RafaelFajardo

Still, they’d have a hard time trumping Katharine Neil, to whom Ellison speaks in Paris. “To this day so many people don’t know Katharine’s work. She’s just one of the most extraordinary humans,” Ellison stresses.Neil was part of a covert team of game industry veterans and journalists who, using Australian state art funding, produced a game that exposed the government’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers at the Woomera detention centre. As you can imagine, the authorities weren’t too pleased about it.

“There were arguments in parliament about how this arts fund had been allocated because they were angry that it was embarrassing Australia,” Ellison explains. “Neil did something that was so risky and so rebellious, especially since she was working for Atari at the time. It’s really admirable stuff. Since the arts council did that I don’t think they have awarded money to a video game since.”

You’d think work like Neil’s would bring an end to the tiresome debates about videogames’ cultural validity. But alas, the hand-wringing continues. “Games are actually really contentious, politically speaking,” Ellison points out. “There are all these misrepresented issues like ‘what’s the connection between videogames and violence?’ – that’s never been proved. ‘What’s the connection between video games and sex?’ – because there’s an interactive element. It’s still not okay to put sex in a mainstream video game. I find all of this really annoying because it’s really obvious to me that videogames are art.”