Indie Games: The Movie
I recently viewed one of the most important documentaries about indie games developers. It’s not the most exciting thrill ride available to the home streamer but it was chock full of insight. I have to confess that I was under-informed about all of it. I’ll try to cover what bit of bits I was able to glean from the experience.
Indie game development is about creating something personal and doing it in an interactive medium. Indie games also enable interpersonal communication and expression between developer and player. This is a good source of insight into the experience of game dev. There is a good bit of personal drama involved in the process of game dev, and they are sharing themselves and their touch of madness with the player community. In a surprising and truly alarming number of cases, the process of game development is productive of psychological distress for those at the game-making grindstone. It can be a psyche-crunching process that, in an utterly real sense, alienates the developer from the fetal game right in front of him. In debiting the game world she is withdrawing something from herself, if but for a time.
AAA games are about being big, realistic, and massively distributed. Getting the LCD to stare at the LED. Indie games are about focusing on something that is special to a smaller community. It is about satisfying the needs of somewhat of a niche in the gaming ecosystem. To my headlights, this seems to be the single most important aspect. The game makers profiled were making games for younger and in many ways more vulnerable iterations of themselves. They felt abstractly connected to an amorphous community of socially vulnerable youths with particular tastes who are not ramified as such until, just in case, the game is made that populates the intersection of all their peculiar palates. This is crucial to understand: indie game building is also community building at its apotheosis.
Part of the appeal of indie games is taking standard genres like platformers and introducing radically novel art styles. I daren’t dwell on this more technical point, lest I allay any doubt about my own foolishness about looming innovative game mechanics into the digital world of being, though it is important to note and suffice it to say the following pair of statements. Firstly, displaying this virtuosity can be the motivating factor for making the game at all. Secondly, this aspect can define the game, as does the temporal mechanic in Braid. Let us press on.
The movie follows the developers of Super Meat Boy and Fez. Meat Boy was first a flash game that became wildly popular. Fez was brilliant. It was a kind of nod to Flatland, scaled up a dimension. It was a platformer about a 2D character exploring a 3D world. Both were made by duos of independent game designers. Super Meat Boys’ designers come across as deliciously anti-social and subversive. One of them, Edmund, was a nan kid. Now, as an adult, he looks and sounds more than a bit like Seth Rogan. This gives him a lovable charm in spite of his occasional verbal bite. He seems to develop games with the consistent purpose of re-ramifying aspects of his childhood as a creative prodigy. And some of these game designers’ quirks are truly laugh out loud hilarious. I’ll let the reader view the film with an eye to discover these.
Jonathon Blow’s Braid was also featured. This is one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed indie games ever made. Braid is a temporal-kinetic puzzler. I’ve played it and is a satisfyingly clever product.
The stress of the pre-release crunch causes a tension build that can get released in some high drama event for any dev. Yet some devs cannot but bring an overdose of their own personal drama into the process. Phil Fish was also featured, and he seems to’ve personalized delivery of and interactions with the game too much. It seems to have crushed him. He comes across as a person in a near-constant state of panic who made a relaxing, slow-paced game as a cope. I suppose this feature, when done capably, is a source of true artistry.
Overall, the film offers touching personal portraits. For hardcore gamers it’s probably going to be somewhat of a disappointment that the documentary didn’t feature the games and their mechanics and development concepts more. I would’ve liked to learn something about how developers really make it happen: from concept in their heads to playable prototype.
The sacrifices made by game developers in every aspect of their lives is staggering and systemic in the industry. Something for which we players are perhaps insufficiently grateful. Game development takes a psychosocial toll on a developers life which may be enduring. Try to show some modicum of gratitude if you can muster it. It is well deserved, I now less incompletely appreciate.
The creative work of small indie game development can maybe best be described as pathologically severe isolation. This is followed by absences of feelings of relief, in a special situation that can be likened to reading a musical score and not seeing notes in all the places where you precisely expect them to be. Perhaps I—and all of us who live our lives as gamers who can—should make at least one serious game. Only then, can we have the deepest available sense of what gaming is about. Who can better hear music than he who knows what it means to play it to the point of pain, plucking some strings until the fingers bleed?
indiegamethemovie.com
