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“It’s like a Ship of Theseus as far as the board is concerned,” Darcy Smith, de facto lead on this year’s Freeplay Parallels showcase tells me as we chat remotely.

He’s referencing a famous thought experiment. If you replace all the parts of a ship, is it still the same ship? Or in Parallels’ case, the same showcase?

Parallels is invariably a highlight of Melbourne International Games Week. A industry melting pot and celebration of games as art.

“People love this event,” Smith said. “Shuhei Yoshida [the former president of Sony, credited with building the Playstation brand] has said that it’s one of his favourite game events on the planet. The pressure is immense.”

2026 will mark the showcase’s 12th year and the Freeplay festival’s 22nd, but also will be the first occasion that its volunteer board members, of which Smith is one, have directly ran the show themselves.

Since its inception, Freeplay has always operated with a director, or directors. A role which existed not just as a figurehead for media but to whom also fell the final word on curation and tone for the various events held under its banner.

Between 2023 and 2025, the state government granted Freeplay a contracted period of organisation funding as opposed to just individual events funding, which allowed for the direct employment of Louie Roots and Mads MacKenzie as co-directors for one day per week.

“Last year we did our Parallels wrap up, and we were supposed to have a decision about whether Creative Victoria was still going to fund us,” MacKenzie said. “They didn’t get back to us in time, and at that point it was kind of mysterious as to why.”

“Creative Vic had a big shake-up, and all of the people we were talking to got switched into new roles,” MacKenzie continues. “It was a couple of days before Christmas when the board, and us, got told that there’s no more funding.”

“Creative Victoria via Games Week via ACMI has given us some funding for the next couple of years, which is amazing,” Smith tells me. “We have found money, a bit, but it’s not enough to support longer-term staff. We got together as a board and we sort of figured out what we wanted the future to be, and we agreed that if we could weather a year or two without additional money then the organisation would probably have a good shot at sustaining through the next generation. We do have a contractor, Christina, who is on deck to deliver the event as a producer, so she’s the only staff member and I’m more or less the sort of lead.”

This year’s Parallels returns to its 2019 home at the RMIT Capitol Theatre, a venue with drastically less capacity than the Melbourne Town Hall across the street, at which 900 to 1000 people attended in 2024 and 2025 respectively. The first round of tickets for this year’s event sold out almost instantly according to the event’s management team, and a limited final release is planned for early October. Many had assumed that downscaling was purely a result of the reduced funding, but Smith tells me that wasn’t entirely the case.

“(It) was a semi-taste decision.”

“It scaled up (when) we had government money, but ticket prices still went up to accommodate that,” Smith continues.

“Once again, the directors were able to really steer and choose and they saw a version of this that was bigger, which honestly I still appreciate! There’s no perfect answer for where this all should be.

“They made it bigger, I think mostly just because they knew how many people wanted to be involved. To open the doors to over a thousand people is the most inclusive thing you could possibly do, but it also has a bunch of knock-on decisions that need to be made in order to make that viable. It’s still a lot of work! It’s a lot of volunteer time, of which the board is entirely.”

“This chapter of board-run Parallels will hopefully be short lived,” Smith adds. “I think that the team is incredibly talented and we just by chance had the right combination of people where we were able to step up and make things work but like.”

“God, I can’t understate how much work it is to put Parallels on.”

• Freeplay Parallels took place on 8 October. You can watch the live stream replay here.

Will you watch the Parallels showcase? Do you usually go and you missed out on a ticket? And what does this event mean to you? Let us know in the comments.

• This post first appeared on the Infinite Lives Substack. Follow it here.