Conclusion

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Indie Game Jam—An Outlet For Innovation And Experimental Game Design

by Justin Hall

Austin Grossman is fleeing through a city, fervently searching through tens of thousands of shuffling, pixellated citizens for the wide sombrero of the man who wants to kill him. Austin’s movements with the mouse are jerky, and he’s holding his breath. Suddenly he hears a loud reverberating ping, off to his left. Austin whirls to face the sound. The crowd parts, and before Austin can react, the man in the Sombrero shoots him down.

Thatcher Ulrich watches over Austin’s shoulder, gently nibbling his finger. Austin and his colleague Doug Church are playing Thatcher’s game, Dueling Machine. In Dueling Machine, one player hunts another, using sonar pings to find or avoid their enemy amidst tens of thousands of innocent bystanders. Few games use sound in such an integral way; this idea came from Marc LeBlanc. Thatcher works at Oddworld Inhabitants, a videogame development studio owned in part by Microsoft. At the time, Marc worked for Visual Concepts, a videogame development studio owned by Sega. Given the competitive nature of the modern game industry, it doesn’t make much sense that these two would be coding a videogame together.

Thatcher and Marc are both working on Dueling Machine as part of the Indie Game Jam. Tired of calcification in commercial videogames, a small group of game designers decided to jump-start some experimental game design. In March of 2002, they built a system for simultaneously displaying up to 100,000 moving characters on the screen at one time. Then they invited a dozen designer-programmer friends from a half-a-dozen game companies to join them for collective quick and dirty garage-style programming in a barn on a marina in Oakland, California.

The roots of electronic entertainment lie in these sorts of collaborations, in garages and basements and dank laboratories—places where people gathered over rudimentary machines to make virtual worlds. Twenty years ago, the people responsible for electronic entertainment were not yet game professionals, they were simply dedicated hobbyists. They tinkered with computers and code to make small simulations, establishing rules and parameters that their friends would break.

These tinkerers gave birth to a $20 billion industry. Electronic gaming has expanded rapidly; now twenty years later most games are made by massive teams of specialized developers working for years with a marketable product in mind. Still there are some folks who hope to encourage a generative creative spirit, to inject some creativity and vitality into a medium that’s increasingly conservative.

This “Indie Game Jam” was organized in part by programmer Chris Hecker, who sees a games industry that is “too risk adverse.” He believes videogaming needs a more independent subculture, a Sundance Film Festival or garage band ethos feeding new ideas to commercial publishers. His office is a center for this kind of activity; he works out of the top floor of a red barn in a cluster of antique buildings surrounded by office parks and industrial sites. This space is shared by a revolving cast of independent game programmers—sitting on a futon couch propped up with old CPU cases, these game industry refugees brainstorm on whiteboards.

Indie Game Jam participants in action

Top left: Chris Hecker and Doug Church working on their game FireFighter, top right: Chris Corollo and Brian Sharp of Ion Storm working on their game Wrath, bottom: 2002 Indie Game Jammers, left to right: Austin Grossman, Robin Walker, Art Min, Brian Jacobson, Chris Hecker, Sean Barrett, Zack Simpson, Ken Demarest, Jonathan Blow, Doug Church, Brian Sharp, and Chris Corollo. Photos by Justin Hall.

Hecker opened up his Oakland office to serve as the site of the Indie Game Jam. Over a bowl of dry noodles at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant, Hecker speaks passionately about the evolution of gameplay: “Games of the future will be interactive not only at the second-to-second level, which we focus on now, but also at the minute-to-minute and hour-to-hour levels. This means that not only can you walk left or right interactively, but your decisions impact the overall flow of the game.” Deeper interactions require richer simulations; Hecker works primarily on physics, the system of game rules determining how objects in games interact. Do you want to stack those crates over there against the door to keep the bad guy from following you into this room to eat you alive? As Hecker points out, most games today won’t allow that kind of strategy—crates are for climbing on or smashing up only.

But if physics can develop to allow more creative solutions to game problems, then, as Hecker hopes, the medium of games might develop further: “Physics has the potential to increase the richness and subtlety of the interaction with the world, but at the same time stay airtight and consistent so that we maintain a suspension of disbelief.” For Hecker, that consistency involves simulating the proper way to hang off of rocks. For the last two years, he’s been translating rock climbing into a shareware game that “evokes the rhythm” of that sport.

Trained initially as an artist, Hecker brings an understanding of the humanities to an aspect of game development typically characterized by attention to mathematical programming details. Independent game design gives him a chance to work as the sole writer, artist, designer, and programmer.

The second Indie Game Jam replaced 100,000 sprites with one main actor—the human body. Borrowing from Zack Simpson’s Shadow Garden work, fourteen programmers had one weekend to build games that used the shadow of a human body cast on a wall as the interface for electronic entertainment. Casey Muratori and Michael Sweet created Owl Simulator where a player’s outstretched arms control their flight path. In Atman Binstock’s Squisy Marshmallow Maze, two players struggle to move their colored block through a maze, while using their shadow to block the progress of the other player. Squisy Marshmallow Maze games typically devolve into wrestling matches; a kind of physicality rarely encouraged by videogames.

Saleable product may seem a long way off from experiments like these, but these ideas feed the mainstream. Programmer Doug Church explains in an e-mail interview, “The game industry has always been about smoke and mirrors, and making the correct tradeoffs. So even little baby steps and experiments which seem silly now may lead to some real and unexpected successes later.” Now that game development schedules have extended out beyond eighteen months, it can be difficult to work through a few different game design concepts. The format of the Indie Game Jam weekend codefest is a good uninhibitor; as Doug explains, “Given a lack of research money and time, Game Jam-like no- time-to-think-just-type-and-see-what-happens sort of events may help provide some of the ideas which eventually help us make progress.”

IGJ co-organizer Sean Barrett is a refugee from the game industry, working independently in Hecker’s office to move beyond “people doing simple games and high-end graphics.” He’s been working on a few different games and game engines, free to follow his research interests. Some projects are echoes of older titles, within which he develops what might be best described as “interpersonal physics.” Experienced gamers can tell you that even if a game has good writing, it’s unusual to have the feeling that players can truly affect the other characters or the plot of the game.

In e-mail correspondence, Barrett writes of developing “some sort of character ‘simulator’ which actually has some meaningful state and attitude and reacts to the conversation, rather than just being a menu maze that you navigate no differently than a voice mail system.” Touching on Hecker’s idea that a player’s style of playing should affect a game over time, Barrett has been integrating personality and conflicting priorities in a hovercraft fighting game he’s programming: “Your squadmates have personal agendas (derived from their allegiances to various political and religious groups) and become satisfied or unsatisfied with you based on whether you cooperate with those agendas in game.” Choosing which objects to blow up may not seem like much of a step towards richer interaction, but any in-game motivation other than scoring and linear progress is remarkable. As Barrett points out about game making, “We do violent conflict great, but we don’t do any other kind of conflict, especially interpersonal relationship sorts of conflict, at all.”

The weekend-long Indie Game Jam may not be enough time to develop character-driven, plot-oriented games. Most of the programmers participating have day jobs with studios like Valve, Ion Storm, gameLab, or Oddworld Inhabitants. For them, the Indie Game Jam gives them a compressed version of Sean’s freedom, a weekend where personal inclination and a sense of playful experimentation direct game design more than market concerns.

On the last day of the first Indie Game Jam, most of the games had been finished and many of the programmers had headed home. Sean Barrett stood over Chris Hecker’s shoulder as Hecker’s dirty glasses reflected tens of thousands of tiny figures being mowed down by a single warrior onscreen. As he killed with mouse and keyboard, the camera panned out slowly until his character was shown to be surrounded by an impossible sea of enemies. There was clearly no way he could survive. The artful futility of Barrett’s Very Serious RoboDOOM put a wide grin on Hecker’s face.

The next week at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Jose, Hecker would join numerous upstart game designers rallying for more independent game development culture. Hecker proposes the creation of the videogame equivalent of film festivals and film schools, the systems that have given rise to independent film in America, alongside giant Hollywood productions. He hopes these programmers at the Indie Game Jam, infected by the spirit of loose creative game programming, might start making games that earn the respect commanded by other art forms.

Author Bio

More about Indie Game Jam can be found online at www.indiegamejam.com.

Justin Hall participates in digital culture and electronic entertainment. Present at the birth of the popular web, Hall invested his mortal soul in the exchange of personal information online. Later consumed by machine stimulation, Hall set out to study videogames to better understand his life-long computer babysitters. Justin lived in Japan for the early part of the 21st century. His writing can be found online on Game Girl Advance (www.gamegirladvance.com), and on his personal web site at www.links.net.

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