Jim Fishwick

Queerly Represent Me had a chat with @fimjishwick, Assistant Curator at ACMI and General Manager of Jetpack Theatre Collective!

QRM: Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do in the games industry?

Jim: Sure! I’m an experience designer, which means different things in different worlds. As a theatremaker, this comes out in my work with Jetpack, creating immersive, interactive and improvised experiences that overlap with escape rooms, LARPing, and the playful arts more broadly. As a curator at ACMI, I develop exhibitions that display and interpret the moving image (film, TV, videogames, digital culture, media art).

QRM: How long have you been involved in the game industry, and what projects have you worked on? What are you working on currently?

Jim: I’ve been performing since 2007, and that turned into performing in physical / live action games in 2012. I’ve been directing/developing shows/experiences since 2014. I’ll just list a few: The first show I directed, Where Your Eyes Don’t Go, was an ten-minute interactive horror experience – think Doctor Who meets Amnesia. Pea Green Boat, a darkly comic retelling of Edward Lear’s Owl and the Pussycat, which we performed on a rowboat on the water for three audience members at a time. The biggest recent one was Art Heist, an immersive escape room where four players break into our purpose-built art gallery, then have 40 minutes to steal a painting and get out again, dodging cameras, distracting guards and fooling alarm systems. Finally at last year’s Sydney Fringe I directed Quick Bright Things, a LARP of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in a Year 12 Drama class. That one was super queer, I enjoyed that show a lot.

I’m currently developing a couple of different show ideas. One is an untitled performer-based escape room, one is an interactive adaptation of an existing work that I can’t name, one is a gender thing called All Dogs Are Boys All Cats Are Girls and one is a very very boutique experience for one person at a time, with the working title Intimacy Simulator. In my capacity at ACMI, I’m working on a refresh of our Games Lab at the moment. I’ll be putting in a suite of games that will be in place for the next nine months or so. It’s a selection of games that explore the use of gameplay to convey emotion, curiosity, empathy, and exploration.

QRM: What inspired you to get started in the games industry?

Jim: One of the joys of performing improvised theatre is the feeling of being immersed in the scene, where you and the other performer get so into your characters and the situation that time flies past and you forget yourself. It’s like playing make believe. It’s similar to the state of flow we get into while gaming – you look up and an hour has passed. I wanted to share that feeling with the audience, by improvising with them, not for them. We started making works that used reaction and presence as load-bearing pillars in the show.

QRM: In what ways do you feel your experiences as a queer person manifest in the games you work on, and influence the work you do?

Jim: As a fairly straight-passing bi guy I’m always conscious of trying to not make assumptions about who my audience/players are or what they want. In my theatre practice I’m often co-creating the story with the audience, and I try to give them options to choose how they want to play the game, and then validate and support their choices. If they choose to make their character queer, we support the heck out of that. If they don’t want to then that’s cool too. By making the options visible we shift the player's view (however subtly) away from heteronormativity. When I’m authoring background characters or backstories by myself I will go out of my way to include a mix of queer relationships or characters.

In my work as a curator, I’m selecting games for exhibition, which is another form of storytelling. There’s a dominant narrative around games, about who they’re for (young straight white men) and what they represent (those men's power fantasies). I feel a responsibility to subvert that narrative, or present alternative narratives, to build up cultural capital around different kinds of games and broaden our visitors’ horizons of what games can be, away from the straight and narrow. Is this a queering of games exhibitions? Maybe!

QRM: Do you have a favourite queer character—in games or media more generally? If so, what is it about them that makes them your favourite?
Question asked by @kamienw.

Jim: If Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn 99 looked at me I would die on the spot.

QRM: Have you ever encountered roadblocks in trying to include queer characters in games? What do you think is preventing greater diversity within games?
Question asked by @dustinalex91.

Jim: The majority of the shows I’ve done so far haven’t really explored queerness in depth. Where there are queer characters in shows I direct, I’ve never had someone to report to creatively, so I’ve never had it raised as an issue. Some of the characters in Quick Bright Things (see above) were queer, but the audience didn’t always realise the exact machinations. Some people would play a character with a different gender from their own, but then another audience member might not realise those two things are different, and then think they couldn’t ask other characters out, and it would take me intervening to let them know they could live out their gay dreams… High school, amirite?

More broadly, from an industry point of view it’s going to take (1) baby steps of indie game developers gradually including more queer characters and stories, putting pressure on the bigger studios by demonstrating that there’s a market for those games and (2) those bigger studios taking big strides to keep up, and drag the mainstream taste along with them. When it comes to audiences, that’s an even bigger question. How do you get people to dispense with their entitled solipsism?

QRM: Why do you think it is important that queer audiences are able to see themselves represented in the games they play, and in the developers who make the games they see? What can we do to improve the industry for queer audiences and devs?

Jim: If art is a mirror on society, and you don’t see yourself in that mirror, you become invisible, you feel like you don’t belong. If you don’t see people like you doing the work you want to do, you feel that people like you don’t get to do that work, or that you need to leave some part of you out if you’re going to do it.

I’m not a vidyagame developer myself, so I don’t want to comment too much on the industry or games themselves. (Having said that, the quickest representation fix is probably to include more character creation options, more sliders and fewer binary settings, and more romance settings.) The bigger and slower task is changing the mainstream view of what games are and who they’re for. If the public sees games as hyperviolent toys for twelve-year-olds, is there space in that perception for games to contain subtlety or earnest emotion, let alone quality queer representation? It becomes the role of cultural commentators (like, say, curators) to shine a light on queer games and queer devs, to hold them up as examples of what games are, what they can be, and who the people are that make them, to encourage that slow shift in perception.

QRM: Have you ever mentored somebody in your role in games, or been mentored? If so, what made these experiences worthwhile for you?
Question asked by @pepelanova.

Jim: Kind of! A lot of the shows I build are collaborative in some form. Part of that collaboration is a transferring of skills and knowledge – I learn a lot from the people I work with, and share what I can in return. It’s not direct mentoring as such, but there are lots of different approaches to creating a show, and increasing the breadth of my understanding is just as useful to me as increasing the depth.

QRM: In what ways can non-queer folk increase and support queer diversity present within games, as well as in the industry more broadly? How can we all work to support intersectional approaches to diversity, and why is this important?

Jim: Interrogate your assumptions about what is a ‘default’. Get as wide a range of people to play your title as possible, and take their feedback sincerely (but not personally). Have queer friends. Acknowledge your debt to folks who have pushed at boundaries in the past, actively search out the folks who are pushing at boundaries at the moment. Quality is 80% subjective; something may not resonate with you, but it’s probably someone else’s favourite thing. Try believing them. Take it for granted that you’ll never know enough but that shouldn’t stop you from trying to know more. A lot of what I’m saying here is probably also general life advice; the process of creation and living have becoming infuriatingly entangled for me.

QRM: Is there a message that you would like to share with the queer game players, game studies researchers, and other interested folks who comprise the Queerly Represent Me community?

Jim: ‘Super Mario Galaxy’ is an anagram of ‘Our Gay Praxis Meal’

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You can find Jim on Twitter, or at his website.