Interacting with the Interactive

Indie Game: The Movie

***½  out of ****

Directed by: Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky

Running time: 103 minutes

Video games are not often referred to as an art form, despite their lucrative role in changing the modern media landscape to make art more interactive.

Indie Game: The Movie, a Canadian documentary that explores the lives and creative struggles of four independent video game designers, is a big step toward giving brilliant programmers and designers the due they richly deserve.

The film, which won an award at Sundance earlier this year, is about those who make their games with limited funding and just a few team members. The first is Jonathan Blow, whose game Braid became the first massive independent success in 2008, renowned for its crafty rewind function that allowed players to take as many mulligan shots as they wanted.

Currently designing a second game, Blow regrets some of the game’s instant popularity, explaining that his audience looked over the intricacies of his creation and were too attached to the rewind move. His attempts to defend the game online have only hurt his image.

Blow may be frustrated, but he is not as paranoid as Montreal programmer Phil Fish, whose cubist game Fez became a punchline on video game blogs the same way that the Guns N’ Roses album Chinese Democracy got ripped apart in the music press. Nobody ever thought it would see the light of day.

But Fish cannot help that the game is delayed a few years after it was primed to launch: after new technology became available, he redesigned his game using innovative pixel art aesthetics three times over.

As Fish notes, the public has no problem tirelessly criticizing him and his small team for taking years to finish a game, when there are other games that take hundreds of programmers that are in development for just as long. He speaks in disdain about Halo and related multi-million dollar successes.

The final subjects are Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, in the ending stages of making an independent game called Super Meat Boy. Their protagonist is a character without skin that goes through levels to find Bandage Girl, who will offer him healing.

He is an animated personification of the bitter hurt Refenes and McMillen may feel if their game flops. Not only will their work’s perception flounder but so will their entire creative capacity.

Since gamers now download new releases from their consoles, independent video game markers can get a deal with a distributor like Microsoft (who own the X-Box Live platform) to get their work out to fans of the format.

In the same way that independent directors eventually got a hold of small, portable cameras and starting filming stories that were personal to them, the indie video game programmers examined here say that their games are the most effective ways to express themselves.

Discussion of mortality becomes eerily frequent in the film. McMillen refers to the room where he works as a concentration camp. After committing so much time and money to a venture so personal, Fish laments that if Fez flops, he will consider killing himself.

The figures in this male-centric documentary have no regrets showing off their bedrooms, filled with posters of obscure games, Nintendo Power wallpaper and bean-bag chairs. These rooms are microcosms of their youth-bound minds.

Indie Game is a frequently fascinating and surprisingly moving film that delves deeply into the creative psychology of unacknowledged artists. The four subjects are trying to cling onto a childlike spirit that once came from immersing themselves in the world of a game.

These interactive programmers once felt animated and alive, but they don’t want to admit that it’s game over. They will fight to rack up points – of a creative and professional variety – to become the winner of a new kind of game, even if the level seems impossible to finish.