’s curiosity with the practicalities of the space and to respect visitor’s time, especially, she says, if they’re paying for the experience:

 “When you're asking someone to leave the house you have to be ever more disciplined about what that invitation is and making it really quality. You have to prove, more than ever, that it's worth people's time.”

Visitors to Game Worlds are guaranteed to have, not just a different, but more valuable experience, than if they were to simply play the games in their homes. One of the focusses was to provide opportunities to play games in ways you can’t in any other contexts by actively emulating and displaying prototypes and games from both past and future.

Even though the inclusion of Silksong was a massive feat and helps to get people through the door, Emily says these well-known titles aren’t necessarily the ones people will remember: sometimes it's the lesser-known games sharing the same space. She says, “the sense of discovery in the exhibition is strong… And I think that's one of the really admirable parts of people who are into games–they’re genuinely curious.”

People still approach Emily to say previous ACMI game exhibitions inspired them to begin a career in games, but she was hesitant to use the exact word validating to describe this:

“It makes me cringe because there are so many examples that validation isn't needed, but you have to accept that you're not everyone else, for some it's still news when video games are in a museum, it's still something people find surprising. So unfortunately, that is your indicator that there's a ways to go.”

She hopes that something like Game Worlds can open up conversations around games that have existed for older art forms, like film, for decades:

 “We are clearly making curatorial choices about the kinds of games that we are profiling… In the same way that it's absolutely fine to watch a trashy movie that you enjoy, we can all appreciate that there are different kinds of cinema that do different things. I'd love the richness of that conversation around games to be one of the things that comes out of people's visiting the exhibition.”

Weighing up how to create opportunities for these kinds of conversations while also making sure that the practicalities of having bodies in a space is also something Emily finds fascinating, as she says, "people need a whole range of very practical considerations," like being able to sit, know where things are and how long it is, have lines of sight to watch their kids.

Game Installations

Louie Roots is someone who has also had to weigh up practical considerations with larger cultural impacts in exhibition spaces. This Games Week, Louie is building arcade machines for Electric Arcadia, the Swinburne showcase at PAX AUS, and, as usual, is on director duties for Freeplay: Parallels.

Louie has always been more interested in the physical and social nature of gameplay over its digital aspects. When he worked previously on mobile games he became excited over things like games with tilt controls, and explained to me the Bus Test:

“… Which was asking, would you use these controls on the bus? If it's crowded and you're shoulder to shoulder, can you? If people are watching you, would you? The idea of someone actually physically playing this somewhere in the world… I'd much rather see one person play it outside than however many people play in their homes… What you do in your own home doesn't bother me.”

This passion for creative practices between material, play, and community is pretty obvious for anyone who has seen Louie’s work before. He’s a big believer in letting people do whatever they want with games and harnessing curiosity, but this also means building things that are durable. From his experience making TVs for petrol pumps he learnt to build fully-enclosed, weather and damage proof machines, which he brings to play spaces:

"I love making things museum proof, public proof. It’s a really nice feeling when you plug it in and just say ‘go for it.’ We had a demo one time for school holidays and kids were just wailing on it, and nothing happened."

At the same time, he believes good design is about providing what is absolutely needed. He told me about one instance he was pretty proud of; For one of his previous game installations with a desert theme, he partly displayed a keyboard in a sand box, but he said he hadn't been in Melbourne long, “I was like, where do I get sand? And I literally looked up beaches, sand, and I saw Sandringham, and I was like, ‘sand…ringham’”

Once he had retrieved the sand he also had to figure out how to steer the player towards a secret ability in the game, which required pressing the enter key without it being too obvious. So, he set up a different keyboard in a different part of the box to make it seem like the enter key was simply decoration: “I felt super smart about that.” But he also admits that not all of his ideas are winners, saying that he once tried to incorporate a "bunch of sausages" into a game display before someone mentioned how wasteful it was: “I was like, damn, I immediately don’t like this idea anymore.”

Louie estimates that he will be platforming (literally, physically, and figuratively) at least 26 games, people, or studios over Games Week. For him, creating the right conditions for developers is the whole point, and he has done so previously with Australian games that are now wildly successful. He told me about a time when he was still running Bar SK and showcased games made by Grace Buxner, who would later go on to make the Frog Detective series:

 “She came in one day really pissed off with one of her tutors who said it wasn't a game. But I said ‘well, look at this, people love it here. People love playing with it, it's a game.’ I don't think that she would have stuck with it if it wasn't for her showing it in physical spaces and seeing people who weren't her tutor enjoying it... And then she made a bunch of money and a cool cultural thing.”

Similarly to Emily, Louie also wants accessibility and respect to be at the forefront of his events and installations, saying that while Freeplay will have the typical developers and publishers, he would also want someone’s mum to feel like they can come too. This is partly why he works so tirelessly, saying "I need to do what I do best, which is to do it properly. You bring in what you're good at, and you bring in the things that kill you, because you’re passionate about it.”

Like the other experts in this piece, Louie thinks that the community aspect of all of these physical play spaces are the most important. While he thinks we can alternate between online spaces and face-to-face events, he believes that talking to people directly is crucial:

“It’s community strengthening, just knowing who's around and being physically present. A lot of times being in public, being personally next to someone, stops you being an asshole to them… You have that feeling of respect, you’re reminded there’s someone else at the other end of that computer.”

Tabletop

Aramiha Harwood is a researcher at RMIT future play lab and will be part of the panel talk Playgrounds for the brain: the playful arts in the public library at PAX AUS this year. Aramiha publishes and researches tabletop games, which he says he prefers to the digital play of video games because of its tactile elements:

 “I think I work in reverse; I paint the figurines first and want to play with them after. It’s a relaxing, mindful, nice state of mind because you’re focussing on the process.”

While he can get a bit worried when his kid plays too much Roblox online, he also sees him enjoying the face-to-face of events, such as at his weekly tabletop play testing group Across the Board. He says that while he worries about the distance online play can create, “I don’t think the two have to be mutually exclusive.”

Aramiha loves miniatures and tabletop war games, but is doing the work to shift the war game narratives away from its typical historical stories which are “usually based on the German Spiel system where you conquer everything and kill everyone.” Even outside of the gameplay itself he is also disheartened by the gatekeeping culture around war gaming: “people sneer at you because you’re not playing a historical war game.”

As a Māori Ngāpuhi person he is more interested in decolonising tabletop games and genres, and wants to imbue elements of his Indigenous culture into his games. He explains the concept of mana as an alternative:

 “It's kind of like social cache, honour, but it's also spiritual. There are things you do to build your mana, but it could also be taken away. So on the battlefield it's not so much how many people you kill and whether you win the battle, it's actually how much mana you build from your actions. On the battlefield, doing heroic things will build your mana.”

For Aramiha the concept of mana is also connected to the social elements of physical play like tabletops, where there are opportunities for more and more varied stories to come from a group rather than a single person. He says, "rather than being a passive consumer you’re a creator as well. I'm a big believer in collaboration, imagining worlds together, being able to work together as a group —I think that's an Indigenous approach, right?”

Live-Action Roleplaying (LARP)

Aramiha is also working closely with Troy Innocent on the upcoming Reworlding City North LARP. Troy began his career in VR during the '90s, but found that working with mixed and extended realities was challenging because the technology can so often become the barrier: 

“I became really fascinated with material play when I started to see a lot of the language of those systems seeping out into cities. Material play has this really immersive, deep ability to create core memories. I'm not saying that doesn’t happen in digital worlds, but there's a larger sense of connection.”

He says whether it’s larping, urban play, installation contexts, or tabletops, he really enjoys the liveliness of it all, reflecting that “there are ways that you can do that with digital code, but if you're in a live session you can respond to what players are doing and even bend rules.” He told me about a previous LARP where he was being killed with a ceremonial blade on a church alter atop a hill because he had become possessed by the God of the apocalypse:

“… But the health ribbon wasn't unwinding, which meant I was immortal. I thought, I'm not dying, so I kept ranting, seeing very horrified looks twenty people’s faces. It was amazing but eventually they said, ‘look, you gotta die.’”

Reworlding City North is an urban LARP about how we can build a city together. The premise is to imagine the year 2025 on Cardigan Street in Melbourne city, and to find collective ways of living together despite having different and often conflicting backgrounds, roles, and agendas. Troy says, in a time when urban design doesn’t often support community connection, the atomisation and individualisation, time poverty, and anxieties in the face of poly-crises, they are attempting to ask, "well, what can we do? How can we act? And not that playing a LARP for two days is going to solve the problem, but it will at least plant the possibilities.”

Troy says that the pandemic especially has shifted thinking, as people realised they didn’t necessarily want to go back to the old ways of living. For himself he became drawn to apocalyptic themes but "not in a doom-and-gloom end-of-the-world way, but more with an interest in what chaos can bring… What do you do after? How do you rebuild?”Aramiha adds:

“When we’re talking about apocalypses, Indigenous peoples have lived through that apocalypse, right? When you lose culture, language, and a high percentage of your population, that's an apocalypse.” 

This is why they are interested in the idea of reworlding in the context of holding multiple worlds at once:

“In the Western framework there’s one world and there’s an apocalypse, and that’s the end of that world. But maybe there’s other worlds, and this one is slowly collapsing. Reworlding is pushing back against that idea of a singular apocalypse because there's also a slow rise of other worlds. Which ones of those are in the social imaginaries, being supported and participated in, and which ones aren’t?”

For them it was essential to collaborate with Professor N'arwee't Carolyn Briggs AM to provide traditional Boon Wurrung language, connecting the event activities with the place they will be occurring in. Place-based knowledge is something they want to teach as part of the LARP, to develop responsibilities of care towards place using collective, grounded ways to do knowledge that already exist. As Troy says, “to learn with place rather than learn about place, to not have a separation.”

Place and people, I think, are at the centre of interest for all the practitioners in this conversation. While there’s a lot of worry around the ways we use technology, it’s invasiveness, and our desires to step away from screens, we can also imagine worlds where both physical and digital art forms help us connect and play to make sense (and fun!) of it all.

This article was commissioned by SUPERJUMP with support from Creative Victoria. Melbourne International Games Week runs from October 4–12, for more info visit https://gamesweek.melbourne/