With Playtopia, the annual destination of Indie Games & Immersive Arts festival and conference set to return in 2025, GIA has partnered with the event to share insights from the crop of supremely talented creators in attendance. Next up in a series of speaker interviews is Doug Wilson, who was previously a co-owner of Die Gute Fabrik, where he worked on a number of commercial videogames including Johann Sebastian Joust, Sportsfriends, Mutazione, and Saltsea Chronicles.

I’m very excited to attend Playtopia and visit South Africa! I know of some South African developers from afar, but I have to admit I don’t feel knowledgeable enough to comment on general trends in African game dev. That’s part of the whole reason I want to attend Playtopia. I’m keen to meet other devs and find out more about what’s going on in South Africa and Africa more broadly. In general I think it’s more important than ever to pay attention to art being made at the so-called margins of the metropole. We shouldn’t let hubs like North America, Europe, Japan, etc exclusively define what is “normal” or desirable in art and games.

Playtopia celebrates the intersection of games and art. What makes that kind of space meaningful for you as a designer and researcher?

I’ve heard lots of great things about Playtopia from friends who have attended in previous years. One of the reasons I’m so excited to attend Playtopia is it seems to be arts-leds, instead of primarily commercially focused. Commercial games, even commercial indie games, already soak up the vast majority of the attention within game dev discourse. I feel like, compared to even just 10 years ago, there are far fewer places these days to exhibit and discuss non-normative work – installations, alt ctrl, mods, interactive fiction, etc. Playtopia was one of the few festivals that was willing and able to exhibit my piece, Canopy Co-op, which is part videogame, part performance, and requires a ton of space and a very specialized setup. I want to see work that can’t or doesn’t get showcased in traditional industry settings.

Organizing arts-led spaces for experimental games is important for so many reasons. I play and love a lot of commercial video games, but when you have to distribute an exe file to strangers, via some storefront, you’re only able to explore a fraction of what is possible with games. Once you’re able to radically overturn certain assumptions – about intended audience, about distribution, about IP, etc – you’re able to play around in a really exciting and under-explored area of art and human connection.

How do you envision events like Playtopia influencing your teaching or academic perspective on game design? How does being in a diverse, cross-cultural creative space affect your sense of design ethics and experimentation?

Obviously the specific histories and trajectories of South Africa and Australia are very different, but both countries do share certain legacies around European colonialism and its ongoing effects. I’m personally keen to learn more about what African artists are doing with games and play. We live in an increasingly geopolitically unstable world, in which corporations and payment processors are trying to influence what we can or cannot make. As such, I think it’s more important than ever to share art, culture, thinking, strategies, etc with one another, across diverse groups. How can we make art or games than imagine a better world, bring us together, or speak truth to power?

Check out the full program and consider joining Playtopia, which will run from December 5th to 6th December 2025 in Cape Town.