Indie Game : The Movie

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.