“By empowering those at the front lines to innovate, we will see greater innovation at the front lines.”

I am a professional music composer in the video game industry here in South Australia. When I was a kid, video games were thought to be “only for nerds.” When I was a young adult, the idea of working as a video game professional was talked about akin to throwing your career and life away. Today, the video game industry is larger than the movie and music industries combined. If you look at the history of digital media grants in Australia, it is obvious that the government was not predicting that. In some states, it would seem that government is only now starting to invest time and money — over a decade behind the industry itself.

This isn’t an attack on the government. If you are a huge, democratic, largely politically-trained organization, it would be unrealistic to expect that you can prophesize the future of all industries in their own niche specialties. In some ways, this is actually an unfair expectation on those working in government. Sub-government industry-specific bodies may actually be more in tune with those industry-specific trends, but the whispers you hear from insiders tend to follow along lines of “we would love to fund this new area, but there simply isn’t enough money going around.” It seems that expecting all grants from these support organizations to emerge up-to-date with industry is being a little unfair on them too. So who can best know what new opportunities are becoming ripe in an industry? The people on the ground. The people on the front line. The people working in those industries.

Front-line Insights from the Games Industry

Focusing on my home industry, many skeptical outsiders call video game development a waste of money or simply self-indulgent. From games being blamed as the reason that people commit school shootings, to rotting the brains of the next generation, you don’t have to look too far before finding arguments against the reason my job should exist. Admittedly though, this argument seems to be diminishing as more people become aware that video games never caused violence to begin with. Unfortunately this also points to a parallel issue of a perspective that all video games are about violence and killing, such as in commercially mainstream titles like Grand Theft Auto or Fortnite. But if you talk to anyone working in the industry, you’ll quickly learn that those two games are a tiny slice of what is out there. You’ll find that games professionals chose the industry because they were emotionally impacted by games enough to risk their own financial and career security on something they believed could really make a difference in people’s lives — as it did in their own lives.

Hannah is one example of many games that have been developed for societal change. Game Designer and University Lecturer Dr Susannah Emery created the phone-texting game to simulate the experience of having a friend who is going through domestic abuse. Emery explains that through talking to Hannah, the player will learn about the different forms of abuse that Hannah is experiencing, as well as how to effectively talk about the emotional effects it is having on her. How the player decides to interact with Hannah will ultimately impact Hannah’s trust in them. When I asked Emery to describe the reasoning behind the game further, she explained that “friends and family are the most important people to domestic violence survivors. [She] wanted the game to help educate people to be more informed support network members if someone they know in the real world does share [about their] domestic violence.” Hannah is just one example of a growing understanding that video games can be an incredible vehicle for education.

Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness is another example, creating an immersive virtual reality experience where the player can only visually make out objects as those objects emit sound. This is one way of helping those of us without visual impairment to imagine what it might be like to be blind. The whole experience follows scenes based on and narrated in his own words by John M. Hull, the late Emeritus Professor of Religious Education at the University of Birmingham, all about his own experience of becoming blind. Since release, it has won a large number of awards, including Peabody 2022 XR Experience and SXSW 2017 Innovation in AR/VR.

There are many other examples of games made for societal change, but even for those made for the individual experience, the effects can be profound on people. Personally, it wouldn’t be enough to say games have had a big effect on my life. It would be more accurate to say that the most important games and game music I have experienced are integrated into my foundations as a person, as great literature and art has been for others. Why else would I be putting myself in a risky sub-industry of an already risky industry? It’s not like I just “fell into this, and it’s good to pay the bills.” Before and around my life as a games professional, I worked for 8 years in the IT industry — a very important industry, and a nice secure income. The thing is, I have jumped back out several times because it became clear to me again and again that it is not healthy for me. My most recent jump was helped by the realization that I was more stressed at work — that it was taking a larger toll on my mental and physical health — than when I was struggling for money. Funnily enough, now that I am back in the games industry, I am finding myself doing more work for community and societal growth, more research and development for audio, and growing more meaningful connections with industry peers. This flies directly in the face of the myth of the struggling and self-indulgent artist being the natural fate of the artist. It would seem very clear that myself being in audio and video games serves Australia much more effectively.

This sounds like a dream come true, right? Almost. There’s one catch: I am also studying my second degree at university so I can specialize in audio in academia so I can build a stable income. I am currently working 3 separate jobs (which I was very lucky to even get in the first place), alongside a university grant, so that I can pay for rent and food. As much as I appreciate our welfare system is better than in some other countries, I have been burned badly by its (not uncommon) bureaucratic breakdowns in the past. One particularly bad incident included me living on and losing the entirety of my savings while waiting several months for the processing of study assistance — which ended up being rejected for reasons that were never flagged for concern during any of this several-month process. In my most recent inquiries about whether I would be entitled for study assistance, I was advised that it was unclear and that I should go through the lengthy application process just to find out. If we had Universal Basic Income in Australia, none of this would have happened. A Basic Income would have given me my answer from the get-go and not wasted my time, money, or dignity.

Front-line Innovation with UBI

Let me make it clear: I’m not writing this article to complain about the past. My own experience above is simply illustrative of what can and does happen to many hard-working people trying to work with the current welfare system. I am, however, writing this article to talk about the present, because I know that as soon as we implement Universal Basic Income, myself and others can focus our energy on furthering our fields for the future. I know that from the moment we implement UBI, we will see more innovators emerge as they have a solid financial ground to stand on.

For a further diversity of thought on this, I decided to ask my industry peers if the proposed $615 weekly ($1,230 fortnightly) basic income would change things for them too. Here are a few of the responses I received:

“I am currently under what was called NEIS where I receive $668.40 per fortnight [author’s note: the NEIS program funding lasts for 9 months]. My family and I are currently couch surfing with family where we have been given 5 months until we will be homeless. While putting in 35 hours a week focusing on hyper casual mobile games trying to get any kind of income, I am also a stay-at-home father, PTSD and Mental Health affected person and have been looking for any kind of work at all (labouring, retail, supermarket, factory, etc). My wife is working full time and we are unable to afford any rentals that do not have over 100 people at the openings. A UBI of $615 [$1,230 per fortnight] would not only give my family stability and myself some headspace to better deal with the damage done to me by state government departments, it would also have me working on a game I have been trying to continue which is based around the outback and features representation of the Indigenous Peoples of the area as well as stories from a diverse range of backgrounds.”

“Currently there is an idea I want to work on, but getting funding for it is difficult. And so our ideas, what we choose to work on, is changing to meet the funding options available to us. We will be working unpaid for months to attempt to get approved, and if we aren’t, then we’re left making an idea that.. never really was our dream, on no money. Fear of not being able to pay rent poisons and frightens away the creative spirit in ways many don’t realise.”

“A UBI of $615 [weekly] is nearly double what I got while I was on the NEIS programme, without which I don’t think I would have been able to start my business. Not everyone is eligible for such opportunities, and having a UBI would I’m sure give many more people the opportunity to weather the first few years of getting a business off the ground, which would probably do wonders for the lack of diversity in the field of game audio. For where my business is at right now, I don’t think having a UBI would change what projects I work on, but it would certainly make it a little easier to run my business at what is still a fairly early stage, since I could afford to pay myself less and invest more of our income back into building the business. That would definitely reduce my stress levels and make it easier to take care of myself and avoid burnout.”

Other responses showed a pretty consistent pattern of people believing that they would be able to work less hours in their “main job” so that they could devote more time to their own innovative projects. One person mentioned using the extra funds to purchase tools for their own projects, rather than working less.

I also asked for anyone who disagrees with the concept to message me too. Of the few who did, most admitted that they did not fully understand the concept of UBI — one person seeing its core flaw is that it only goes to a select group of people (which is not true and exactly the opposite of what a Universal Basic Income is about). This points to the importance of increasing UBI awareness and the ease of understanding rather than any issues with the Basic Income model itself. One person had concerns that due to medicine and housing still being expensive in Australia, a basic income wouldn’t fix everything. This is being debated, but shouldn’t be ignored. However, it is important to remember that no single policy can fix everything (nor ever has in history). We believe that a properly integrated Basic Income will have a huge positive transformation on poverty, the precariat, and related socioeconomic issues. The issues that remain after this will still require government intervention.

While this wasn’t a scientific study (go look at the many UBI pilot studies for that), the answers above did come from real people. These are real kinds of lives that would be affected by a UBI. If we are to look at these answers, we could extrapolate that no individual, nor society, would be disadvantaged — far from it. A Universal Basic Income would result in us seeing the blooming of a diversity of people, voices, ideas and innovations spreading throughout each industry. People may worry for “main jobs” having so many of their workers shift down to part-time, but the truth always comes back to asking whether that full-time work was full-time productivity, or actually part-time productivity and then the rest low-energy-grinding to make up the remaining hours. Rather than people pushing through just to make ends meet (and not being efficiently productive), jobs will be vacant for those people who are actually passionate about them. Then we may actually see something closer to full-time productivity.

One other important factor that is often forgotten in the UBI discussion is that by providing a more equal distribution of wealth to all, it creates a more equal ability for everyone to spend money on products they believe in. This will literally empower most people to actually “vote with their dollar,” rather than many having their hands tied by the need for basic survival. It will be interesting to see which new industries and front-line innovations will grow once all citizens are actually given the financial vote that their democracy promises.

Finally, it is important to recognize that these innovators we have been talking about are not only rare mavericks or the highly fortunate who have progressed their careers to the point where they can comfortably work part-time. These are all kinds of people from all kinds of life experiences, and importantly, these are the people on the front lines. They know their industry better than anyone else could. It is not fair to expect politicians to have an industry understanding as deep as those who see it, who live it, day in and day out. By empowering those at the front lines to innovate, we will see greater innovation at the front lines. This is one of the great societal effects of a Universal Basic Income.

John Oestmann is a Video Game Composer, Audio Developer, and advocate for Basic Income Australia. You can find out more about our proposed UBI model at https://basicincomeaustralia.com/policy/