It was a long and
tiresome trip: I kept travelling from one airport to the next. Barely having
enough time in between stops to rest. I was in the last part of the trip and I
have spent almost 22 hours travelling…
(The
total trip time was 26 hours!)
Imagine being
exhausted, sleepy, in physical pain, and bored all at the same time and you
would know how I felt at that moment. I wasn't really in the mood to watch
anything on that plane. But I decided to turn on the screen in front of me
anyway. Scrolling through the menu, it turned out that I already knew and saw
most of the films and TV shows available on that flight. So in a moment of
despair, I decided to look into the documentaries section; a genre that I like
in general but for some reason I used to ignore during flights. Of the
available titles, one caught my eye: a Canadian documentary from 2012 called
"Indie Game : The Movie".
"Hmm... A documentary about video games. And
it's Canadian! Interesting!"
Being myself;
someone who is crazy about games, I had to watch that movie. Suddenly all the
aching and tiredness was gone and I was eager to hit the "play"
button! And so I did…
As the title
suggests, the movie is about independent games and their development. The movie
concentrated on three specific games and their independent developers. What was
interesting about that movie were the stories as well as the direction. It
followed the developers of those three games into their personal workspaces
which were usually their homes. It followed them through various stages of
development and showed a side that we rarely get to know about with such
developers. I was surprised to see how personal those projects were. Those were
not just games; they were the very lives of their creators!
Being
"Indie", the creators had to do everything themselves. Everything
from concept, story, art, programming, testing, bug fixing, marketing, to
customer support and everything in between relied solely on them. So it was quite understandable that they had to sacrifice their personal lives and
dedicate themselves to their projects. They've even lost money and yet refused
to work under someone else's authority in order to preserve their independence.
But the price they paid was that they had to spend tremendous effort and be
under overwhelming stress. With that said, they still treated their projects as
if they were their own babies; nurturing them and watching them as they grow
little by little day after day over a number of years. You can see their pride
when something —no matter how little— works right. And you can see their worry
when something goes wrong. You can feel how terrifying it was for them after
all the hard work to release their "children" and send them to the
world; how powerless they felt when their projects were not under their
absolute control anymore and they had to face the different reactions of users
from around the world.
For me to see the
amount of creativity and dedication those people had; it was inspiring to say
the least. And I can definitely relate to some aspects in those stories. But
there is also another thing about that movie that I've noticed. And in fact, it
is why I decided to write this post in the first place:
Even though the
games in question were huge hits and had great successes, and even though the
movie crew were there to capture the exciting reactions to the wonderful news
right from the beginning; the developers weren't as excited as one would
expect! And that really caught my attention.
I'm sure that deep
down, those developers were happy. But their initial reactions to hearing that
their games were huge successes were more of long sighs of "finally letting
go" of the weight of all the stress, fear, and terror of things going the
wrong way. They loved their work so much and spent so much effort on it that
they became terrified of it being rejected or finding that all their
"upbringing" was in vain. So for them, hearing that their
"game" did "exceptionally well" was not as important or as
exciting as the realization that their "babies" have grown up and are
now out in the wild and doing "fine"; so that they can have their sigh of
relief and move on to think about their next project…
That's how I think most of
us behave. In our moments of triumph, we focus on all the fear and stress that
we've accumulated and bottled inside and how we can finally relax. Then
immediately afterwards we start thinking about what's next; forgetting to enjoy
the moment and celebrate our success.
