Locating Videogame Development in Australian Higher Education

This paper examines how videogame development is positioned within Australian higher education, drawing on a discursive mapping of publicly available information on 119 programs that teach game development in some capacity. Its central argument is that game development education is consistently marketed as a pathway to industry employability, appealing to prospective students' existing identities as consumers of games, yet the skills and graduate identities it emphasises depend on whether a program sits within a Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) department, a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) department, or a dedicated games department.

The analysis finds a shared emphasis across programs on job-ready skills, industry connections, and an entrepreneurial mindset, reflecting broader trends of higher education marketisation and the development of human capital for the labour market. Differences emerge in how each disciplinary context frames the field: HASS-based programs foreground storytelling, aesthetics, and critical and cultural skills, while STEM-based programs emphasise programming, software development, and technical competence. The authors argue that this reflects a formative tension within videogame development itself, which is neither a clean synthesis of technical and creative work nor simply a creative industry, and that the resulting programs differ in the ideologies, cultures, and graduate imaginaries they recruit students into.

The paper situates this within a wider scholarly debate in which game development education is seen as both reproducing the capitalist and patriarchal structures of the industry and offering space for resistance and alternative identities in gamemaking. It also notes that videogames sit awkwardly within cultural and technology policy frameworks, leaving the industry as a useful but outsider case for both sectors. Ultimately, the authors conclude that game development higher education appears torn between disciplinary cultures rather than successfully reconciling STEM and HASS approaches.