Melbourne International Games Week is almost upon us once again, presenting a stacked schedule of events for industry professionals and public punters alike. One of the more curious features of this year’s lineup is the free installation game Rotted Luck. An original work commissioned by the Australian Center for the Moving Image (ACMI), the game is a collaboration between noted Melbourne indie game developer Ian MacLarty and writer and performer Vidya Rajan.
We caught up with Ian over coffee to chat about their co-creation.
“Vidya and I didn’t know each other,” MacLarty is quick to confess. “ACMI thought it would be interesting to throw us together and see what happens!”
“I started working on it initially, and I just had an idea for a kind of graphical technique that I wanted to experiment with,” MacLarty continues. “It involved morphing between different 3D objects, and it was really just a sort of graphical toy where one of the objects happened to be some fruit. I showed it to Vidya and they went away and came back with the idea that maybe it could be kind of like a really weird slot machine. Almost an ‘anti-slot machine’ that’s been taken over by some sort of sentient fungus which doesn’t really know what slot machines are for. It’s a very different perspective on a slot machine, and I liked that idea.”
A different perspective it certainly is. Rotted Luck utilises a webcam that tracks the player’s body movements in order to spin the three slot channels and deliver playfully warped outcomes. Those of us with lingering memories of Xbox’s Kinect technology will no doubt be conjuring ideas as to how it all works in practice, but MacLarty is quick to tell me that it’s much more primitive than that, which thematically reinforced the perception of player control that makes casino slot machines so insidious.
“You can see that it’s responding to you but it doesn’t feel like you have direct control over it…”
“It’s very basic, and in a lot of ways quite unresponsive. You can see that it’s responding to you but it doesn’t feel like you have direct control over it,” MacLarty says. “It’s got a little bit of a life of its own… You can’t really ‘win’ on it.”
As a playful comment on the portrayal and implementation of gambling mechanics in mainstream video games, the timing couldn’t be better. Completely by coincidence, the work goes live not two weeks after an overhaul of Australia’s classification laws goes into effect, instantly categorizing future video games that feature casino games such as slot machines as being R18+ fare restricted to adults.
Despite Rotted Luck’s framing as a cheekily subversive commentary on the kind of dark pattern design methodology that has become increasingly prevalent in video games in recent years, MacLarty is quick to explain to me that finding conceptual meaning in the work wasn’t something he was really thinking about from the outset, and credits both Rajan and the evolution of the game itself with bringing that element forward.
“She’s much more concerned with a top-down kind of process,” says MacLarty. “What is the fiction of this thing we’re making? What’s the story behind it? Whereas I’m coming up from the bottom like, ‘oh I made this thing that does these cool graphics. So it was kind of a nice process of meeting in the middle there,” he finishes with a chuckle.
MacLarty tells me that he personally isn’t super judgemental about the growing industry trend either, but can’t help but feel a little bothered by some of its knock-on effects.
“I don’t have a strong opinion about ‘free to play’ or games that are trying to leverage ‘whales’ to pay heaps of money,” he says. “Some people have a lot of money to spend on stuff, you know? I’m just most interested in making something that people feel good about when they play.”
“I’m a little bit sad about mobile games,” he continues. “I made a few mobile games, and there was definitely a period where you could make something with a simple, original idea and it could go quite far. Now it’s just really hard as a lot of (mobile) games exist in this ecosystem of advertising each other. I don’t think people really browse the App Store anymore.”
MacLarty is about as indie as it gets, with a lengthy tail of mostly solo and micro-team projects behind him. A commission work of this type from a major government-backed arts body was something of a fresh experience for the veteran developer.
“It was a fun project to make, and a very different kind of project,” he tells me. “Obviously it didn’t have any of those commercial constraints. Meeting and working with Vidya was a very valuable experience to me which I really enjoyed.”
“We’d have regular meetings (with ACMI) and they would offer a lot of enthusiasm and support. It was overall a very good experience.”
Rotted Luck is an ACMI commission for Melbourne International Games Week. Drop into ACMI’s Fed Square foyer to play the game from 5 – 13 Oct 2024. More at acmi.net.au
This article was commissioned by Checkpoint Gaming with support from Creative Victoria.
About the Author
Jam Walker
They/Them
Jam has not shut up about video games since the moment they received a Mega Drive for Christmas at age 5. A couple of years later they grew as a person by adding wrestling into the mix. They still view NBA Jam as the greatest sports game ever but rank WWE All Stars close behind.
