Untitled article about a goose game

It’s a lovely morning in the village… and you are a horrible goose. That’s how the creators of Untitled Goose Game described their work in a simple trailer for the game. Fast forward to its September release and it has topped Nintendo Switch's UK and Australian download charts. One of its creators, games designer Michael McMaster, is a RMIT PhD researcher and the university interviewed him about the game’s expected success. “Since we put our first trailer online in late 2017 there’d been a lot of excitement around the game, but we’d always tried to be as pessimistic as possible in the leadup to its release,” he said. “We weren’t prepared for the game’s wild success.” People think game development means you get to play games all day, but they're wrong - it means you talk about geese pic.twitter.com/I8XvTWy7b1 — Michael McMaster (@mjmcmaster) 11 August 2016 Untitled Goose Game was developed by Melbourne-based independent developer House House and funded by Film Victoria. And its success has led to calls for more investment in game creation. To move through the levels, users must complete a list of tasks – almost all hinged on making life tough for the inhabitants of a quaint English town and ranging from stealing a farmer’s hat to tripping over a bespectacled child to make him wear the wrong glasses. Honking as they go, players unlock new parts of the town to cause more havoc. Or, as the University of Melbourne’s Associate Professor Kenny McAlpine described it in Pursuit: “Imagine Quentin Tarantino directing Buster Keaton as Beatrix Potter’s Mr McGregor in a slapstick avian revenge flick and you’ll be getting close.” Explaining the new age of game creation, the Melbourne enterprise fellow in interactive composition said: “We now have a generation of creative professionals who have grown up as digital natives around the technologies and the audio-visual vocabulary and grammar of gaming. “And what of those kids — kids like me — who grew up playing that first generation of video games? Well, as much as I am loathe to admit it, we are all now middle-aged. We’re the policy-makers, educators, publishers and commissioners.” Despite this, lecturer in games and interactivity at Edith Cowan University Luke Brook explained in a piece for The Conversation that the Australian government is still reluctant to support the videogame industry. Brook said Untitled Goose Game’s success is an indication of what the Australian games industry is capable of with funding and support. “The popularity of Untitled Goose Game comes from a perfect confluence of factors: a stylistic and playful art style, slapstick humour, an adaptive soundtrack, logical puzzle solving, and the high level of accessibility and short learning curve due to the simplistic control scheme," he explained. “The game’s success shows great things can come from investing in small, independent teams.” And McCaster, whose PhD work looked at the surge of videogame exhibitions and other programming within museums, said there’s still a lot of uncharted gaming territory to explore. “Games in the general sense are extremely old, but videogames as a distinct audio-visual medium are still very young, so there’s a huge amount of white space for new ideas to be tested,” he explained. “Not that we’re making wildly experimental games ourselves, but I think it says a lot that ‘a game played from the perspective of a horrible goose’ seems so novel and interesting to people.”