Tax relief and Carmen Sandiego: Australia's once-dismissed video game industry is finally getting a leg-up

The idea that video games are not "serious things", says Ross Symons, overlooks the benefits they offer to gamers feeling isolated. "One thing that struck me during Covid is that games were the way that people connected and stayed together." The chief executive of Big Ant Studios, a Melbourne-based game developer, recalls when in 2010 the then opposition leader Tony Abbott dismissed the national broadband network as being for "internet-based television, video entertainment and gaming". Symons says that dismissiveness of the video game industry has not stood the test of time. Last year alone, Australians spent 3.8bn on video games, according to the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association (IGEA).