Warhol meets wario
Independent developers Kokoromi encourage creation of artistic, experimental video games
KEVIN GILLICH THE LINK (CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY)
MONTREAL (CUP) — When you think experimental and independent art, what comes to mind? Maybe a rock band that doesn’t need guitars. Or perhaps a painting of a soup can. What about a duo of plumbers that rescue a princess from evil turtles by eating various magic fungi and plants?
All right, that last one was probably not the best example. However, while the latest Super Mario Bros. game qualifies as neither experimental nor independent, in time video games may become the next venue for unique and creative art. At least, that’s what the people at Kokoromi are hoping for.
A Montreal-based collective of independent game developers, Kokoromi — Japanese for experiment — aims to create artistic and experimental video games and promote these games as an art form.
Having just completed their first successful game-art event — GAMMA 01: Audio Feed — and already planning for GAMMA 02, the members of Kokoromi spoke about what they hope will become Montreal’s next indie scene. “What we’re trying to do with [GAMMA] is start a kind of counter-culture to balance out the major [companies] in video games,” said Kokoromi member Phil Fish. “We don’t have an independent circuit. I mean, yes, there are independent games on the Internet you can download but there is no real circuit. There’s no counter-culture.”
The video game industry, as with most industries, isn’t the most supportive when it comes to creative expression and experimentation. Encouraging independently developed games but will this provide new experience for gamers and allow developers to express themselves in a way that wouldn’t be possible at their nine-to-five jobs.
“[Working in video games] is an awesome job,” explained Fish, “but as an independent creator, as an artist, it can be quite suffocating sometimes. You want an outlet to just let loose and go nuts and not have to worry, ‘Is this game gonna sell, is it gonna get the right demographic?’ Just go nuts, do whatever we want, and just expose these games to people.”
An independent video game scene in Montreal doesn’t seem like that far of a stretch. However, despite the abundance of talented programmers in the city, there are a few obstacles that need to be overcome.
“The people with the necessary skills to build the games are pretty much all working in video games,” said Fish, who himself works in the video game industry. “It’s very time-consuming, it’s very energy consuming.”
Actually, making a video game that functions — let alone is fun to play — is a challenge in itself. While the required tools to learn are becoming more accessible, computer programming still isn’t something you can learn in six easy steps.
“It’s not like a guitar where you can just pick it up and learn three chords,” said Heather Kelley, another member of Kokoromi. “It’s getting easier . . . It’s easier to find out what games are about and people have played a lot more of them so they understand them a lot better. But it’s still really, really, really hard compared to doing something like picking up a camcorder or some other tool that has been a little further developed.”
“It’s easy to make a bad movie or to make a bad song, but even making a bad game is still hard,” added Fish.
Despite these challenges, the members of Kokoromi have a good feeling that video games will catch on as an art form. If the success of their first event is any indication, then Montreal will be seeing more video game galas in the future.
“We’re just trying to give people a reason to bust their asses and make a cool game. The payoff here is, ‘Hey, you made the game and then we have this huge party and everybody is drinking and dancing and they play your game and they love it,’” said Fish.
“We want gaming cultural events. I go to rock shows, I go to art shows, I want to go to [video] game shows.”
