PixelVixen707

I spent the better part of the day checking out indie games. And I made a conclusion: I’ll never really get the indie scene until I learn to write code.

I reached that conclusion at the end of the Indie Game Developer’s Rant this morning at Moscone North. The highlight: final panelist Petri Purho used his five minutes of time, not to complain about publishers or tackle the “games are art” question, but to actually make a game. It was a rag doll/Peggle mash-up and it almost didn’t work until Cactus came up and helped him get it running. But nevertheless, we watched as he cut some code in one place and pasted it somewhere else and made a game before our very eyes. The crowd loved it.

Another experience: tonight I caught the launch party for The Path, the deliciously eerie horror game made by Tale of Tales, who also did that joint with the old lady in the graveyard. (Which is up for an award at the Independent Games Festival tomorrow night - and I’m right that IGF is truly Sundance for games now, no?)

The makers of The Path are artists first, technologists second. Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn set out to retell the tale of Little Red Ridinghood and her trip down the path to grandma’s house - and what happens when she decides to veer away and check out the woods instead. I put a couple of hours into it before I came to GDC, and that was nowhere near long enough to plumb the stories and horrors hidden in this game.

The party started at 6, and I made it to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts just in time for the screening. And this was really a screening. While somebody - I think it was Harvey - steered us through the woods, two musicians sang and and triggered laptop samples of the score and a creaking swingset. One of the singers also gave a reading of the story of “Little Red Ridinghood,” with sexual undertones firmly inserted.

Harvey took us through a happy-case runthrough, where Ruby wanders off the path but is rescued by the girl in white. Then she triggered Rose’s story on the lake. I won’t ruin it except to say that it was powerful, affecting, and thoroughly terrifying …

… until the game crashed.

Right at the door of grandma’s bedroom, where something probably brain-scratchingly awful lay in store for us, the game hung. The cast covered up well; the musicians finished the performance and the reading, and Harvey came up and gave us a big thank you for coming. This isn’t the sort of thing anybody would really mind. But it’s one of the pitfalls of relying on so much, and such new technology.

Same goes for the Indie Games Rant panel this morning. When I read that a dozen or so of our brightest new minds in indie gaming would be sharing a talk, I expected big things. Big manifestos. Big controversies. And the panel did have its moments. Phil Fish called out the Independent Games Festival for nominating PixelJunk Eden, which was well-funded and already a big hit on Sony’s download store, when there are plenty of hard-working new gamers who can’t even scrape together the $100 to submit their game in the first place. He stirred the pot. Simon Carless even jumped onstage to correct one of his statements. Sparks flew.

But at the end, Fish caved and petered out. He admitted he didn’t know where he would set the threshold for what’s “indie” enough, and by the end he kind of wandered around and started driveling about, what is indie anyway, etc. This disappointed me. Maybe other indie gamemakers have a clearer concept of what indie means as an ethical and business concept. The indie music and indie comics scenes worked this out for themselves, and maybe gamemakers will too.

But why would they bother? Indie game developers are small businessmen waiting to happen. As soon as they get a name, they can start a studio, get a good industry job, or just take their lucrative coding skills to a lucrative coding job. Fish shouldn’t ask, “what is indie” so much as, “did I make sure to get a lawyer before I sign anything.”

The rest of the talks were, well, mostly a mess. Mark Johns tackled the “are games art” question by reminiscing about the time he told off Roger Ebert, who has argued that games can’t be art. But Ebert’s still sticking to his guns, and so are a lot of other people. “It’s just gonna take time for people like Ebert to die off,” Johns concluded.

Steve Swink, who organizes the IGF, gave a little plea for “ethical game design,” without giving any idea what that means. “If you’re going to make a game, don’t make a game that wastes people’s fucking time.” Well, that’s broad: should boss fights only last three minutes? Chris Lobay called for us to look for the auteurs in game development; good point, but we’ve been down that road too. And Flower’s Kellee Santiago called for gamers to … unite. “There are so many little flames out there,” she said (and by “little flames” she meant “all the game developers who aren’t basking in their hit stoner game”). She wants them to come together in a “big bonfire.” Well, isn’t that why everybody flew out here this week?

I did like Mare Sheppard’s mini-rant, which made the case that every single game should ship a demo. It costs more for the developers, but it’s the most ethical way to tell the customer what they’re getting and why they should pay for it. Yes, this is just a business point, but she posed it clearly and it had a lot of merit.

But Purho’s talk drew the biggest laughs, because everyone could relate to it. Everyone in the room was a coder, and everyone in the room had had their dev tools shit the bed on them. And in that sense, the indie developers that GDC has put in front of me - and again, this is just staring at the wolves in the zoo, not wrestling them in the wild - don’t have their stories straight yet. They’re still learning how to use their tools, and break their tools, and make something better than the tools were ever made to make. They’re learning to play with ideas that other people might be sick of. They’re taking a game that’s really an intriguing, creepy little piece of work and staging it like an independent film, just because that’s where their guts led them.

And yes, some indie gamers can strike a mission statement or take complicated, messy problems and cram them into a nutshell. They might even question the modes of production and all that snoozy Marx stuff. But if you want to reach indie gamemakers where they really live, I’m suspecting the way to their hearts is through their compilers.