Girls Love Robots. Jack Lumber. Neocolonialism. Moonlight: Mistress of Mischief.
These four represented a fraction of the games on display at the Boston Festival of Indie Games on Sept. 22, a celebration and showcase of all things gaming-related, both analog and digital.
The festival, held all day Saturday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the first of its kind in the Greater Boston area, a burgeoning center for independent game development.
Fiona Cherbak, a festival co-producer, said when she moved to Boston a year ago, she was puzzled to discover that Boston didn’t have an independent gaming festival. She soon found out that industry meet-up group Boston Indies had been talking about starting a festival for some time. Boston Indies and MIT finally partnered this year and got the festival off the ground.
Cherbak said organizers originally planned for 1000 to 1500 attendees, but between 2000 and 2400 people ended up attending.
On Saturday afternoon, crowds of attendees milled about two rooms on the ground floor of an MIT building, talking to developers, playing games on iPads or computer monitors, and voting on their favorite of the 36 games curated for the showcase out of nearly 100 submissions. The upstairs floors hosted the analog activities: an art show containing game-based images and anime; a Live Action Role Play session; tabletop board games featuring intricately drawn maps; a Game Jam, where a group of people had seven hours to design a new game.
All of these different facets of gaming demonstrated a universal truth about 21st century society: games are becoming ubiquitous.
“Gaming is becoming more and more part of people’s lives,” said Zach Reiner, co-designer of “Prime’s Quest,” a puzzle game where a teenager must smash logs and collect soda cans while searching for his kidnapped grandfather in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. “Twenty years ago, people were ridiculed for playing games.” Now, said Reiner, gaming appeals to many different sectors of society.
“You have your hardcore gamers. You have your ‘I’m bored at the train station gamers,’” said Reiner.
While gaming is becoming more and more mainstream, so is game-designing. Reiner and co-designer Jason Snair said if you can write code, you can design a game.
For many of these designers, game-making represents an art form akin to writing a novel or painting a picture.
“It’s a different way of telling a story in interactive art form. There’s really no limit to what can be done with them,” said Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games, who designed Resonance, a game with old-school, Monkey Island-esque graphics where players have to work together to stop a science experiment gone wrong.
If the emphasis on post-apocalyptic backstories seems fitting for the gloomy zeitgeist of 2012, consider an even more blatantly topical game: Neocolonialism, by Subaltern Games, a satirical multi-player game where players are supposed to exploit a black-and-white map of the world, shown upside down.
Designer Seth Alter, who has a background in history from Wesleyan College, said he designed the game because of “a desire to change the world through games.” He said he thinks there’s an unexplored potential for educational games for adults, and he hopes to change that through his game, which he said will require players to develop knowledge of Marxist economics.
Other games had a lighter mien, such as Girls Love Robots, a game where players had to quickly seat robots, girls and nerds on a city bus to insure that all characters were happy with the seating arrangements. Then there was Owlchemy Labs’ Jack Lumber, a story about a supernatural lumberjack out for revenge on a tree that killed his grandmother. Idea man Alex Schwartz had always wanted to make a game about a lumberjack, but it wasn’t until a brainstorming session that the game got off the ground.
“One day someone said to him, what if it was a supernatural lumberjack? And it all just came together,” said Michael Carriere, who worked on Jack Lumber. Jack Lumber is currently being published through an alliance with Sega, which has started producing games made by independent designers.
At the end of the festival, organizers compiled votes and announced the winners. Track, a student game from WPI by Christopher Hanna, won Game Design; Prime’s Quest won Technical; Negative Nimbus by Cloud Kid won Best Visuals; Jack Lumber won Audio; and Resonance won Narrative/World Building.
Cherbak said MIT and Boston Indies are “absolutely” planning to hold the festival again next year.