INTERVIEW WITH Rami Ismail

Rami Ismail is cofounder of the Dutch studio Vlambeer (Ridiculous Fishing, Super Crate Box), as well as a speaker and organizer focusing particularly on trying to make game development more inclusive, with a focus on game development in the non-Western world.

This is part of the interview series for my Handmade Pixels book.

The interview was conducted on October 8th, 2017.

 

Jesper:	That the talk you gave just before [at IndieCade 2017] was interesting, because often when people talk about indie games, they talk about them as something that’s going to “fix” game design. They talk about how first-person shooters or military shooters are the kind of games we don’t like, and therefore we want to make new kinds of games that provide different experiences. But it’s interesting that what you talked about was about living a good life and having a good community around working. You referred to that some of the early ideas of indie games involved the notion of creating something from your heart, so obviously, you’re not really expecting to get paid, and you have to sleep under your desk, etc. Are you saying that in the idea of “indie” there is something inherently destructive—this expectation of poor working conditions?
Rami:	Yeah, I think a lot of what early independent game development was—at least the “indie” we know now—is really the legacy of a small group of about 20 to 25 people between 2006 and 2008. That group of people was generally young; many were students who were just looking at game development and had spare time to make games. A few select people were doing independent games as a commercial thing, but the commercial aspect was really an outlier. It was usually someone who had saved up money from doing commercial game development. In general, independent game development at that point was kids kicking against the status quo of game development and creating a counterculture. It was very much about antagonizing the industry and creating something separate from it. As indie grew and as those people grew up, obviously the mechanics changed. Independent game development became more accepted and became a commercial venue, and those kids grew up and needed money. At some point, you can’t just be the rebel; you have to be a human and a rebel at the same time. I think at that point, a lot of those more self-destructive notions—the counterculture and the antagonism towards the industry—took a really long time to siphon out of independent development. I think only now do we see that, and it’s interesting because clearly it was required. Independent development needed an antagonist to become what it is now, but it’s interesting that now we have to deal with the long-tail effects of that, like the bad working conditions. That was just part of it because if you were a kid, you came home from school and worked until you couldn’t work anymore. If you translate that to an office job, it doesn’t look quite as pretty anymore.
Jesper:	That’s interesting. I was looking at the Vlambeer website the other day, and you tell your “living off ramen" story. I think it’s common to have this kind of story—Dwarf Fortress has the story about how they lived at the university in the beginning. I was wondering: we’re always talking about how we want to make games culturally acceptable, and then what we’re doing often is tying into this idea of the “starving artist.” Those are great stories, but they also set up this expectation of working in terrible conditions.
Rami:	It’s very much a romanticized myth of creation, right? The idea that you can care so much about your art that you are willing to forego everything else. I really try to make sure that in the Vlambeer story, I emphasize that yes, there was a point when we ate noodles, but that was the result of what was effectively a mistake. The way I lead into that story is by explaining that I really didn’t like the guy [Jan Willem Nijman] and I decided to start a company with him anyway. The goal of that story is to get a laugh at the ridiculousness of doing that and then a shock at the realization that, “Oh god, this can actually hurt you.” It does mythologize the starving artist bit of it, but I try to make sure that the rest of the story counters that by showing that we’ve used Ridiculous Fishing as a learning moment to get over that and become an ethical company that takes care of its people.
Jesper:	I was thinking in terms of game design. When you make games, do you see your design as providing something that was not provided by the larger mainstream industry?
Rami:	I think originally what we really tried to do was make things that were small and kicked against certain notions of the games industry. Back when we started, one of the things that was really coming up was narrative in game design—things that were big with big epic stories. We tried to make things... our slogan back in those days was “Games should be games again,” which is incredibly brash and incredibly obnoxious, honestly. But we felt that there was a value and a truth to pure game design that we couldn’t find in games anymore. So, like indie games, we started as a counterculture. It took us a while to figure out that it’s not the counterculture that mattered to us; what mattered was that we weren’t seeing specific things that we thought were powerful about games, and we just wanted to see more of that. We didn’t need an enemy to do that.
Jesper:	But the enemy is a convenient way of making yourself feel good.
Rami:	I think for a lot of independent developers, especially when they start young, they don’t really have an idea of what they like. Developing a taste is one thing, but being able to communicate that taste in a meaningful way is a lot harder than just kicking against something and saying, “That’s what I don’t like.” I think a lot of that comes from a lack of experience in communicating what you do like. The easiest way for many people to communicate what they do like is by yelling about what they don’t like. We started like that as well.
Jesper:	I guess it’s a trope we all understand. It’s easier to say, “I don’t want that” than “I do want this.” But what types of games do you make? I was writing down what I see in Vlambeer: a visual style that suggests improvisation or the “low-fi,” and then typically some kind of movement that has an old-style precision, lots of feedback, and an arcade or post-arcade tradition.
Rami:	I think “post-arcade” would be a pretty good phrase. Our games are always built around a certain hypothesis, like a theoretical idea that we think might be interesting. For Super Crate Box, we tried to create something that would stop players from camping or staying in one place. For Ridiculous Fishing, what we really tried was to create a game with an infinitely positive feedback loop. On top of that, we try to layer a game that is mostly focused on overwhelming the player’s senses. That is our aesthetic. Our aesthetic is that there is always too much happening, and within that, we create a gameplay system that requires a certain level of flow—a state of not just knowing, but being able to execute. That’s very much what our games are. They’re based on overwhelming the player with stimuli, and then the skill comes from being able to filter through that.
Jesper:	OK. You’re not just reinterpreting old mechanics, you do something that makes it feel modern, namely your overwhelming feedback, because in the old days, you couldn’t do that. You couldn’t put all that stuff in.
Rami:	Usually when we do a design, we try to subvert something from the arcade in a way that doesn’t rip it apart but emphasizes the good parts of it. We don’t consider arcade games holy or important for our design in that way; we consider them interesting artifacts of a specific time in game design. Those games had a lot of misunderstandings about player experience just due to a lack of research, and some of them are terrible when you play them now. But what we really liked was the feeling that they gave, and that feeling is what we try to replicate, but we do it today—which sometimes makes games that just haven’t existed yet. That’s actually really cool.
Jesper:	I was wondering, both for your own work and for the indie scene in general: do you think there’s a danger sometimes? All this energy went into building up the mainstream games industry as the enemy, and then for a period of time, you started having this gelling of the “independent style,” and in a way, independent games boxed themselves in.
Rami:	One of the biggest worries I have about independent game design right now, honestly, is that within independent game design, we’ve so long resisted any fragmentation. We’ve really tried to keep “indie” as one coherent term, and it really shouldn’t be. Independent game development has so many expressions nowadays. Someone like Mike Bithell or Capybara Games are looking at budgets of half a million or a million-plus to make their games, and they’ve started the “graphics arms race” that was similar to the AAA arms race originally. On the other side, you’ve got the alt-games community and the experimental games community, and their focus is very much not on that. A budget of half a million would destroy their work just by having too much money to spend on it. So, there’s this interesting thing happening right now where independent game development is finally fracturing. That fragmentation of that term is going to be critical for the spirit of independent game development. For the idea of being able to create your own work to survive, maybe “indie” as a word has to break.
Jesper:	I was about to ask if you think the label is still relevant.
Rami:	It will be relevant for as long as people wish to identify with it, but whether it helps in achieving the ideals of independent game development is a completely different thing. It’s funny because “indie” as a phrase is common in the US and Western territories, but outside of those, you will barely hear it because game development is just game development. Here is where we needed that antagonist to channel creative energy into, but in the rest of the world, that wasn’t needed—either because AAA development didn’t exist there, so there was nothing to fight against, or “indie” was not a requirement because everybody was making games on the same level.
Jesper:	I was looking at various indie festivals around the world, and it’s clear that in the rich Western world, there is this idea of cultural independence—that we’re doing something that’s a bit highbrow or culturally alternative. In a lot of the rest of the world, that’s not really the case; it’s much more just “we make games.”
Rami:	Because they don’t need an antagonist since game development there is on the same level. I think a lot of what “indie” in the Western world was, was a rejection of the money involved in games and the processes that were a result of that. In the rest of the world, independent game development is just game development. That’s how games started here as well. If you look at the first game developers—the early game developers—they were closer to the indie mindset than the AAA game development of now. Maybe we were a pendulum, and “indie” was the moment when the pendulum swung back, and now we have to find a new balance.
Jesper:	And then what always happens is that one day you’re The Sex Pistols and five years later you’re Pink Floyd, and then some new Sex Pistols come along.
Rami:	That’s it. “Indie” was critical to make the industry what it is now. I believe that it played a great part in the variety and diversity of game development we see now. But “indie” has become big enough that it needs a diversity of its own, and for that, the word has to break.
Jesper:	I thought it was interesting that you talked about how the idea of diversity is different in different countries. For example, I’m from Denmark, where we tend to read in English, copy the American discourse, and assume we should be diverse in an “American way,” reflecting American categories, which is misleading because it’s obvious that the big, excluded group in Denmark is people of Middle Eastern descent.
Rami:	In most of the world, they call it “American cultural imperialism”—the idea that America gets to impose its cultural values on the rest of the world just by virtue of exporting media. I think a lot of the people who created Hollywood originally were very aware of the power they had. Hollywood sold cars; it sold cigarettes. They were aware of the impact it had on the world. Over the decades, most of us have grown up in a world where that is just the truth. But the thing that I’m most fascinated by right now is the role of language in diversity. The discussion is an English discussion. This is not a worldwide discussion. Even when Danish or Dutch people talk about diversity, we use English words though we don’t have the same words or categories in Dutch. Racism in the Netherlands has different forms than it has here. Until we recognize that and start to work with it—until we start using the word “diversity” in our own languages—we have a problem. Racism in the US has a very different shape from racism in Egypt. In Egypt, the group of people that is excluded is a different racial category than in the US. There’s a lot of work to do there. I think also independent game development fragmenting is going to be relevant to that because indies tend to be really good at having conversations about that—a practical conversation—and applying it to their games because there’s less risk for us. I hope that we will allow ourselves to fragment into people that take care of the problems that are local, instead of everybody trying to tackle the problems that are global. I believe that big problems are solved by little solutions. Many little solutions will do more than us all trying to fight over one big one.
Jesper:	Thanks a lot.