Spelltower creator and Ridiculous Fishing collaborator Zach Gage said it best as he opened this GDC session’s string of miniature rants from well-known developers: “This has been a very intense year for the indie scene.”
Now a fixture on the GDC schedule, this year’s Indie Soapbox offered paeans to bravery, tips on how to avoid shame, and former Journey developer Robin Hunicke, now at San Francisco studio Funomena, closed the session by stating her hope to see games do a better job of expressing exactly these kinds of emotions.
Gage began by calling 2013 “one of the best years” for the indie scene. It was “a year of advocacy and inclusion, a year of arguments. We’ve gone from what is art, to what is games, to what is indie,” he said, “But I feel that games, more than any other medium, are a representation of ourselves. I was thinking a lot about that dumb idea of corporations as people – if they can be, then games are people too. A game like Bejeweled laughs heartily at our jokes whether they’re funny or not…Spelunky is the kind of cool kid who puts up barriers before they let you in.
“The greatest games are the ones we never truly understand, even as their creator. This is how games keep us humble. Every game we release is an expedition into the unknown, every game designer is an astronomer discovering new universes; as long as we keep up the bravery, everything is going to work out great.”
Ethan Levy, a challenging inclusion in the soapbox as an in-game monetization-focused consultant, followed this call for bravery with a discussion of the ‘indie game shame spiral.’ “Every game starts with a eureka moment; an idea you are intensely passionate about,” he began. “You start with a big to-do list, time passes and you find yourself getting through less of it than you hoped. So you start to get depressed about your lack of progress, which drains your motivation, which drives you even deeper into a pit of despair…before long, your behaviour starts to change. Maybe you start taking longer lunch breaks, maybe what you have to get done before you can get to coding becomes more and more. And all that time, a new idea is growing for a new game. So you abandon the original idea and start working on something new. It’s a proven way to never, ever ship a game.”
Levy provided a range of ideas to “claw your way out of” the shame spiral, such as managing your own time the way you would manage a team’s, ensuring you have realistic expectations of what you can get done and regularly performing ‘personal post-mortems’. “If you waste an entire afternoon arguing with someone on Reddit, you have to call yourself out on it,” he said.
The message from Robin Hunicke, who recently formed her studio Funomena with Keita Takahashi, was clear: “I believe in feelings. And especially lately I’ve been thinking about how feelings are important to game design. When we start designing a game, I think feelings are a good place to start: what are you trying to make the player feel?”
“Have we given up on some feelings because they are harder to express than others?” asked Hunicke. “Or do we think that perhaps we as game designers can’t really express these things we find in ourselves? I find myself wondering and daydreaming what it would be like if we could interact with these feelings in some way. I find myself hoping that there are some games out there like this just waiting for us to reach them.”
Feelings “help us understand and appreciate each other,” Hunicke concluded. “Feelings make us human.”
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