Glitches, Gags, and Good Times: Why Aussie Gamers Can't Get Enough of Broken Games

There's a moment in Goat Simulator where your ragdoll goat clips through a fence, gets stuck inside a car engine, and somehow launches itself into a swimming pool on the other side of the map — all without you pressing a single button. And honestly? It's one of the funniest things you'll ever see in a video game.

For a lot of Aussie players, that kind of chaos isn't a bug report waiting to happen. It's the whole point.

Across Australia, a quietly enthusiastic community of gamers has developed a genuine appetite for games that are, by most conventional measures, a bit of a mess. We're talking physics engines that have clearly never met gravity, AI that wanders off a cliff mid-cutscene, and collision detection that treats walls as more of a suggestion. These aren't AAA games with a few rough edges — they're proudly, joyfully broken, and people are loving every second of it.

What Even Is "Jank"?

In gaming slang, "jank" is the affectionate term for that particular flavour of technical roughness that makes a game feel unstable, unpredictable, or just plain weird. It's not the same as a game being bad — plenty of beloved classics are janky as anything. Think early Bethesda RPGs, where NPCs would levitate off staircases and quest items would fall through the floor. Or Kerbal Space Program, where your rocket's structural integrity is more of a hopeful suggestion.

Jank has always existed in gaming. What's changed is that players — particularly here in Australia, where indie gaming culture has quietly exploded — are no longer tolerating it reluctantly. They're seeking it out.

"There's something genuinely freeing about a game that doesn't take itself too seriously," says Brisbane-based gamer Rhys, who runs a small Discord server dedicated to sharing clips of their favourite in-game disasters. "When a big-budget game has a bug, it's embarrassing. When a little indie game glitches out in some insane way, it's like the game is in on the joke with you."

The Rise of the "So Bad It's Good" Genre

The gaming equivalent of a cult B-movie has found a comfortable home on platforms like Steam and itch.io, where indie developers — including a growing number of Australians — are releasing games that lean hard into their own limitations.

Titles like Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread, and the gloriously unhinged Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy built massive audiences not despite their frustrating, chaotic mechanics, but because of them. These games understood something important: comedy and difficulty aren't mutually exclusive, and sometimes the funniest thing a game can do is completely fall apart.

Melbourne-based indie developer Tara, who released a deliberately wobbly physics platformer through itch.io last year, says the response surprised her. "I made it in about three weeks for a game jam and honestly didn't expect much. But people kept sending me clips of the character bugging out in ways I never programmed. It became this whole community thing where players were competing to find the weirdest glitches."

She laughs. "At some point the bugs stopped being bugs and started being content."

Why It Hits Different in Australia

There's a cultural thread worth pulling here. Australians have a well-documented soft spot for self-deprecating humour and a healthy suspicion of anything that takes itself too seriously. We tend to side-eye the overly polished, the aggressively marketed, the things that shout look how perfect I am. There's a reason the underdog story resonates so strongly here.

Buggy indie games, in a weird way, fit that sensibility perfectly. They're unpretentious. They're not trying to sell you a lifestyle or prove something. They're just there, doing their chaotic little thing, and if something goes sideways, well — that's kind of the fun.

"I think Aussies are pretty good at laughing at stuff," says Rhys. "Including the games they're playing. It's not mean-spirited — it's more like, you're in on it together."

Streaming culture has amplified this considerably. Australian content creators on Twitch and YouTube have built loyal followings around playing deliberately rough games and reacting to the chaos in real time. The shared experience of watching something go spectacularly wrong — and losing it laughing — creates a kind of communal joy that slicker, more serious games sometimes can't match.

The Developers Who Lean Into It

Not every janky game is an accident. Increasingly, indie developers — including several in Australia — are making deliberate design choices to embrace instability as a feature.

Sydney developer Marcus, who's currently working on a physics-based cooking game he describes as "catastrophically unbalanced," says the decision to leave certain bugs in was intentional. "There's a moment in the game where the oven door flies off and launches the chicken across the kitchen. I could fix it. I've chosen not to. It's the funniest thing in the whole game."

He's not wrong. And it reflects a broader shift in how some developers think about polish. For a small studio or a solo dev working with limited resources, chasing AAA-level smoothness is both impossible and, arguably, beside the point. Leaning into the roughness — making it part of the personality — can be a smarter creative move.

"Players are pretty smart," Marcus says. "They know what a small indie game is. They're not expecting Red Dead Redemption. So if you give them something that's charming and weird and a little broken, they're often totally on board."

Finding the Good Stuff

If you're keen to explore this corner of the gaming world, here's where to start:

• itch.io is your best friend. Filter by "weird" or "experimental" and prepare for a rabbit hole.
• Steam's "overwhelmingly positive" jank gems — look for games with funny user review screenshots.
• Game jam collections — events like Ludum Dare and Global Game Jam produce thousands of rough, rapid-fire games, and some of them are absolutely unhinged in the best way.
• Community recommendations — subreddits like r/patientgamers and r/indiegaming regularly surface underrated oddities.

And don't sleep on local Australian developers. The indie scene here is genuinely thriving, with creators making weird, interesting, imperfect things that you won't find anywhere else.

Imperfection as a Feature

At its core, the jank appreciation movement is about something pretty simple: games are supposed to be fun. Not impressive. Not technically flawless. Fun. And sometimes — maybe more often than we'd like to admit — the most fun thing a game can do is completely lose the plot for thirty seconds while you watch a ragdoll character vibrate through a wall.

There's no stress in that moment. No leaderboard pressure, no ranked anxiety, no fear of missing out on a limited-time event. Just you, a broken physics engine, and the very human joy of watching something go wonderfully, stupidly wrong.

That's not a bug. That's a feature.

And if you ask Aussie gamers, it might just be their favourite one.