Untitled Baseball Game

Untitled Baseball Game is an experimental narrative project centred around the culture of Melbourne’s Western Suburbs. Its story follows someone who formerly lived in Footscray and has spent several years abroad. The project begins with their return to Melbourne and their re-discovery of the culture of the Western Suburbs.

Their return was prompted by the passing of a close friend, which then leads to re-connection with all the friends they had grown distant from in their years away. This experience of re-connecting, and finding things that were previously unseen with new perspective is something that drives their curiosity through a changed Footscray. A place they thought they knew had either changed in their years away, or they had never truly seen it for what it was. Their perspective begins to open as they find out that their old friends had started a local baseball team, and they decide to stay and play the season together.

Untitled Baseball Game is a cultural collage of Footscray and the City of Maribyrnong, encompassing many aspects of our personal connection to the space. Luke had grown up in Maribyrnong, near the river, and this has become a focus in our experiments. As the game is mixed-media, Super 8 footage taken around Pipemakers Park was used as textures within there game. Sunny too, had created mixed-media collages from places like Footscray Milking Station as backgrounds for the games world.

The project is aimed at accessibility for those who do not have experience playing video games. It was designed around community and intuition, opposed to systems reliant on knowledge of genre and complex control schemes. It is presented as a cultural collage that we hope the community will be able to access without any former experience with the medium.