Indie Gaming Comes to The Hall
The three games that are featured in Indie Game: The Movie are inspired choices. We spend most of the film with Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes of Team Meat, who are working on a game about a boy with no skin who must survive a world full of knives; and Phil Fish and his associate Renaud Bédard, who are struggling to finish Fez, an intricately-visualized game about a little man in a two-dimensional world who suddenly acquires a sense of depth. Rounding out the story are interviews with Jonathan Blow, whose Braid—a meditation on how we experience space and time, as well as a descendent of Super Mario Bros.—ranks as one of the best-selling downloads in the history of Microsoft’s Xbox.
When you play a videogame, it’s not always easy to picture the creators who worked behind the scenes. I’m not just talking about big budget games, where hundreds of people might spend years on a big-budget blockbuster like the Madden or Modern Warfare franchises. Games aren’t statements or essays: they are rich interactive experiences that feel different to everyone who enters them. In Fez, the interlocking worlds that Phil Fish has created are absorbing and complete. When you explore its secrets and unlock its puzzles, you inevitably dwell on your own perceptions, your own footsteps, your own false starts and sudden deaths. Same goes for Super Meat Boy: when we watch a singer deliver a lyric, we can glue our eyes to theirs. What can you learn about the men of Team Meat as you watch their game kill you again and again and again?
This is where Indie Game: The Movie shines. We meet the creators’ families, hear their dreams, and wallow in their frustrations. The filmmakers draw a straight line from McMillen’s anxieties to his vulnerable, exposed protagonist. And when we watch Fish teeter on the verge of a nervous breakdown as he tries to show his game at a major convention, we see the obsessive love that has kept his project going.
Pajot and Swirsky don’t consider themselves big gamers. Coming at the industry from the outside, they bring an outsider’s eye to the insider references, and they make these projects accessible to a wide audience—something that can be incredibly hard to do, as gaming remains a niche (though fantastically profitable) form of entertainment in the wider cultural landscape.
Of course, that’s changing: thanks to the iPhone, people of all ages are becoming passionate gamers, and many of them are playing independently-produced games without even knowing it. The world of indie games is much too vast to fit in a single documentary, but Indie Game: The Movie is the perfect way to get started.
We hope you’ll see it here at the Music Hall. And if you come early or stick around after the show, you’ll have the opportunity to play over half a dozen indie games—including Braid and Super Meat Boy, as seen in the movie; B. U. T. T. O. N., a simple, wickedly fun party game that forces four people to compete in silly physical contests; Proteus, a gorgeous, nuanced world that unfurls before your eyes; the super-fun multiplayer sports game Hokra; and AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome, a futuristic base jumping game by the Boston studio Dejobaan Games in collaboration with Owlchemy Labs. Every game is easy to try, fun to play, and sure to please and surprise. We look forward to seeing you there.
About The Author
Chris Dahlen is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared at Pitchfork, Variety, the Boston Phoenix, the Onion AV Club, and Kill Screen Magazine, where he was the co-founder and editor-in-chief. He has also written for games including Carmen Sandiego for Facebook and the upcoming Mark of the Ninja, from Klei Entertainment.