A MODERN top-tier video game takes years to make, represents the work of hundreds and costs tens of millions of dollars to develop—and that’s before any money goes into marketing it. If the game fails, that could very well mean the end for the studio that produced it. This environment is better suited to incremental innovation than wild experimentation. There is steady growth in sophistication. But rarely is something genuinely new and risky produced.
The good news is that there are other models for game development out there, and three great examples reside at the edges of Silicon Valley, within the city limits of Santa Cruz. Team Meat and Gaijin Games are indie game developers. Both are proving that players aren’t just looking for games with more realistically rendered environments. They are looking for original voices, stylistic flair and better and different challenges. And it doesn’t take the large teams that a mainline company like Electronic Arts employs to build games like that. In fact, in terms of innovation, the indie scene puts the rest of the industry to shame.
The game-design program at UC–Santa Cruz came about in part because the school’s computer science department was looking for ways to boost enrollment after the dotcom implosion, and in part because the school already had plenty of students who were there because they wanted to make video games.
Hearing about these practical origins, one might expect a mildly interesting and useful course of study to result. Instead, UC–Santa Cruz has launched the largest games-research program in North America, with 350 undergraduates and upward of 20 graduate students. Dozens of small game projects are going on all the time; professors are forced to innovate just to teach their subject; students and staff enthusiastically exchange ideas, dreaming big, creating a social context so bursting with creative energy that it emphatically makes the case that universities could completely shake up the current game-development status quo.
Meat Boy’s Makers
Two people isn’t a lot when it comes to making video games. The technology doesn’t exist for a team of two to create the next Halo or Call of Duty. But how about the next Super Mario Brothers? It turns out that that’s doable—if the talent and taste for hard work are there.
Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes have the talent, and they’ve done the hard work. Both are on full display in Super Meat Boy.
Meat Boy, like Mario, is trying to rescue his kidnapped love. Unlike Mario, Meat Boy’s love is a girl made out of Band-Aids, and she’s been kidnapped by a suit-and-tie-wearing fetus in a jar. The art is adorable (well, as adorable as it could be), and there is a genuine sweetness to the story, which does a lot to balance out all the saws, fire, death and hell.
This visual style is a good reflection of how the game plays. It is brutally, viciously difficult. (Running through a salt factory while dodging guided missiles is about as hard as it sounds.) But so much thoughtful design has gone into managing the frustration level that it actually ends up feeling oddly welcoming.
McMillen has lived in Santa Cruz his entire life. He got his start drawing, writing and publishing his own comics. He moved on to flash games for the web, via sites like Newgrounds.com, but the spirit of indie comics still informs his work. It shows in his art style and his dark sense of humor and how both are used to communicate real emotions. And of course it shows in his pride at being an independent creator.
When the time came to supersize his most popular flash game into something fit for the PC and Xbox Live Arcade, he turned to Tommy Refenes, a talented engineer based in North Carolina. The two worked on separate aspects of the game from opposite sides of the country before finally coming together in Santa Cruz to get everything finished.
I visited McMillen in his apartment, which also serves as his office. McMillen explained some of the ways he mitigated potential player frustration with his challenging game.
“We keep the levels really, really small. You can almost always see Band-Aid Girl at the end of the level, while you’re there,” he said. “You never feel super discouraged, because you know she’s right there.” This was not the last time in our meeting that McMillen would, in discussing some practical design aspect of Super Meat Boy, wind up referring to the emotional core of the game.
I asked him if he thought there would have been a place for him in making video games if there wasn’t an indie scene.
“Oh, no,” he said. “No one ever listened to me. There’s no way in hell that Super Meat Boy could ever be pitched to a company and get picked up. I’d say for almost every single one of my games, there’s no way anybody would take that risk.”
Super Meat Boy takes a huge risk by trusting the player to keep trying after countless failures. It challenges players to try and achieve things that look impossible, to take their own big risks. The pure joy of taking on big things, and keeping at it until success is achieved, is not to be underestimated.
Is Super Meat Boy a success? Judging from its reviews, the answer is yes. Metacritic, a website that collects major reviews and calculates an average, summarizes the critical response to game with a score of 90 out of 100. And if that weren’t enough to get people’s attention, PETA recently debuted a parody of the game, called Super Tofu Boy, which drew coverage from sites like Yahoo and AOL and brought a million hits to Team Meat’s website, according to McMillen.
Before I left the Team Meat headquarters/living room, I played the game for a little while with helpful advice from the man who designed every level: “Don’t hesitate, you had it! The moment you hesitate is the moment you’ll fall … right into the saws. It’s all about confidence and committing to what you’re doing, and then you have it.”
The Gaijin Guys
Gaijin Games has an actual office, a workplace that doesn’t double as anybody’s home. It was founded by Alex Neuse, a self-described industry veteran who also serves as the company’s CEO. This year, Gaijin games increased its workforce by a third—making for a grand total of four.
Gaijin operates on a more traditional structure than Team Meat and has more traditional ambitions for growth. And unlike Team Meat, everyone from Gaijin has been a part of more traditional studios. The company is made up entirely of former employees of Santa Cruz Games, which made its mark with the Nintendo DS version of the eighth game in the Tomb Raider Series.
This is not to say Gaijin is just a regular game company, because looking at what it produces, it clearly is not. Gaijin’s games are extremely clever, visually stunning and most of all, deeply odd. Gaijin didn’t strike out on its own to make the same kind of games everyone else makes.
At the company’s tiny one-room headquarters in the Sash Mill, Neuse explained how they came up with the idea for their first game, BIT.TRIP Beat: “We’re just three guys, so we need to do something that’s simple as possible. We all decided that making Pong would be within our means.”
Well, not exactly Pong. Their extremely clever idea was to mate Pong with Guitar Hero. Instead of two bars bouncing a square at each other, it was one bar struggling to keep up with a barrage of squares, each representing a musical note that would only sound if it was hit. It is a very difficult game, but it comes with an automatic reward: music.
The visually stunning aspect is the old-school arcade-inspired color palette, featuring lovely neon over a black backdrop, and the strange imagery floating in the background, including DNA and a brain rendered in a 3-D take on 8-bit style.
And the odd aspect is what meaning can be read into that imagery and into wordless cut-scenes: This is a game with a hero, a black monolith with arms and legs and a white slot representing eyes, and the action of the game takes place inside the hero’s mind.
BIT.TRIP Beat was just the first in a series of downloadable games for the Wii starring that monolith known as Commander Video. Each game was more ambitious than the last, each recalled old-school gaming forms but was imbued with music, and each had an ongoing storyline detailing the hero’s spiritual journey, told without words through music, visuals and game-play.
There is a sense, playing a BIT.TRIP game, that a lot is being communicated but in an alien language—the language of the world that was born with the creation of the first video game and that grew in detail in our arcades and in the Atari 2600 and never stopped evolving. Often it is hard to say what has actually happened in the story, but nonetheless it is emotionally resonant in ways that are mysterious.
Gaijin has released an iPhone version of BEAT and numbers four and five of the BIT.TRIP series, its best games to date. In BIT.TRIP Runner, Commander Video is set on an unstoppable run through a beautifully detailed world where every obstacle creates music and every level is a song. He journeys from the darkness of space into the idealized sunshine of countryside, then into sunset and civilization and the ugliness of the constructed world.
In BIT.TRIP Fate, our hero is strung along an ever-changing line identified by Gaijin Games as “the vibe.” He negotiates its curves to protect his heart from the projectiles of enemies, shooting down robots, while in the blood-red-and-black background terrifying visions loom: office buildings under construction, vast fields of cubicles, images of increasing conformity under the guise of progress.
There are no cubicles at Gaijin Games’ tiny office, by the way. When privacy is needed, they use curtains.
The 800-Pound Animated Gorilla
Team Meat and Gaijin are showcases for innovation and free thinking on a small, guerrilla-style basis. No bureaucracies stifle brainstorms. I was amazed to discover that the same kind of free-wheeling experimental spirit can be found at the other end of the complexity spectrum. At the University of California Santa Cruz, a new initiative is ushering in a revolution in the way games are created.
I met with Jim Whitehead, founder and director of the UCSC Center for Games and Playable Media, and associate professor Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Whitehead’s areas of research have included systems to land aircraft as well as interactive storytelling. Wardrip-Fruin tells me about his interest in tabletop games and other systems for play, as well as his admiration for Virginia Woolf.
These are two of the faculty members tasked with the difficult and very interesting job of teaching students to create for a medium that is still in its infancy. Wardrip-Fruin compared their job to teaching film in the era of silent-film pioneer Eisenstein. Whitehead told me that one of the biggest impediments is how little formalized knowledge there is in the field. But one thing the program founders did have in their favor from the beginning in 2006 was the number of students who wanted to be a part of it: currently nearly 400 students are enrolled.
My visit included encounters with four undergraduates in what is unquestionably the hippest university room I have ever been inside. Polished concrete floors, high ceilings and cool light fixtures set the stage for rows of computers with large monitors and a big flat-screen TV with a long red modernist couch in front of it.
“For the record, this couch: not bad to sleep on,” reported Dexter Lohnes, a senior, as we walked into the room. After talking to them briefly about what brought them to UC–Santa Cruz, the conversation quickly turned to what brought them to game design in general. They talked about the unique power of games, how they can make you feel actual guilt, how they can express emotions and ideas in ways no other medium can and how they can teach through the act of play.
“One thing that makes games so great,” said Alex Mathew, “is the ability to have a player-driven narrative, where not everyone sees the same thing, so you have different stories that are very unique to you as a player. They feel like something that belongs to you because you helped create them.”
So what are these students aiming to do with all their enthusiasm and intelligence once they graduate? Do they hope to work on the biggest and best games from the traditional studios, or do they want to make smaller games with more freedom for experimentation and personal expression, as the local independents are doing?
“You’re talking about Team Meat and Gaijin?” asked Jon Gill. “I think they’re much bigger inspirations to shoot for than, like, the Call of Dutys and things. That’s much less exciting than the smaller teams of three, 10, 20 people who get really inspired about an idea, get some seed money, try to make it work and if it fails, it fails, and they can go on to the next thing.”
“My goals have kind of shifted since I got here,” April Grow said, “because I knew when I first wanted to make games I wanted to work for a big company, Blizzard, because as long as I can remember I’ve played Blizzard games. But now I see myself wanting to infiltrate industry and push those new visions forward from the inside and make a game that really breaks boundaries.”
Alex said, “I’m thinking about grad school right now, because all of these grad schools are looking into the exciting new projects. I don’t want to go into this industry that feels a little jaded and is trying to make safe games and not really pushing anything, while we have all these really exciting grad schools that are pushing all these weird, different ways to play games. Instead of closing off doors and saying what a game has to be, we’re looking at what a game could be, and I want to explore that some more.”
Level 500
Next on my agenda was a series of meetings with graduate students and a showcase of their projects. I saw a tool to assist players in designing their own levels. I saw an experiment in motion capture from a graduate student with a background in theater and dance. I saw a game designed to gather data about what images people find aesthetically pleasing—data that will be used to design a sort of automated cinematographer for other games.
A sociology major demonstrated what he called a social-puzzle drama, in which the setting is a high school, just before prom, and the puzzles include how to get the goth girl who is dating the shallow goth boy to start dating the computer nerd instead.
A couple of other grads told me about SpyFeet, a game that on its surface is merely an alternate reality role-playing game for the iPhone designed to get young girls to exercise by exploring and learning about their local ecosystems. Simple enough, right? OK, maybe not, but on a deeper level, it’s also a good excuse to try out a bunch of neat ideas—such as being able to automatically turn any information into dialogue written in the voice of any character in the game. And having tools that allow players to design and run adventures for their friends.
The game is also meant to be able to gather local weather information from Google so it won’t tell its young players to go walk around outside when it’s cold and raining.
All these ideas are helped along by traditional grad-school values. Unlike in the world of blockbuster video games, the imperative is not to repeat success but to tackle interesting problems and stake out new territory. UC–Santa Cruz’s is potentially the most important alternate model of game development. UC–Santa Cruz is not the only school out there with a game-design program, but it is the largest on the continent, and it seems to take both the science and art of the medium very seriously.
The ideas generated and the values instilled here will make their way into not just academic projects but also indie and blockbuster games. This could be exactly what the world of gaming needs.
