The face of the enemy flashed across a 20-foot screen. “That’s right,” Jason Rohrer announced. “It’s Roger Ebert.” There were a few boos, as several hundred people stirred in their seats. The film critic’s cherubic face stared at the audience. “Ebert said video games can’t be art,” Rohrer said. “He issued all of us a direct challenge. And we need to find an answer.”
Rohrer was addressing the Game Developers Conference, one of his industry’s premier trade events. Each spring, the conference convenes in San Francisco, and among the tens of thousands of people who attend is a burgeoning fringe of independent designers like Rohrer who hope to radically transform their medium. “A realization is dawning that games can be much more than what they are now,” Rohrer told me later. “They even have the potential to be meaningful in deep, fundamental ways.”
These game designers, a self-described indie scene, form a tightly knit group with a do-it-yourself culture and a rebellious spirit — something like a ’zine movement for video games. New and cheap technologies have enabled the movement’s rise. New tools for production and distribution — through smartphones, over the Web and via downloadable services on PlayStation, Wii and Xbox consoles — now make it possible for individuals to conceive, develop and publish their own games.
Rohrer himself is a kind of Thoreauvian game designer, a 31-year-old back-to-the-land programmer-philosopher who lives in Las Cruces, N.M., where he codes his eccentrically engrossing games, which can feel like digitally mediated poetic moods, on an ancient computer and makes them available free online. “Now anyone can do it,” he says, “which is not how the mainstream video-game industry works.”
Video-game companies were once nimble trailblazers born in the countercultural spirit of the 1970s. But it didn’t take long for the industry to grow into a kingdom of conglomerates, spending tens of millions of dollars on big titles. Soaring development costs squeezed out small publishers and stifled creativity. “There are some great mainstream games, but they are getting to be fewer and further between,” says Rob Auten, who used to run video-game production for 20th Century Fox. “Our industry is probably more risk-averse than Hollywood. It is extremely difficult to break the patterns of the establishment.”
Continue reading the main storyHence the growing opposition. At the conference, the indie community gathered daily, halfway down one wing of the basement, in Room 131, where Rohrer and dozens of other speakers discussed what you might call games for games’ sake. It was a diverse group, including teenagers who make Web games for fun; fine-arts refugees who create digital esoterica; and indie success stories, like Jenova Chen, the co-creator of the PlayStation 3 hit Flower, and Jonathan Blow, who almost single-handedly created Braid, perhaps the most successful independent game of all time. Although theirs is a loyal opposition — they say it is because they love video games so much that they are called to action — there is a playfully polemical attitude among indie gamers, some of whom wore matching eyepatches around the conference as a sign of solidarity. They are activists, people who want to take on juggernauts with two-megabyte downloads. For them, games are software manifestos.
The industry is starting to take notice. Two years ago, almost no one had heard of Jason Rohrer. Then he made Passage, a brief but powerful meditation on mortality that created a stir even before it caused Clint Hocking, the creative director at Ubisoft, the world’s fourth-largest game company, to shed tears. Hocking used Passage to publicly indict his colleagues at last year’s conference. “Why can’t we make a game that . . . means something?” Hocking asked. “A game that matters?”
Many of the mainstream designers who heard Hocking’s lecture a year ago now piled into Room 131 to hear Rohrer ask those questions again. “Other media are capable of masterpiece-level works of art,” Rohrer said. Behind him, a slide showed Picasso’s “Guernica,” a poster for the movie “Blue Velvet” and the cover of “Lolita.” “The question we have to ask is: How can we follow in their footsteps?”
VIDEO GAMES ARE too big for their own good, Rohrer told me as we walked through one of the several convention-hall floors — some 300,000 square feet of screaming bells and digital whistles: supernaturally enhanced combat, turbocharged vehicles, many-eyed monsters with seemingly phlegm-covered fangs and the expensive software that makes it all possible. The conference was a preview of the next incremental step in the industry’s quest to make video games bigger, louder, more realistically violent.
Showcasing these flashy graphics requires bigger teams and more money, which has guided the industry toward safe prospects like licensed properties and sequels. Even when working on more original fare, the enormous teams that create today’s video games dilute artistic intention. There are exceptions like Will Wright, whose legacy includes The Sims, but they stand out because they are exceptions. “For the most part,” Rohrer said, “there’s no single person trying to bring a specific vision to life.”
Making matters worse, according to Rohrer and others, video games fall into the trap of using the wizardry and craft of those big teams to emulate movies — bad movies at that. The narrative elements in today’s big games tend to be retreads of film-genre clichés. Or they’re extensions of actual film brands, like “The Godfather.” Rohrer calls this cinematic approach to video games “asymptotic”: in his view there’s no point in making video games as good as movies, because we already have movies. “Just as early film production copied the stage,” he said, video games have yet to escape the influence of film. “Eventually film figured out editing, camera movement — the tools that made movies movies. Video games need to discover what’s special and different about their own medium to break out of their cultural ghetto.”
This is something that Eric Zimmerman, an independent game designer, has been thinking and writing about for years. Zimmerman, who studied painting as an undergraduate, co-wrote “Rules of Play,” a well-regarded textbook on game design. “Maybe games are not about communication the way movies are,” Zimmerman says. “They’re about interaction — with a system or other players, with rules.”
At the Game Developers Conference, the avant-garde assembled itself around the Independent Games Festival, a patch of convention floor where more than two dozen idiosyncratic titles were on display. Not far away, cheers rose as gamers played blockbuster releases like Street Fighter IV, but there was still healthy traffic around whimsical, mostly two-dimensional games with titles like I Wish I Were the Moon. Because of their lo-fi graphics, these titles might look like kids’ games to the casual viewer. Or they may not look much like games at all, abandoning conceits like competition and levels, winning and losing. Osmos appeared to be an amoebic adventure in space. Coil begins by piloting a sperm in search of an ova. Blueberry Garden, a floor favorite that was named the best game in the festival, looked like a surreal moving storybook with a flying, beaked protagonist.
Billed by its programmer, Erik Svedang, as a game of “curiosity and exploration,” Blueberry Garden features little instruction and no puzzles — other than the question of what exactly to do next — but roaming among the garden’s flora and fauna to the sounds of a Debussy-like soundtrack is captivating. “Dude, you just kind of float around and get those blueberry power-ups,” one player explained to his friend. But the directionless dream world of the garden turns out to be a seductive trap. The garden is slowly filling with water; only once it’s inundated do you realize how to escape. Blueberry Garden’s quick denouement makes it more of a clever ruse than a great game, but the emotional arc — being lulled into a dream and then forced awake for survival — was original. Most important to the indie admirers, the game demonstrated what one person can do to make something new and sell it for just $5.
Simplicity prevails among indie games and not just because developers lack the resources for complexity. Stripping to the fundamentals, indie game designers say, allows them to innovate. “Designing a game can be like a Japanese garden,” Jenova Chen says. “It’s not what you put in but how much you take away.” In 2005, while at the University of Southern California’s graduate program for interactive media, Chen and Kellee Santiago created Cloud, a daydream of a game where a boy stuck in a hospital imagines himself floating in the sky, corralling clouds into shapes of his choosing. When Cloud went online, it was downloaded 500,000 times. “It crashed the school’s server several times,” Chen says.
Chen and Santiago formed their own boutique developer, Thatgamecompany, and signed a three-game contract with Sony. Their company now has 10 employees. Flower, the second title from Thatgamecompany, was released this year over the PlayStation Network. There is some debate in the indie scene over whether a deal with Sony means that you’ve moved on to the mainstream, but Chen says indie gamers should be happy that companies like Sony are starting to respond to the movement’s successes. “Flower is like an ambassador for the rest of the indie world,” Jason Rohrer says. “It shows you that what we’re doing can appeal more broadly.”
Flower is striking to behold. In it, you gather and pilot a stream of flower petals through a series of landscapes by turning the controller in your hands, somewhat like a steering wheel. Flying along the rows of bulbs growing in the grass releases more petals to join your caravan. As you green the grass and bring color to the wind, the game gives the sensation of unlocking spring. And vividly so: unlike most indie games, Flower’s visuals are as sophisticated as any big title. As many as 200,000 individual blades of grass can ripple in your wake. “I like technology,” Chen says, “but the blockbuster games use it for the same thing over and over again. What we tried to innovate was the emotional content.”
Flower has an environmental message, about the fragility of life, but more important is the primal experience of playing. You can experience it like a film, passing through a whole range of emotions from beginning to end. “Flower,” Chen says, “is about the sublime.” It is a game to be played in one sitting, he said, and preferably “alongside your lover.”
If Chen is a sensualist, evoking feeling with focused graphics, Rohrer is the genre’s minimalist. Rohrer’s most influential game, Passage, is two megabytes and can be downloaded in seconds. All the action is displayed in a horizontal window 12 pixels tall. Your character and environs are two-dimensional, about as vivid as Pac-Man. The game lasts just five minutes.
Navigating the game is not the challenge: you control the protagonist with simple keyboard strokes. You sense the world is big, but it can be glimpsed only through a small window that scrolls along as your little blurry figure encounters little blurry obstacles (walls, trees, stones, etc.) and occasional little blurry treasures (actual treasure, in boxes). There is only one other person, and you meet her almost immediately. You can choose to go on by yourself or to become forever bonded by freeing her little pixilated heart. Together, the game is harder but more rewarding: navigating the dense obstacles is more difficult as a pair, but the treasure and the distance traveled yield more points. You have a companion in a lonely world.
And that world is changing. At the start you are on the far left of the window. On the other side is a rippling, dotted haze. As you head toward this uncertain future, your perspective shifts, inexorably sliding forward. Eventually you and your companion are balding, stooping, growing old. There is only so much time, for togetherness, treasure or both. As you reach the right side of the window, the dotted haze is now behind you, a past, receding into the distance. Then your wife dies. Then you die.
“And then you can start over,” Rohrer says. “Which you have to do to get everything out of Passage.” Only through multiple attempts can you fully appreciate the consequences of your choices. By the third run, the finitude starts to settle in. No matter how well you do, you’ll cross that screen until it goes blank. The revelation is not in the game’s story; rather, it resides in the player’s agency. With 300 seconds of rudimentary graphics, Passage created the first interactive memento mori.
“People are starting to realize that games can’t survive on narrative and character,” Rohrer says. “It’s not what video games are meant to do. It doesn’t explore what makes them unique. If they are going to transcend and have real meaning, it has to emerge from game mechanics. Play is what games offer.”
The response to Passage was mixed. Some called it a pretentious failure, neither art nor a game. Others thought it was a strange but sweet exercise. And then there were those who declared it a giant step forward, an unlikely demonstration of the power of video games. Rohrer’s champion Hocking, in his speech the previous year, sharply chided his entire industry for failing to innovate as much as indie designers like Rohrer who are “tinkering away in their spare time.”
Hocking told me: “These games have used what is innate to games — their interactivity — to make a statement about the human condition. And we in the industry seem to not be able to do that.”
JONATHAN BLOW, ANEAR celebrity at the conference, spent more than two years and $180,000 of his own money to create a captivating game called Braid. Blow is intense and intellectual, a vocal critic who has repeatedly compared the gaming mainstream to cigarettes and junk food. He burnishes his critique with language you might expect from a critical-theory seminar, attacking the “Skinnerian reward scheduling” of games like World of Warcraft, the hugely successful online game, as “unethical” and “predicated on a kind of player exploitation.”
Blow’s prickly antagonism toward mainstream games has been amplified by the commercial and critical success of Braid, which he released first on Xbox Live. Now available on personal computers and the PlayStation, Braid has been downloaded — and paid for — more than 400,000 times. “It is a revelation,” Rohrer says. “In terms of a game that deals with complex, subtle and multifaceted themes, the kind of themes you would encounter in a novel, there’s nothing like it.”
Braid involves a two-dimensional world of levels, not unlike the worldwide classic Super Mario Brothers. But unlike most platformers, neither the chronology nor the game play is linear. As the game opens, we learn that Braid’s male protagonist has lost a girl and wants her back. As the character moves through the worlds of Braid, he can manipulate time in several ways: for example, to undo mistakes; to repeat actions through a ghostly doppelgänger; to slow the present. Blow has said that Braid takes its inspiration from, among other sources, Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.”
Resolving Braid’s mysteries often requires creating doubles of yourself and then cooperating with them in intricate plans. Beyond the metaphysical suggestions, Braid is unusually satisfying as game play. It is also an aesthetic experience: Braid was designed by Blow and then rendered by David Hellman, an illustrator. The delicate watercolors and haunting soundtrack combine with the game play to create a penetrating melancholy.
“Braid is something you could show to Roger Ebert and say, ‘Here is a work of authorial intention,’ ” Rohrer says. “It captures something about the modern zeitgeist.” It is also a postmodern work, reiterating traditional features — puzzles, princesses, levels — to comment on the medium itself. And it achieves all of this with very little conventional story. Rohrer likens the game to Thomas Pynchon’s “V.” But in a novel or a movie, Rohrer says, the meaning emerges from the characters and the situations they find themselves in. Whereas in Braid, the meaning emerges from the game mechanic.
Braid is about the tragedy of time and the impermanence of memory; the time-reversal feature functions as a metaphor for loss and learning from mistakes. Blow denies the widely circulated theory that the game is about a breakup, suggesting that it is instead about a much more primary aspect of human experience. A practitioner of kung fu and tai chi, Blow has said that his character’s four-dimensional journey is about the existential problems that arise from quantum mechanics. That may sound like quite a lot of intellection pretension to wrap around a little cartoon man in a maze. But it does reflect the fact that Braid is both a game and the artistic vision of a single person.
Some observers say the success of Braid is an “Easy Rider” moment for video games. The industry is stagnating; the megastudio Electronic Arts lost a billion dollars in the last fiscal year. Along comes a game that takes artistic chances and shows there’s a market for it. It’s not the same market as the one for, say, the Halo franchise, whose latest offering sold 1.5 million copies in its first month. But for a lone developer, it turns out that a game like Braid — more than 400,000 downloads, about $15 apiece — can make you rich.
For the industry’s major studios, the Independent Games Festival is now a place to scout talent, to buy new games and to hire new designers. Jason Rohrer agreed to be represented by a production company to make games for potential advertising campaigns, and he also signed up to create his first commercial release: a strategy game for Nintendo’s hand-held console that will explore the trade in conflict diamonds in Africa.
But among indie designers, there is a wide spectrum of commercial engagement, from Jenova Chen’s small shop under the banner of Sony to Jonatan Soderstrom, a 24-year-old designer who is content to transmit his bizarre output free to the world. “Yeah, the big publishers come around and want to talk to you,” said Soderstrom, who until a few weeks ago lived in his childhood bedroom in his parents’ house in Gothenburg, Sweden, and goes by the handle Cactus. Soderstrom, who has made more than 40 video games in the past five years, gave a talk in a filled-to-capacity Room 131: How To Make a Game in Four Hours. (“Games don’t need to be fun,” he said. “They can get intensely weird and freak you out.”)
Now he and some friends were wandering down Haight Street holding a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon and drinking from paper bags. “I don’t care about money,” Soderstrom said. “I just want games to be something like art.” The indie scene was leading his medium in the right direction, he said, but “games are still not like great films or books that really affect a lot of people in a special way.”
Last year, Soderstrom had a game in the Independent Games Festival that generated interest from the big publishers. “They all wanted to talk to me about my games,” he said, but he was too busy hanging out with his friends, drinking, staying up all night, playing and talking about video games. Several companies at the conference, he said, left their cards at his booth. He never called them.
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