Communative

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. 

Every now and then

Every now and then something special comes along. However, in the shallows of the digital torrent, every “now” seems to be every five seconds and every “then” was 2 hours ago. Inspiring? Maybe. Numbing? Definitely.

 

But then, if you’re very lucky, something will cut through the morass. Something so coruscating and brilliant, that every fibre of your being is set alight with tiny twinkling pulses. The digital crusts nestling in the corners of your square eyes are sucked clear and you understand again. You comprehend how creativity is meant to make you feel (italicised here, because it’s easy to forget that this is the point – emotional mimesis; orchestrated compassion; feeling).

I am lucky enough to be able to say that such a revelation has recently occurred for me. I was making a cup of coffee the other day, when I bumped into one of our creatives. We started to chat and very soon I was listening to him rave about a little animation set-up he called “ Tokyo Plastic”.  This was my lead.

I logged-on to take a little flick through their web-page (http://www.tokyoplastic.com) and BLOODY HELL!  I feel like I need to resort to M&Sisms just to communicate how sodding impressive these guys are. “This is not just a little animation set-up; this is a style-soaking, innovation-drinking, genius-pissing little animation setup.” These guys make movies, short films, graphics and ads. They also design toys, t-shirts and dildos. They’ve worked with Microsoft, Aiwa, Mitsubishi, Guy Ritchie, Dreamworks SKG, AMD and Toyota; and have won the audience award at the Sundance film festival, the Flash Forward 3D category (three years in a row) and a D&AD pencil (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDguaz5I98Q).

 

"Well good for them!" I hear you bleat...

 

Yes, I agree, all of that stuff is bollocks. Just lists and claims. Just words. So, what you really want to do is click onto the site to have a peep with your own eyes. The work speaks and acts for itself. You’ll be converted much before you have the chance to read even one word. 

“Okay, but really does this really justify a blog post? Just paste in the link, god-damn it!”

Well, I get your point. But there is more… I promise.

Tokyo Plastic are a demonstration of something pretty radical. They are a glimpse, a glimmer, of the realisation of an idea that many of the sharpest minds in digital have only until now conceived of hypothetically.

“Oooohhh….big talk from the man at the keyboard!”

Maybe, but bare this in mind: they don’t have a central idea. They don’t have an umbrella thought. They don’t have a brand as we would understand it and build it. They just have lots of separate, brilliant, variously relevant and commercially productive pieces of content. All that sits at the centre is one intensely burning nugget of creativity (its founders- Sam Lanyon Jones and Drew Cope). This is what makes them different. This is what saves them from being buried. This is what makes them operate as a brand and is why they work as company.

 

“Okay…gulp, I get it, but surely you don’t think this is a model for all brands to follow”

 

Ho, ho, no! Far from it. I’ll leave that argument for Dylan Williams, thanks very much. But it is interesting to think, that it is a viable business model. Their set-up does work for them. That much cannot be denied. The rest of the inference, I shall have to leave up to you.

The theme of the mean meme

"Hey man, have you seen that clip yet? You know the one: that snippet where a bloke creeps up behind his sister, screams her name, and then slaps here off her chair? LOL! Or, oh God mate, you’d love this one: that meme about the little boy who’s close to tears because of the side effects of his anesthesia? Nearly ROFL’d my waffle!" 

Hmm… not such an endearing missive. In fact, both of the clips mentioned, and their endorsement (3 million and 22 million views respectively), rile a certain amount of moral rebellion in my gut. This is not to say that neither of them inspired nervous laughter when I first watched them. Nor is it to say that I didn’t lean creepily close to the LCD to watch the hi-jinks unfold. In fact, I have noticed that, like so many seeking their entertainment on the net, I have begun to develop a sort of morbid fascination with this more “extreme” breed of web viral. In fact, it is this category to which this post is dedicated.

This is a trend spotting piece. A tract where, as a net-based social trend flies bye at a brain frying pace,  I whack a socking great flag in its slithery  belly, just so we can demarcate it from the rest of the thousand-mile an hour hocus-pocus. After that's done, I will then conclude with a suggestion of how this might affect the business of communications.

The trend I am skewering this week is “morally questionable comedy”. Not such a snappy title, I know, but it does the job.

Firstly, I must make it absolutely clear that there is a distinct and important difference between this title and the seemingly similar subject of “immorality in comedy”. This is a truth threefold. Firstly, when one talks of morality and ethics, the issue of theology rather quickly rears its head, and from the outset I must confirm that I am, indeed, an atheist. I simply do not have any biblical references for absolute definitions of my ethics, nor do I have any sort of missionary axe to grind. Secondly, I am sympathetic with Hume’s “guillotine”. In the great man’s “Treatise of Human Nature” (1739), he uses the aforementioned slicer, to severe the world of fact from the world of value (i.e. what is observed, is just that, and that only). Put simply, I do not believe that descriptive statements (“is” statements) have any logical connection with prescriptive statements (“ought” statements). Those oughts (in my opinion) tend to originate from the observer. Thirdly, (and this is the important bit) I do not intend to re-write Philosophy’s rule-book, or re-invent its wheels. Absolutists, consquentialists, deontologists, naturalists, non-cognitivists, objectivists and subjectivists alike, will all have definite and variously cogent opinions on the moral scale of this matter, and I do not intend to wade in and embarrass myself. Although I am prone to them, on this occasion I will not be indulging myself with a spleen purging pub rant.

This article is about an identification, not an evaluation, of “morally questionable comedy”.  It is written in recognition of a variety of internet meme that raises eyebrows and stimulates the sort of discussion most ably marshalled by the tribes mentioned above, but most fervently pursued by the Daily Mail. This is not to say that this genre intrinsically holds content that is moral or immoral – just that its ethics are quite frequently up for debate.

In short, this "meme theme" (or "MT") could be seen to fit snugly under the umbrella of “black comedy”. All of the trademark attributes, be they separated or working in conjunction, seem to be present and correct. Indeed, broad satire, the comically shocking, protracted humiliation and taboo subversion run through this trend like a carotid artery, pumping life into its fibre. And, certainly, this supply is profuse and direct; this is an incredibly vigorous genre.

Beyond this simple description, the MT is characterised by 2 further ideas: a fascination with the visceral and a progressive celebration of the extreme. This is what gives the trend its edge. It doesn’t just represent black humour, it consistently represents it in its superlative form; incrementally amplified and mutated to be more base, more graphic and more downright disturbing than the what has gone before. Potent stuff!

For immediate evidence of this progression, just check out the notorious history of the "random" (or "/b/") forum on 4chan.org (not for the fainthearted), or the back-catalogues of failblog and keyboard cat. All 3 (the last 2 being pretty closely related) find energy in the principles outlined above. Indeed, /b/'s content frequently follows this path to its natural conclusion; hosting content which is eventually a concern for the police.

So, I suppose, some attempt should be made to speculate about why there is such an audience for this stuff; why are people fascinated by videos of teenagers being berated by their folks for being atheists, or by clips of Japanese men being thrown down ski runs in the nude?

Now this is a huge question, but some educated guesses can be made.

• The first knee-jerk reaction is to suggest that humans have always enjoyed watching others fall down, and that pathos has forever been an excepted tenet of humour. Indeed the misfortune of others is apparent in almost every form of comedy ever realised: from ancient Greek satire, right through to the most saccharine of children’s television.
  

However, this is a pretty unsatisfactory conclusion, as this trend isn’t just about mocking – it is also fuelled by an obsession with the excessive and the visceral. With this in mind, 2 possibly contributing factors might be:

• It exists, because it now possible for it to exist...
  Thanks to the internet and readily available audio-visual technology (see the Flip for confirmation of this), the production of entertainment is now firmly in the hands of the people. More of the grittier, weirder and more shocking bits of life are being documented than ever before.

• Modern life is meh!
  Thinkers, such as the infamous Bakhtin, see the ritual of carnival as a way for society to subvert norms and so access a more natural form of experience. We might consider something similar for our MT; where people fore-go mainstream sanitised culture to indulge in documentations that are more visceral and emotionally relevant. Maybe what clips like "David after the dentist" offer is merely a little life affirmation. 

Finally, we might pay some thought to the implications this MT has for the communications industry. It may have become increasingly visible to the mainstream, but does this mean brands should start fooling around with it, trying to appropriate its sense of humour? Possibly not.

To my mind, it would be rare to find a brand that would sit comfortably with grand-scale hyper-realistic humiliation. Moreover, attempts to tone it down would only see its relevance disintegrate (see the Dominoes' Britain's Got Talent spots for evidence).

To this end, we should perhaps view this trend identification in another way. Rather than replicate its superficial traits, perhaps we should further examine this MT's motivations. Indeed, I would moot that instead of watching the TV screens for its infiltration, we should be starting to more conscientiously consider the consumer mindset that is propelling it and where this support will take it next.