Interview with Sam Roberts

It was a carbonated guarana drink. This was early 2000s, they wanted to go after a gamer audience, they wanted to be different and edgy, so they went to a different edgy film festival and were like, "We should do different edgy games." I came on right after the first year of that event. The first year had gone okay. They got very few submissions though, and both the curators at Slamdance and the people advertising it didn't really know anything about independent games.

I ended up getting the job. I was living in Los Angeles, I was working in a variety of entertainment fields, I was pitching game scripts, which was a fun thing in the early 2000s. I had been working on television, movies, gig work, which at the time, Craigslist was a great place for. I was looking on Craigslist and Slamdance was looking for someone to showcase independent games and run a festival for independent games.

I applied and went to interview, and a big reason I got the job is that I was the only person who knew what an independent game was, and the only person present who knew what Slamdance was supposed to be. I understood a film festival and I understood independent games. To me it was very straightforward: "This is something that does for young game makers what a film festival does for young filmmakers." It finds talent, brings them to a place where they can be exposed, brings them to a place where they can meet other people working in their field, form relationships, community, collaboration, and become a home community.

Slamdance did this very well for its filmmakers, and in fact we didn't adopt much from what they did, except one specific thing: once you have shown a film in Slamdance, you are invited to be part of the screening jurying process, which is exactly what we do at IndieCade. If you have shown a game at IndieCade, we ask you to look at other people's games.

No, no. The film festival, and this is the direction I tried to take for them, was applying their feeling of what they thought independent was directly to games. For Slamdance, punk is that festival's aesthetic, so they meant punk games. In 2005, there were few. For me this required a pivot, and this immediately meant I pushed towards experimental projects often happening in academic spaces by students.

I went on to do IndieCade, and the focus on student work was a choice to focus on who could be helped, rather than on what was commercially successful or oriented. That's still the focus of IndieCade, and it's a cause of both our greatest successes and many of our difficulties.

IndieCade does a slightly different thing than Slamdance does. Slamdance is very much about helping to expose young game makers, but they're very much just about punk expressivity, about finding young talent. Film festivals are all about talent, talent, talent, and I think Slamdance thought that they could leverage that talent economically towards sponsors and stuff at some point. That didn't really work out for them. Whereas with IndieCade, I already had the Slamdance experience, and I thought about what was working and wasn't working.

The biggest difference was that the IGF and other occasional showcases of independent work up to that point were not public facing. To me, the problem with IGF - and this was true to the indie developers I knew and talked to at the time - the IGF wasn't a place you sent your independent game because you wanted your independent game to get picked up and sold. You made a game that could show in the IGF, so you would get a job. In 1999, half the submissions to the IGF were all built on the Sony consumer development platform, Net Yaroze, do you remember that thing?

In the very first year of the IGF those developers were thinking, "I'm going to code something on Net Yaroze, and then I'm going to go get a job." That was starting to change when Slamdance got started and when IndieCade finally got founded. There were so many independent developers trying to make money, but that was also a moment where independent PC games were almost exclusively student and academic, or maybe hobbyist. Then stuff that we would think of as independent games now that were commercial, was at the time casual games.

The casual game developers were not submitting work to the IGF, it did not fit that model. For the IGF, suddenly, a few people who had been in the casual game space began to make things they cared about more, wanted to make smaller companies that worked differently and weren't exploited by the awful casual game publishing portals. This is when Greg Costikyan did Manifesto Games as well.

There was a need for this, and IGF didn't know that it could or should be that. They did not pivot to filling that need very fast, which meant there was a gap. For IndieCade very explicitly, the idea was to attack the long game and provide a venue for interesting artistic creative work. One of the things I learned from working at film festivals is that venues help generate work.

We wanted to make a venue that was reaching past the gamer audience and the game designer audience and connect with a public that we thought had interest in this content. There's a barrier, which is that the public thinks “games” means a very specific thing that they aren't interested in. There's a lot of people making a ton of stuff that isn't that definition of games that the public probably would be interested in, but they can't even reach it.

We've been trying to slowly educate and bridge that gap for games, and that is what is to me unique and different about IndieCade compared to anything else. It's probably not 100 percent true anymore after ten years, but when we started, one of my talking points was always that every other venue for independent gaming content is inside of something else; it's a sideshow. We're not a sideshow, it's the only show here.

I don't think there's a tension in regard to helping people's careers, because a lot of people who want their careers helped are making very innovative, inventive, artistic work, and I think the festival does a really good job of providing value to developers who show work. It is time and money for them to get out here, for them to submit and do all that, but the foot traffic, the people they talk to if they have a game, the live player feedback, the opportunity to integrate with the community here, all that stuff tends to be valuable for the developers.

However, there's a large tension between showing the kind of stuff that I think is important to show and to help reach that broader audience and push the space forward, and showing stuff that is ready to be commercially successful tomorrow. If you are making an explicitly commercial game for an audience on a gaming platform, you have a lot less to gain from being here. There's a routine internal discussion about this. We try to find a space in the middle, because to be perfectly frank, the more commercial work we have, the easier it is invite in the traditional industry and try to get money and folks' stuff from them, but the less we would be serving those original core goals.

Because one of the reasons we still try and invite the industry into the things that are less explicitly commercial now is we think there's real space for companies like Nintendo or Sony or Oculus to be here and say, "Oh, I see that, that would work on my platform, looks like nothing that's on my platform, and nobody has anything like it, I could make a mint."

To get some cachet, they did that in the early 2000s, they've stopped basically. From the folks I've talked to over there I understand that they had a much broader, wider strategy where they tried to invite of interesting people onto their platform, but now they don't want to meet everyone in the indie world, they want to focus their attention on the people they already met, who've had some success, and try to grow them to the next level of success.

In the film industry, there's a full ecosystem, you're at the bottom, you play small festivals, you get a reputation, it's easier to get into a major festival. Now you've been in a major festival, that first time you screen in a major festival, you meet the community, you meet a bunch of people who are acquiring films, you meet journalists, you meet audience, you meet other filmmakers who are going on the film festival circuit, probably the first time you play a major film festival, you end up playing six or seven because there's that many of them, and filmmakers submit their movies to everything. Now you're through the first line.

The next time you get something made, that might sell or get you an opportunity to make something for one of these companies. Now you're like a minor leaguer, you might have steady work, you probably end up making most of your money in commercials. Some of those commercials are brilliant, or you self-fund a third movie that just is out of this world, and then that pushes you over the top, and now you're working for the big guys. It's a functional ecosystem, they have a way not just to take fresh talent and introduce them, but to take introduced talent and upgrade them. In games, we're not that good at any of that yet.

Yes, so we tend to focus on that connoisseur audience, for explicit reasons. One, is that we think it will be easier to get them to understand that even though this is a game, it's not a regular kind of game, so we feel like there's a connection there. That audience goes to film festivals, they go to museum exhibits. Contextually, they are closer to understanding what we're doing. Then we also view them on some level as a gateway to the rest of the world, where you can't serve everyone all at once, you have to go and convert some folks, and that audience also tends to have a higher percentage of, I hate this word, but the modern "tastemaker", people who once they are engaged with a community or a thing or understand what it is, bring that to a broader public audience.

That's the reason for that, and you're right, I'm very interested personally as a designer in truly democratic play, stuff that is for broad audiences, but not the current broad “shoot the other guy in the face”-audience.

I think that often we are perceived that way, I think that it easy to fall into the language that does that. In my head when I'm working on this, and when I'm trying to really be explicit about phrasing or our mission in what we do, I shy away from anything that is confrontational, in large part because I love the video games industry. It's a very big part of my childhood, and I love classic video games. I don't like first person shooters, which is why those are the ones I usually make fun of, but I like many other kinds of very classic game audience games. I think that industry has put itself into trouble by tripling and quadrupling down on the same shrinking audience that pushes other people away, by falling into the Hollywood trap.

Hollywood also makes giant blockbusters with this specific audience and pour all the money and marketing into that, and they can't be interesting or new, because then you might not make your money back. I think the similar trend has been very bad for the games industry, because the games industry doesn't have as much counter-availing pressure in it against that.

I dislike that it is such a point of conversation and contention at this point. I both fall into the trap of using it and get frustrated by endless semantic arguing. It is an incredibly useful word for us, it helps people who are doing this identify us easily, know that it's a venue for their work, come out to see it, it captures a lot of what we mean, but it is such a vague, unspecific term used by different people. For some people it is a badge of honor, for some people it is a derogatory label, and it can be everything in between.

We catch a lot of trouble and heat around that, and we get people who don't submit because they don't feel they're indie enough, even though they're as indie as I need them to be. We get people who say, "Well, all the stuff you show isn't indie. I'm the real indie, because I'm the only person making my game, and I made it on a budget of $0. That's what indie is, and why isn't everything here that?" A big part of my job as the festival director over the years has been to invite in new communities every year, so that those communities showcase and provide an example to other people in their community that this can be a place for their work, and then also influence game developers .

One of my happiest things is when we invite in a tabletop community or a live action community, or big play, and then video game developers in here see a game, play it, love it, and feel, "Oh, I have all these ideas now for stuff that I can do." That is valuable and amazing and doesn't happen if we don't throw our arms open. Though indie helps draw a bunch of people we want, it also creates this unnecessary sort of like grouping that then sometimes excludes.

This is why we need those multiple perspectives, because the closer as a curator you get to, "How many of my boxes does this check?", the further you get from being able to find the interesting innovative stuff. I think the visual thing is interesting, I believe that games needed to get enough people who were thinking about or had been educated by or were aware of the way other art forms work. In the early space of indie games, the huge constraint, which is still a huge constraint, is that you couldn't afford cutting edge, pseudo-photo-realistic 3D graphics, and everything was supposed to be that, so you had to go the other direction.

At the beginning, the only other direction everybody knew how to go was towards what video games had used to look like. Now that we have people who understand that you can choose a visual style that is other than photo-realistic 3D and still bring in an artist who is good in that other style, and they will make beautiful art for you. That's why so many more indie games now have beautiful art, without being 3D photo realistic.

"Phases" is an interesting way to phrase it. At the beginning, there were small games made by small teams, often with small innovations on PC. Then there was an acceleration, where we were rapidly inviting in new communities doing very different things, and there was a brief time where each year, there was something that a big chunk of the game designers had never seen or thought of before. There would be at least one game every year in that space. It's during this time that Humanoid Asteroids came through, that Eric Zimmerman and Nathalie Pozzi did Sixteen Tons, that we see the first tabletop RPGs come to the festival, you know this is during this period that Nani shows up with documentary virtual reality.

Now we've passed into a post-that phase, we still have some entirely new things like immersive theater, and new platforms are arriving wholesale. What I'm personally very excited about is the re-mixing of all this coming together, people coming back from a more traditional game or video game designer's perspective, but just gobbling up this stuff that other people have done. Now you see pieces over there like Busy Work, a digital game played on four PCs simultaneously by people talking to each other, and it's heavily supported by set and props, it's a very different kind of experience.

Or Hackers of Resistance or Santiago, which is a VR game where the virtual reality is all tied to a literal physical statue. This is the newest wave, if that answers the question.