So I had the chance to go and see Indie Game: The Movie last night.
It is a fine documentary, or at least, a documentary of the heavily narrativsed sort, which eschews activism and realism in lieu of style, story and drama. It is a powerful film, with beautiful camera work, excellent editing, interesting interviews and at least 5 or 6 moments where the subjects of the film appear to be pouring out their hearts, their sadness, their uncertainty, their hopes. It is beautiful as a result.
But as soon as the film ended, I was quickly reminded that there isanother component of the film that needs attention: its context. A friend of mine, Jaime Woo, was at the screening and voiced his displeasure rather quickly. Here is a short collection of two of his tweets:
It’s always weird when a documentary interviews less than a dozen (and essentially three) people and tries to represent a whole sub-culture.
This film is fan-service. If you’re a game dev, it’ll feel like an aspirational vote of confidence, but it’s an on-the-surface work of film.
It is a film purportedly about a community and practice, but as all documentaries are doomed to do, fails in the attempt. This is because the filmmakers come from a very different community and practice: documentary film. As they made very clear in the interview afterwards, they were interested in the stories of the developers, rather than the practice of creating videogames. They felt that these were stories that hadn’t been told before in the medium, and so they went out and created this film to fill the void.
It is not an activist film. It wasn’t created to do justice to the community or the form. It was created to tell an engaging story. I have a feeling that if the directors had seen a powerful story about chicken farmers, they would have made that instead. It, likewise, would have come up short in communicating in real truth about what chicken farming is about.
And that is why the most unfortunate thing about Indie Game: The Movie is the title. The title hints about the subject matter, when in reality its focus is on two of the most successful projects in the last few years, whose success is the exception, not the rule. Sadly, “The Story of the Development of Super Meat Boy and Fez: The Movie” doesn’t roll of the tongue.
It is my philosophical inclination to posit that all interactions between objects bound to see only illusions of the other, and that no interaction or relation can do justice to its subject matter. Objects are withdrawn from us, and from all other things, and we can’t ever hope to touch them. I’m going to write a 300 page dissertation on an object, and I hope it is good and people like it, but in the end I know that it will be adistortion, a fiction that can’t ever hold transcendental knowledge of its object. It will fall short.
Indie Game: The Movie, falls short and fails if it was about making indie videogames. It can’t speak for the practice of creating videogames, and it never was going to be able to. I think good documentary film making should foreground this shortfall (often this is achieved by pulling back the veil of the production of the film, stressing the subjective nature of the story, etc), but its not the stylistic inclination of every documentarian. It never will be.
Instead I look at the film itself as an example of the medium: as a film it succeeds, as a representation, it fails.