In press and forthcoming

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Melanie Swalwell & Michael Davidson Malzak, Ludologica Retro: Volume 1: Vintage Arcade
(1971-1984), Matteo Bittanti and Ian Bogost (eds).

“Lan Gaming Groups: Snapshots from an Australasian case study”, 1999-2008, Gaming Cultures and Place in the Asia–Pacific Region, Larissa Hjorth & Dean Chan, eds, Routledge.

“Preserving Local Computer Game Software: A multi-dimensional yet achievable challenge”.

Research by the author into the history of digital games in New Zealand yielded information about a significant number of locally written software titles from the 1980s. Few people seem to be aware of these. No institutional collections exist, and even if they did, preservation efforts are currently directed elsewhere. This context prompted the assembly of a multidisciplinary team of researchers, to bring legal, technical, and media-historical expertise to bear on these titles’ preservation. This article briefly introduces the game preservation landscape, before outlining the case for the preservation of local game software. It reports on the mixed successes we had in achieving the aims of our pilot study. The initial plan – to secure licence agreements that would, in turn, enable technical preservation – gave way as a more complex intertwining of the legal and technical emerged. Navigating these challenges, our strategy shifted: from emulation to translation. Translation – from BASIC to Java – is an elegant solution, in the circumstances. As well as recounting the project’s practical realisation, this article will consider the fidelity of the conserved digital game to its ‘original’.

“Whither Audience? Re-Assemblage as Aesthetic Strategy”, 5th Research Symposium of Cultural Transformations Research Network (“Re-Assemblage”) Otago University, Dunedin, 30 Nov-2 Dec 2006.

Practices of assemblage have been some of the most influential aesthetic strategies associated with postmodernism. The ‘re-’ in re-assemblage, however, challenges us to fresh thought regarding things that refuse to stay in their assigned place, or in regard to elements that have no fixed place. Prising works apart, then reconfiguring their elements into new assemblages, while not without precedent, is urged upon us with new vigour in a digital media age. But what implications do aesthetic strategies of re-assemblage hold for conceptions of audience? This paper will seek to both examine and critique some of the pivotal shifts the concept of audience is undergoing in the current historical moment.

Swalwell and Katharine Neil “’UnAustralia: The Game’, or Why We Need an Australian Game Commission”, Cultural Studies Association of Australasia annual conference (theme: “UnAustralia”), Canberra, 6-8 December 2006.

This paper documents efforts to gain funding for an educational videogame investigating the vanished civilisation of UnAustralia. Part archeological discovery, part research adventure, real world methodology is used by the player to forensically analyse the demise of this failed state. Players of “UnAustralia: the Game” uncover the actions of leaders, while perspectives from commentators and everyday denizens supply exciting primary source material. Participants re-experience the distortion and disinformation, board stacking, demonising of various Others, and debasing of political institutions. The coupling of player’s imaginative involvement and exposure to these sources enables critical understanding of the multidimensional mess that UnAustralia became, prior to its collapse.

This paper further reports on the response of potential funding bodies to our game pitch (disappointing), and notes the cultural politics and potentials of videogames. We ask – in the wake of that other unfinished game (“Escape from Woomera”) and on the back of David Rejeski’s recent call for a Corporation for Public Gaming – how can projects such as “UnAustralia” overcome the hurdles that independent game production face, to actually get made?

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