Stop making people feel ashamed for loving casual games — and stop feeling embarrassed about your own “guilty secrets.”
That was the message from Kimberly Voll, a VR expert working on Fantastic Contraption who spoke as part of the Game Developers Conference’s now-traditional Indie Soapbox.
“I want to shout from the rooftops that I play Bloodborne because somehow it validates me as a gamer,” she told the crowd. “But my dark secret is that sometimes I play Candy Crush too.”
Voll shared this dark secret before a packed conference hall on Tuesday evening, one of many independent developers who delivered short, energetic rants on some aspect of their profession.
“Our industry as evolved to have ‘right games’ and ‘wrong games,'” Voll continued. “There’s no such thing as the wrong game. Nobody should feel their status as a gamer questioned because of what game they play.”
To defeat this “game shaming,” she urged a monatorium on judgmental language like “casual game” and “guilty pleasure.”
Voll’s theme was echoed by Toni Rocca, president of LGBTQ-centric game convention GaymerX, who spoke about the “double standards” applied to indie and AAA games. She noted how titles like Read Only Memories — produced by Midboss, the same company behind GaymerX — receive the same repetitive complaints over and over from angry people who seem to believe they aren’t real games. These included:
- “Walking simulator”
- “Not gonna try it”
- “it’s in 2D and that’s bad”
- “There’s a girl in it and I’m mad for some reason”
- “This game is really pretentious. Also, I haven’t played it.”
But Rocca also gently upbraided indie fans who expect small developers to tackle issues of diversity and oppression without mistakes, while giving a pass to AAA developers who don’t even try: “The people who are actually touching on social issues, who might not be doing it perfectly, or might even do it super wrong – they are getting bombarded by people who make them feel they shouldn’t even have touched that issue.”
How not to screw yourself over
Many talks focused on surviving the so-called Indiepocalypse — a dangerous spiral of increasing consumer choice and endless Steam sales which drives indie game prices towards zero.
Dan Adelman, a business consultant for Axiom Verge and Chasm, called on developers to start telling their customers at launch exactly how long it would be until their games went on sale.
Skullduggery‘s Amy Dallas (source: Mobilize).
The average time between launch and first sale, he said, was “about six weeks” — making full price customers feel like “suckers.” Giving fair warning means people can choose how much they value the time they will have to wait until the price drops.
Amy Dallas, who quit the Sims franchise to make Skullduggery, had blunt advice: “Make a fucking budget, for fuck’s sake.”
Too many indies don’t budget, she said, because it makes them uncomfortable. But even those who do often only consider external costs and fail to put a price on their own labour.
“Our time has value,” she said. “Figure out what that value is, plug it into your budget, and look at what your project really costs.”
That felt like a contrast with David Condolora, who created Doggins and the upcoming Burly Men At Sea with his wife Brooke. Quoting Captain Kirk (“Never tell me the odds!”), he said indies should think only of finishing their game — by any means necessary.
For Condolora and Brooke, that meant quitting his job and trading their Bay Area apartment for increasingly poky temporary accommodations, including a volunteer farm near Portland and a tiny wooden house in a field. None of it mattered, he said, as long as their game was getting made.
Max Temkin, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity, warned that social media companies are starving indie developers of publicity. Like politicians, he argued, indies rely on a hard core of highly motivated superfans who love everything they do. But the use of algorithms to decide what you see or don’t see is blocking them off from these supporters.
Gmail’s multiple inboxes, for instance, have cut Temkin’s mailing list click-through rate from 90% to 50%, while Twitter and Facebook act “like the mob” — refusing to show content to more than a few thousand people unless you pay.
“Specialization is for insects“
Other talks looked further afield. Mahdi Bahrami, an Iranian developer who makes beautiful games about mathematics and Islamic artwork, seemed bemused by his industry’s insularity. He asked fellow indies to look beyond their technical horizons and be more like medieval polymaths such as Ibn Sina.
“Who cares about the PS4 dev kit?” he said, to laughter. “In four years we don’t even know the PS4 will still be here, but the solar system and fractals will always be there.”
If you build it, they will come
The most affecting talk was from Amy Green, who with her husband Ryan created That Dragon, Cancer — a game about the death of their son Joel which broke out of the bubble of game-centric news sites to be lauded by the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and even the Daily Mail.
“The fact that the world sees That Dragon, Cancer as novel just shows that outside of this room, outside of this conference, people still don’t understand the potential of videogames.”
This bemused Green. “We didn’t do anything surprising,” she said. “Humans have always expressed grief through art… we found ourselves in the surreal position of giving interview after interview for doing a really common thing. The fact that the world sees That Dragon, Cancer as novel just shows that outside of this room, outside of this conference, people still don’t understand the potential of videogames.”
Nor did Green at first. She stayed on the “peripheries,” downplaying her role because she couldn’t code (though she would sometimes help Ryan by methodically replacing his commands with “dirty words”). But her growing enchantment with the medium’s power convinced her that she needed to make her voice heard.
That, she said, is how games must grow. “If you want to draw more non-technical voices, and if you want to have the best storytellers in the world beating down the door… all you have to do is keep introducing the world to what videogames can be. Those artists will find their way to games, jumping every technical hurdle in the way. Most of them still don’t know what you already know: that games are intrinsically personal, and the perfect medium for sharing your heart.”
(Top photo source: Official GDC.)
John Brindle is a critic and journalist who lives in south London, working as a mild-mannered editor for a metropolitan newspaper. He tweets @john_brindle.
