Indie Games: The Movement and The Movie

The earnings of the video game industry as a whole now overshadows that of the movie industry. But video game design still doesn't garner the same level of respect as an art-form as the typical Hollywood movie production.

The world's biggest video game conference, E3, is about to begin. Although various big budget games of arguably great artistic value have just been announced at E3, such as X-Com and Dues EX, there is a community of designers whose pursuit of creative experimentation perhaps supersedes the studios behind these triple-A titles.

I'm talking about the indie game development community. Over the past several years a burgeoning community of indie video game developers has emerged on the global scene. The breadth of game design and the innovation in development in this community is incredible and almost puts other current artistic fields to shame. Whether we're talking about transcendental orbital-like games such as Osmos, produced by Hemisphere Games, or super artsy platform games like FEDGE, produced by Montreal's Polytron, there are plenty of genre defying games emerging out of this ultra low-budget community of developers. 

Osmos Trailer

Another great example of the community's taste for creative experimentation is the annual Gamma Game Competition. Run by the experimental game collective Kokoromi, based out of Montreal, Gamma IV was brought to GDC, the major annual game developers conference, this year. Each year, Gamma asks indie game artists to submit video games based upon a different theme, such as "games driven by live audio" or "games with extremely small pixel dimensions". Kokoromi describes itself as "an experimental game collective formed by a rare union of Montreal gamemakers and curators to promote games as an art form and expressive medium worldwide."

So with all this exciting momentum behind the indie video game movement you'd expect some sort of indie documentary movie to pop up that attempts to uncover the driving force behind it - right? Well, thanks to the dedication of Blink-Works films and their novel fundraising approach it appears Indie Game: The Movie is about to become a reality. There's no surprise that Blink-Works Films say that they were "inspired to make this documentary by our experience covering the Game Developers Conference in Spring 2009", the same place where Kokoromi's Gamma game competition happened.

Indie Game: The Movie - Growing Up Edmund

After Blink-Works made a short film on Alec Holowka of Infinite Ammo in Fall 2009 and attended GDC they realized they had to make a feature-length documentary on the entire movement of indie game developers.

That initial fascination stuck with us, and in early 2010, we explored the idea of a feature length documentary with an initial wave of shooting. We gathered footage at GDC 2010 in San Francisco as well as in Phoenix, AZ, in Santa Cruz, CA and in Winnipeg, MB, Canada (with the indie teams from Flashbang Studios, Enemy Airship, Polytron, Team Meat and Infinite Ammo).

The challenge though was that they did not have the funds to produce the type of movie they had in mind.

Indie Game: The Movie - CBC Radio Interview

This pushed Blink-Works to think of creative ways to fundraise to meet their budgetary needs. According to an interview CBC had with Blink-Works, various indie video game developers had already been exploring crowd-source fundraising to achieve their budgetary needs. Blink-Works had the goal of fundraising $15,000 by July 20th and now already have over $21,000 raised. How did they do this? With the online service kickstarter.com. KickStarter allows you to set-up a project with a fundraising goal and timeline. Only if the goal is met by the timeline set will the project get funding from the pledged funders. You can also follow the project's blog and share the project on your own website via a widget.  

I'm fairly certain that this project would not have surpassed its fundraising goal if it were not for the tremendous desire that exists amidst the gaming and developer community to see a film like this made, although you also have to give credit to Blink-Works who have proved themselves capable of splicing together a stylish doc together. Their short doc explores the person behind the games (Alex Holowka) and allows the viewer to understand how his life has informed his game design. And you should only expect more of the same from Indie Game: The Movie. As Blink-Works describes themselves:

[Indie Game: The Movie] examines independent game developers as a way to understand the medium and the theory behind video games. Throughout, the film focuses on the human side of the creative process, and the connections between game and game-maker.

If you're interested in pledging some funding for the project head on over to their website or their KickStarter project page.