Indie gaming
on the rise

>>GAMMA 3D presents five-minute games as art and social lubricant, and the industry is watching

GAMMA GAMMA HEY:
Cindy Poremba, Phil Fish and Heather Kelley

by ERIK LEIJON

Not every video game is blessed with a development staff of hundreds, a multi-million-dollar budget and a crack marketing team. For all those tiny games created without staggering sales numbers or worldwide critical acclaim in mind, Montreal experimental game collective Kokoromi has created GAMMA, a one-night-only party giving the little guys and girls a chance for their five-minute masterpieces to shine.

In the three years Kokoromi has held the annual showcase, every edition has forced eager independent game developers to create a five-minute, easy-to-learn game based on a chosen theme. The six titles chosen this year made stereoscopy—the red/blue 3D effect featuring those cumbersome paper glasses—integral to the gameplay.

“It’s very typical of games right now to toss [3D stereoscopy] in as some back-of-the-box bullet point,” says Kokoromi co-founder Heather Kelley. “We wanted to throw it out there as an actual design challenge, and not treat it as some buzzword.”

Adds co-founder Phil Fish, “Right now, Ubisoft is working on a 3D stereoscopic game, and we’re seeing it more in TV and film. So we asked the question: is it worthwhile? Is there anything you can really do with it?”

Is it marketable or is it art?

This is not the first time Kokoromi has selected the theme of their GAMMA party in response to current gaming industry trends. Last year’s edition poked fun at high-definition TV by only displaying games that utilized the smallest or strangest aspect ratios possible. With each passing year, the event—which has become the closing party for the city’s gaming industry get-together known as the Montreal International Gaming Summit—has gained a larger following in the international development community. It gives many in the industry a chance to work alone or in smaller groups for a change, and unlimited leeway in terms of creativity.

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“We talk to a lot of industry people who need to work on projects [like GAMMA] for their sanity,” says Kokoromi member Cindy Poremba. “There’s something nice about having an event where people create something without worrying about whether or not it’s marketable or whether or not they can sell it.”

She admits that even independent game contests serve as forums for indie developers to pitch their ideas to deep-pocketed publishers. GAMMA is meant to be comparable to an art exhibit, but considering the buzz within the gaming blogosphere generated by last year’s submissions, many of this year’s developers treated the contest very seriously, shrouding their unique ideas in secrecy.

In reality, the games tailored specifically for GAMMA wouldn’t even work outside of the party atmosphere. “It’s really interesting to see games designed for social consumption, in a room that’s going to be dark, with loud music and where people are going to be drinking,” says Poremba, 33, a digital media researcher at Concordia. “It’s great to see the games feed into the social environment and get people talking. They act as a social lubricant, which isn’t something you would automatically associate with gaming.”

Indie-inspired

It’s not just the games themselves that get talked about—the still growing indie gaming scene is a focal point of discussion. As the worldwide economy continues to tank and blockbuster video game budgets spiral out of control, the financial success of smaller games such as Castle Crashers and Braid have piqued the interest of publishers looking for an easy buck and designers looking to break away from the stifling hierarchy of big development teams.

Fish, 24, left his job at Montreal developer A2M earlier this year to open his own three-man indie studio, Polytron. “[Publisher] Electronic Arts is releasing a game called Henry Hatsworth that they call an ‘indie-inspired’ game,” he says. “In only three years, words like ‘innovation’ and ‘original’ have become exclusively associated with indie developers.”

The future may belong to indie games, but for now GAMMA 3D will serve to introduce gamers and non-gamers alike to interactive entertainment that really doesn’t bear any resemblance to the Halos and Grand Theft Autos of the world.

“I’m working on a game right now that couldn’t be more different than my GAMMA game,” says Kelley, 39, the creative director of the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College in Vermont. “That’s what’s beautiful about games, that the two projects could hardly seem like the same medium at all.”

GAMMA 3D AT S.A.T. (1195 ST-LAURENT)
ON WEDNESDAY, NOV. 19, 7–9 P.M.
FOR MIGS ATTENDEES ONLY, OPEN
TO PUBLIC AFTER 9 P.M., $5.
FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO
DOWNLOAD THE GAMES AFTER
NOV. 19, VISIT KOKOROMI.ORG