Leah Isobel tapped into the future of play during the annual Game Developers Conference, which took over the Moscone Center last week. Check out her first installment, on games with a social message, here and part two, on labor organizing among video game workers, here.
The Game Developers Conference brings together video game makers and tech professionals from all sections of the industry—from workers and executives at huge corporations like Microsoft and Unity to indie success stories like Billy Basso, who drew a massive crowd for a talk about his hit puzzle and exploration game Animal Well.
Everywhere I turned, I saw banner advertisements for new technologies, networking events, and developers with kiosks and portable Steam Decks set up to demo their games to potential business partners. In this environment, it’s hard not to think about money.
On the first day of the conference, I spoke with Don Bellenger, an Oakland-based developer whose two-person studio The Beauty Cult is working on a “high-octane gardenvania” called Nectarmancer. The game combines the exploration, combat, and platforming elements of the metroidvania genre—exemplified in recent indie successes like Hollow Knight—with the plant-growing mechanics featured in farming sims like Stardew Valley.
Bellenger says that he’s been trying to secure a publishing deal to release the game, but major publishers are incentivized to put their interests first.
“If they produce a trailer for you that costs $100,000, which is not out of the question, then they get their money back first,” he explains, “They come up with these elaborate contracts that are, I think, really unfair.” On his first game, he took one of those deals, to his detriment. “I was in a bad place, and our only path towards finishing the game was through investment,” he says. “That nearly killed us.”
This time, he’s determined to get justice for his project. Bellenger says that he’s been meeting with an unnamed publisher for three years, attempting to nail down a fair deal for Nectarmancer’s release. Meanwhile, work on the game has steadily been progressing.
He mentions that it contains “tons of novel concepts” and that without a locked-in publishing deal setting concrete deadlines, the studio has been able to sharpen and refine its ideas. While being a smaller developer means having to navigate choppy economic waters without as much of a safety net, it also means being able to create more freely.
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When I ask him what the benefit of being an independent developer might be, Bellenger replies, “You get to make the best game you can.”
I thought about that response later in the week, when I attended an indie game showcase held at the arts co-op Syzygy SF in the Mission. The event, organized in collaboration with the Brooklyn-based experimental games collective Boshi’s Place, showcased a variety of games from Bay Area and New York developers.
They tended to be lo-fi and evocative, and frequently remixed material from preexisting games. Midnight Hotel, developed by mariopartygod, is a horror game in which players explore an eerily empty hotel, featuring character portraits and sound effects ripped from Atlus’ megahit RPG Persona 5. Water Level/b.l.u.e. Exploration by Hatim Behnsain incorporates and iterates on top of a ROM of the Japan-exclusive ocean exploration game b.l.u.e.: Legend of Water. Even less abstract games repurposed recognizable tropes in fun and interesting ways. Common Opera’s Waxwing uses a Time Crisis-style lightgun for its control scheme—but rather than using it to shoot enemies, players pull the trigger to light onscreen fires that guide their character through treacherous, bullet-hell style levels.
“When we’re making events like this, we definitely want it to be a little less corporate, less official and buttoned-up,” says Jay Zuerndorfer, Syzygy SF’s current president. “I think it’s about getting people who are interested in this world to have a lot of possible connections with people, and to see a lot of stuff.”
When I ask if they see any patterns in the games on display, they respond, “I do see the games here as really experimental and out there. This [is] a place that’s separate from the main GDC stuff, where really crazy things can get shown.”
It seems unlikely that publishers would take a risk on, say, Water Level/b.l.u.e. Exploration, given its free and creative use of a preexisting game. But that’s fine, because it’s not what the game is for: exploring and commenting on the expressive possibilities of the medium. As I left the showcase that night, I wondered if and how these kinds of abstract games could affect the broader industry.
The last event that I attended at the conference was the Experimental Games Showcase on Friday afternoon. It was a rapid-fire demonstration of 11 projects, all attempting to expand on what video games can do. Akuma Kira’s Basilisk 2000 allows players to experiment with the level editor for a fictional game, exposing and making playable the layer of game development that is usually invisible; Kakakompyuter Mo Yan! is a browser-based digital art exhibition curated by Chia Amisola that “celebrates third world internet & networking cultures.”
The showcase’s emcee, musician and critic Liz Ryerson, said in her introduction, “I don’t know about you guys, but I am really tired at this point of thinking about money. It’s become really urgent to make the case that art is worth supporting even if it doesn’t make money.”
She echoed this sentiment when I spoke to her afterwards. “It’s such a limited category of games that make money,” she says. “Things tend to settle into certain genres and approaches, and this [showcase] reminds people that games can be all these different things. They don’t have to be limited by the market.”
Ryerson sees the showcase as an important contrast to the corporatized nature of the rest of the conference. “A lot of GDC has to pay for itself, so there’s sponsored talks, there’s marketing talks… and then you have this one session that’s like getting shot with a paint cannon of all these experimental games,” she says.
While developers of those games may not receive the same kind of funding that goes into larger titles, they do get the opportunity to connect with fellow creatives and open-minded players. And ultimately, the delineations between mainstream entertainment and boundary-pushing experimental art might be more porous than they seem.
In our chat, Ryerson mentions Death Stranding, the 2019 game from the auteur developer Hideo Kojima, as an example of an art game that falls into the AAA, or big-budget, category. Death Stranding received critical acclaim, has sold five million copies to date, and has both a film adaptation and a sequel currently in development.
The game’s success seems like a strong indicator that there is an audience for games that expand ideas about what interactive entertainment can do.
“A lot of people who are in the game industry really enjoy this type of stuff,” Ryerson says. “So [we’re] trying to push for more embracing of work that is pushing artistic boundaries in all kinds of different directions.”
