Chris McCormick

FreePlay was absolutely stellar this year. This is my third FreePlay, and it's the third set of people organising the event/conference/festival here in Melbourne, Australia. Maybe it's a sampling bias, but to me it feels like there is something in the genetics of this thing that guarantees enjoyment. Just the right mix of "well organised" and "punk rock", it carries a delicious slice of the indie gaming zietgeist over here to Australia.

That's not to say that Paul and Eve don't have anything to do with how great it was. On the contrary, it remains so great because it has come to rest in such capable and nurturing hands. These guys are green-thumbed indie gardeners, ripening a plot of earth where many tiny seeds of ideas will end up growing into lovely games. And they are such incredibly nice people too.

A lot of the angst was gone this year. Many of us have left our jobs in industry and are doing that starving punk rock game developer thing. And it rules. The we-can-make-something-beautiful vibe was palpable. The inspiration and desire to create was so infections that I found myself reaching for the laptop to hammer out some code whenever I could, and so Infinite8BitPlatformer saw a few bugfixes and enhancements between sessions.

Just as it was a highlight meeting Jonathan Blow in 2007, for me a highlight of this year's festival was meeting Brandon Boyer and Adam Saltsman. Brandon and Adam each brought their own brand of energy and love for the art form. I only wish I had been around to hear Petri Purho speak last year too, all of whom highlight what a great job is being done of getting critical thinkers and practitioners over here each year.

Brandon's keynote was brilliantly emotive, and perfectly captured a sort of wistful energy for those games that don't yet exist, but could. He painted a brilliant, shimmering image of possibilities in front of our eyes, and lent us a powerful lust to coax our ideas into reality. When he pulled up a slide full of American indie record label logos from my youth, like Dischord, and Matador, and Calvin Johnson's K records, I felt a definite tugging on the heart strings, a flood of bittersweet memories, and this simultaneous realisation that hey, we are part of something as awesome as that whole thing was.

Adam got down and dirty in the semiotics of games and redefined in our minds the level at which games and play are part of our culture, and even our evolution, our genes. Conjouring forth papers on play and games from mid-century French intellectuals and the like, he was certainly showing tight research chops. At the beginning of the talk, "war came from games" sounded very contraversial to me. At the end of the talk I was convinced.

After hours the beer flowed, and of course that's where all of the most interesting, unrestrained conversations took place. Once again Eve and Paul's refinement shone through in their choice of venue, just around the corner from the library where the festival was going on. It's an oft-underlooked aspect of conference organisation, and usually left to the delegates to find a drinking hole where the ideas of the day can be unwound, probed, picked apart, and put back together again. At FreePlay however, this was all taken care of, and that was an excellent thing.

So anyway, there it is. Great festival, wonderful people, with the most awesomest of organisers.

Now it's time to create.

I don't often get political on here, but watching the Australian Liberal party trot out the "we will stop the boats" line, referring to trying to stop people seeking refugee status in Australia who arrive by boat, has annoyed me enough to write something about it.

The Liberal party have obviously seen the numbers. They know that people arriving on boats seeking refugee status are statistically insignificant. This is basically a cynical political stunt by that party, designed to prey on a deep-seated "rational racism" found in modern Australian culture. Essentially they are taking some of the most powerless and unfortunate people in the world, turning them into boogie men, and then telling the Australian population that they will protect us against them. Heck, I'm going to say it; it's just plain un-Australian!

Why?

1. As a member state of the United Nations, we are shirking our obligations to the United Nations under international law. We derive huge benefits from being part of the United Nations and we should meet our obligations in return. "Stop the boats," is quite possibly illegal in that context. See this article for an example of UN HCR's reaction to Australia refusing entry to refugees in 2003.

2. The number of people arriving by boat is statistically insignificant, especially when compared with:

   • The number of people arriving by air and staying here illegally.
   • The number of refugees arriving to other nations, to European nations for example.
   • The total population of Australia.

3. Finally, and most damningly, Australia's political policy on refugees and immigration has no demonstrable effect on the numbers of people arriving regardless. The number of people arriving are determined by external factors (like hostilities in Afghanistan; a war in which Australia is involved). See this article for details and a thorough statistical analysis.

In other words, if we wanted to regulate refugee immigration to Australia more tightly (a desire of debatable value), then we shouldn't focus on boat people at all. In that case, the rational thing to do would be to focus on our contribution to situations outside of Australia that cause people to want to seek refugee status here, such as wars, disasters, etc. Focusing on "boat people" is irrational at best, and racist at worst.

I will never vote for a party who will capitalise so cynically on, and in doing so advocate, such an awful cultural trait as the racist reflex we are witnessing. Surely we are smarter than that, Australia? Surely we can see through this kind of hateful scaremongering?

Because of this, I will put the candidates of the liberal party very last on my ballot paper on the 21st August, 2010.

Upate: Here are some useful links with statistics:

"Boat arrivals since 1976 by calendar year"

"Australian Prime Ministers Since 1901"

I hope you'll notice something deeply ironic when you look at these links. The year with the highest number of refugees arriving by boat is 2001, which was smack bang in the middle of the term of John Winston Howard of the Liberal party.

I have uploaded a new squeakyshoecore tune called Hilbert Curve, named after my favorite fractal. Czech it here.

Also, here are the Pure Data patches which are used to make this music. You can control them with a midi controller.

This weekend I have competed in Simon Wittber's GameJam. It's been a fun couple of days and nights hanging out with other nerds, programming video games. I used my Javascript/HTML5 games library jsGameSoup which meant I got the first working iteration of the game up and running after about four hours on Friday night. Saturday afternoon I polished it and tweaked the game mechanic with some good suggestions from Jack, Simon, Nick, and Jason. This afternoon I spent a few minutes getting it online and fixing bugs.

Anyway, here is a link to the game, PingZinger. I would love to hear what you think!

The theme of the game was "choose two at the expense of the other," which should give you some clue as to how to play the game.

Have fun!

I am ridiculously behind on blogging because of the amount of contract work I have going on at the moment (working Saturdays and weeknights until 2am - not fun!) Anyway, I'll stop whining now.

Below is a video of the talk I gave at PyCon AU at the end of June. In it I talk about my time working for London based "reactive music" company, RjDj, and also about my video game Infinite8BitPlatformer.

I haven't posted an Infinite8BitPlatformer update for ages, and I have been meaning to do so since a lot of progress has been made since my last post, but here's a quick update:

• Multiplayer code: this is going really well. It's almost at the point of beta release.
• Contributors: another person has started contributing to the codebase. I am hopefully going to be merging his code this weekend. Julian has put basic chat into the multiplayer code, among other tweaks and bugfixes, and a huge amount of very useful information for other people looking to contribute. He's been very patient about my lack of time!

Anyway, back to work.