‘indie’ and independent games and culture in the Australian video game industry
Chris Moore, Deakin University, Melbourne  

The global financial crisis has brought the Australian video games industry to the end of an era. The survivors emerging from the independent sectors are now competing directly with the older studio system whose ongoing survival is reliant on an industrial work-for-hire production and distribution model. New independent studios, partnerships, and collectives have responded to the opportunities of online and mobile games, and their successes have reaffirmed the relationship between the cultural production of games in Australia and their globalized mainstream audiences. This seminar examines these changes and considers their effect on the synonymous relationship between the terms, 'indie' and independent. It argues that if 'indie' culture is to maintain its ideological relevance and critical creativity it must be active in the overlapping spheres of operation between itself, the independents and 'big gaming' culture in order to better address issues of identity, gender, sexuality and intellectual property in the content and context of making games. BIO Christopher Moore is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University, in Melbourne. He has previously lectured in Digital Communications and Games Studies at the University of Wollongong and researched the appropriative and creative practices of gamer subcultures. His current research project involves an ethnography of Australian games developers, and he has recently published on the affective dimensions of the first person shooter game, Team Fortress 2 (http://gamestudies.org/1101/articles/moore) and the potential pedagogical affordances of machinima in higher education (http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet27/barwell.pdf). He is also a co-editor of the forthcoming collected edition, Zombies in the Academy (http://zombieacademy.wordpress.com/).