"It's giving me goosebumps," Reddy says, remembering the first time the games development studio she co-founded and directs exhibited. "People don't realise how culturally important games are": Siobhan Reddy, director and co-founder of Media Molecule. Credit:Janie Barrett "We all got a bit emotional." It was yet another feather in the cap for Reddy, 36, whose successes are seeing both Australia and the UK fighting to claim her as their own. (The 36-year-old spent her formative years in Sydney, moving from South Africa when she was four, and departed for the UK at 18.) In 2013, BBC's Woman's Hour listed her as one of Britain's 100 most powerful women. Last year, she was awarded Qantas Australian Woman of the Year, and also named in Fortune's 10 most powerful women in gaming. More recently she was nominated as a finalist in the Advance Global Australian Awards, which celebrate talented Australians living overseas.

There are few people better placed than Reddy to rewrite games' place in society. Atoi, the unique, female lead character from Tearaway and Tearaway Unfolded. Credit:Media Molecule For her, the opportunity to present beautiful, digital artwork from award-winning games in a prestigious exhibition space means being able to reach new audiences. One moment that stuck out for her at last month's showing of Tearaway Unfolded was when a visitor relayed his epiphany that games could provide a meaningful, shared experience for him and his young son, whom he'd brought along to the exhibition. Reddy explains: "He was saying to me, 'I'm really into my children being exposed to a lot of alternative views of the world and … really artistic things, and I'd not really thought about games as being that way before. I should be doing them with my little boy!'"

But if the fusion of games with high art creates new audiences, it also elevates the games into new territory by inviting traditional audiences to view them in a new light. "Seeing [the game] in the context of that space – that is beautiful … almost like seeing games again for the first time," Reddy says. Media Molecule's titles are a far cry from your average shoot-em-ups or car racing games. The artwork is both distinctive and wildly creative, deliberately pushing boundaries and transporting players into completely new worlds. "One of the central missions of the studio is to do creative projects which flirt with metaphor of the connection between physical materials, physical creation and digital creation, a beautiful craft aesthetic," Reddy says. "With Tearaway Unfolded we wanted to make a beautiful tactile world that you could stick your fingers in."

The V&A exhibit included a craft station for visitors to make paper art, extending the paper cut-out artwork of the game into the real world. Meanwhile, a promo for Media Molecule's next release, Dreams, which is still in development, features polar bears doing belly flops, killer teddy bears, and creepy robots soaring through the sky on what look like flying jetskis. A key ingredient in the studio's ability to remain agile and creative is its size. The company deliberately maintains a relatively small staff of around 55, despite its considerable successes. In contrast, the biggest games studios in the world – the likes of Ubisoft and Electronic Arts – boast several thousand. At the other end of the scale, however, are small independent developer studios, and it's their rise in Australia which has Reddy excited. When she left for London, there weren't many opportunities in Australia to make games, other than to join a big blockbuster studio, she says. "It's a different way of thinking now, it's more indie, and that's where people begin making games and how they get practice, and there are more ways to do that than ever before."