Indie Gaming

As hinted at a little while ago, I've recently been enjoying a peek into the world of Indie Gaming. A small sample of this investigation has now been published in Dazed & Confused. However, there is more. Much more. Not too much. But just enough. Just enough to keep you guys topped up...

The thing is, there are just so many questions to answer. Far to many in fact, for me to attempt some sort of encyclopaedic comprehensive review. You’d balk, you’d scoff and well, you wouldn’t bother to read it.  However, a useful way to scratch the surface might be to ask one of the industry’s leading lights what he thinks. So, in a Communative first, the majority of this post will be dedicated to an interview...

Let me quickly set the scene. The video game industry is now into its 44^th year and things are still pretty “straight-forward”. That’s not to say that we don’t have anything to be thankful for. It’s been fun. Things have bleeped, blipped and blown up, but a small section of the game-playing public have started to ask questions. They want to know if the medium could offer something a little more; a little more creative, a little more insightful, a little more fulfilling? Just like after roughly 4 decades of film, similar voices of dissent birthed “indie” cinema, the same is now happening for gaming . Currently, one of  these voices is slightly louder than the rest. It also makes the most sense. Whenever it speaks up, the industry listens. Whatever he does, people gather round and watch.  His Name? Jason Rohrer.

 

C: How would you describe Indie or Art gaming?

JR: Well I think of them as being different things. I think of independent games as being made outside of the mainstream studio system; in the same way as you think about independent film. But within that space, there’s all sorts of purposes and reasons that a game might exist. Some people are making games that are sort of independent versions of something that occurs very frequently in the mainstream and then, separate from that, are games where the purpose is art. I guess that’s more common in the independent space because people have the creative freedom.

Would you consider your games as Art Games?

For most of my games, I have been trying to make art with them. I  approach it that way as a creator. So when I start making a game, I’m trying to make a work of art and I’m trying to push myself to express something that’s important to me. Whether it’s perceived that way or not, is another issue.

There’s a lot of interest around Art Gaming at the moment. Are the people driving that popularity art fans or gamers?

I think most of them are people that are already playing video games, but are dissatisfied with what’s going on in the mainstream. People like myself, for example. I’ll walk into a video games store, look at all the hundreds of boxes that are on the shelf and not really see anything there! But that’s not the same for film – I can’t keep up with the amount of stuff that would be worth my time!

So is entering a games store like walking into a video rentals and only seeing B-grade action movies?

Yeah! But with even worse acting and stories.

Like if all the movies had Steven Seagal?

Yeah! And that highlights how the effort behind those games has been misdirected in the first place. They’re trying to make games that are like movies – with actors and characters and storylines. I don’t think that games are primarily a storytelling medium – because they’re not linear and require input from the participant. There are a lot of things about the form of games that fights with storytelling. If storytelling is pre-baked and pre-authored, when you go in there and interact with it, pretty much most of the time you’re going to be breaking it!

But isn’t your new title “Sleep is Death essentially storytelling?

That was based in this insight. I was disappointed by the storytelling in mainstream games and the problem of interactivity. There’s this Holy Grail that we’re always dreaming about, that someday we’re going to be able make fully interactive stories. But that’s going to require some really sophisticated artificial intelligence, where even if you try to break a story characters respond to you in a way that tricks you to falling back into the story. We’ve said we’ve been taking baby steps towards that, for the last 30 years. Do I wait another 30 years, until I’m elderly, to make games about things that are important to me? About the human condition, relationships and other things, that I feel are interactive experiences? But if you take the need for it to be single player out of the equation, then all of a sudden it becomes a really easy problem to solve. You’re no longer relying on artificial intelligence – you can have a real person!

So I realised “Wow! Why don’t we have this other man, as another human?” And it’s not a burden. It’s actually very engaging to command characters, and figure out what they’re going to say and to drive drama in response to what someone else is doing. So, you have a 2 player game, where 2 people have interesting but different experiences – one experiences the story, the other is constructing it.

Most of your games have a simplistic aesthetic. Is this on purpose?

When I design the way my games look, I want them to look like games, like something made on a computer. So I’m not trying to mimic other mediums.

Is it true you were drafted into work on Steven Spielberg’s secret LMNO game project?

Yes. They became aware of my work because of Passage. It (LMNO) was a pretty elaborate game with many systems in it. One of the systems was dealing with human relationships. And not much design work had been done on it. It was just sitting there waiting and I came up with the prototype for them. I’m not going to say too much about it. It may have been cancelled, it may not have been cancelled...

Has there been any other approaches by big business?

I was approached last year by (the publishers) Majesco. They wanted me to make a game for the Nintendo DS. I’ve been working on that for the past year. The name of the game is “Diamond Trust of London” (www.diamondtrustgame.com).

Is there now a trend of the mainstream looking for talent in art gaming?

I think there is. The scene has been drawing so much attention. There’s so much happening. Because of all of the recognition it’s much more common for publishers to be approaching independents.

Does this mean new levels of craft and integrity will be brought to the mainstream, subsuming indie, or will indie gaming continue to sustain itself?

I don’t know. I really like the Hollywood model, where each year they go and pay close attention to what’s happening in the independent scene. They look at the best films and pick them up for distribution nationally, and then sign multiple picture contracts with each of these filmmakers and put studio money behind the next pictures that are made by those people. I would like to see that happening.

If you were a betting man, where would say Art gaming will be in 5 years time?

Increasingly, I think that people are starting to think of video games in terms of personal expression and creative ambition. I think there’s a hunger for it amongst those who are frustrated by current video games. There’s quite a cohesive movement now; an art game comes out once a month at least. I hope this’ll continue. 

Just hope?

Well doing these things with games, is much harder than doing them with other mediums because we don’t really know how to do it! I’ve made 13 games and throughout I’ve been constantly exploring, trying to find new ways of being creatively expressive. I’m still exploring right now.