Artists Assemble
Independent, political and inspiring: could videogame collectives point to an alternative future?
URSULA K LE GUIN, THE AUTHOR WHO IMAGINED RADICAL UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS IN NOVELS SUCH AS THE DISPOSSESSED, ONCE WROTE, ‘WE’RE EACH OF US ALONE. WHAT CAN YOU DO BUT HOLD YOUR HAND OUT IN THE DARK?’
At various points during the last decade, game makers across the world will have felt the weight of this sentiment. Reports of exploitative working conditions, the industry’s #metoo reckoning, and chastening real-world politics and economics have put individuals under ever-increasing pressure. But grounds for optimism have begun to emerge in the shape of networks of support and organisation which look to unite solitary figures. Unionisation efforts are one welcome manifestation; so too are worker cooperatives. Arguably less formal but no less important are the collectives – small groups of like-minded people – that are beginning to leave their Le Guin-like mark on the industry.
Collectives have long been a cornerstone of underground art and music, but in videogames fewer have appeared. Los Angeles’ Glitch City is perhaps the most recognisable, while Sokpop, a Dutch collective formed by four foppish 20-somethings, has found recent success thanks to its burgeoning Patreon subscriber count. These groups surfaced within an independent scene which, depending on who you ask, either grew into increasingly dazzling and varied shapes throughout the 2010s or found itself in trouble. Reports of the so-called ‘indiepocalypse’ rumbled on – the idea that so many games are released on Steam that making a living as an indie developer is near impossible – while widening access to game development tools such as Unity and Twine accelerated. With little fanfare, game collectives began to offer a quietly revolutionary counterpoint to traditional notions of working, either within the blockbuster studio structure or independent sector.
Rachel Sala, the videogame artist whose work has graced cult hits Frog Factions, Frog Fractions 2 and Dream Daddy, remembers how welcoming Glitch City felt when she joined in 2014. Her reference point wasn’t videogame studios but LA hackerspaces mostly run out of dusty warehouses. “I was treated like a zoo animal and even told I didn’t belong there,” she says. “But Glitch City was so kind and positive. No one gave a shit that I was a woman.”
The collective was established a year prior by a number of independent videogame makers who, among others, included Donut County designer
“NO ONE GAVE A SHIT THAT I WAS A WOMAN” RACHEL SALA
Ben Esposito and Hyper Light Drifter’s Alex Preston. The group originally congregated in coffee shops every fortnight, naming its meetups Strawberry Garden, but talk quickly turned to a permanent shared space. Preston was instrumental in getting the ball rolling as friends cruised neighbourhoods, keeping their eyes peeled for a suitable home. Eventually, the group found an old print workshop in Culver City, a district in western LA also home to Sony Pictures Entertainment. During lunch hours, studio executives fill the street in business casual attire while Glitch City members amble around in their jeans and T-shirts.
As a formal body, the monthly member dues based on the cost of a desk space give Glitch City, at least from the outside, the feel of a co-working space. “That term implies that we’re trying to run it like a business and make money,” says Brendon Chung, designer of Quadrilateral Cowboy and Thirty Flights Of Loving, before quipping: “Glitch definitely does not make money.” He prefers the term collective, which more accurately describes the cohort he says “supports each other, more like a community of friends”.
Every Friday, Glitch City’s members gather for ‘show and tell’. For Chung, these weekly check-ins during Quadrilateral Cowboy’s four-year development not only offer crucial and reliably paced feedback he wouldn’t receive if working alone, but also an opportunity to relieve the burden that comes with carrying a project mostly by yourself. Sala, meanwhile, recalls the evening of the Hyper Light Drifter launch in 2016, when Chung taught her the basics of the opensource 3D graphics toolset Blender. “Brendon just sat there very patiently with me for four hours,” she says. “‘Here’s how materials work. Animate that. Duplicate that.’ It was amazing. And I was able to teach other people at Glitch City what he had taught me.”
Teddy Dief, a designer on Hyper Light Drifter now working on an independent project whose current codename is a palm tree emoji, left Glitch City in 2016 to join Square Enix Montreal as a creative director. The studio, part of a mammoth, publicly traded network, asked Dief to bring “some of that indie energy” to its output, which included the turn-based Go titles for Tomb Raider, Hitman and Deus Ex. Despite entering with freedom, trust and many respected collaborators, the atmosphere was a marked departure. “Co-workers are not the same thing as collective peers,” Dief explains. Glitch City’s own reputation stems, in part, from its themed parties which open up the space to members of the public, and often include silly playable works from its members. “We threw a Valentines party one year called ‘Sonic is my boyfriend’. I made a stupid game, people played it one time, and that was it,” they continue. “Doing stuff like that in a company is just harder. Everything is capitalised. Everything has a tangible cost. When you’re employing someone to be there who doesn’t own their work, it’s a different environment.”
Ice Water Games, which describes itself as a “democratic games label,” positions itself in opposition to such commercialised studios. Badru, its Seattle-based co-founder, points to the consensual decision-making process and payment model which stipulates any revenue from its games is split equally between makers depending on the hours they contribute to its creation. Membership to Ice Water, which spans North America and Europe and communicates via email, video calls and Slack, stems directly
“[GLITCH] SUPPORTS EACH OTHER, MORE LIKE A COMMUNITY” BRENDON CHUNG
“NDAS MOSTLY EXIST BECAUSE THERE’S NO TRUST” POL CLARISSOU
from its projects, and is incorporated into its democratic structure. The makers of 2014 melancholic walking simulator Eidolon have just as much power as a team member on 2019’s eerie and experimental narrative game The Ritual Of The Moon; even if someone only contributed a few hours of work to a project, they’re still invited to contribute to Ice Water’s running, either in the form of voting on key decisions or nominating themselves to its board of directors.
In line with such an ethos, Ice Water doesn’t secure intellectual property rights for any of its games and operates strictly without the use of non-disclosure agreements to the point where games pitched to the label under NDA aren’t eligible. Member Pol Clarissou describes such contracts as effectively “gagging orders”.
“Even in the case of time-constrained NDAs, they’re tools that restrict artists’ leverage to talk about their working conditions and work. That has a dual negative effect of enabling various forms of abuse while also alienating artists from their craft, since they can’t talk about it,” the Montrealbased game maker says. “NDAs mostly exist because there’s no trust, and because the interests of the company don’t align with the interests of the artists.”
Since 2016, Badru has embarked on a process of transforming the collective into a more formal entity with the guidance of Game Workers Unite, Democratic Socialists Of America, International Workers Of The World and Canadian cooperative Ko-op, the outfit behind the 3D puzzle game Gnog. The aim is to ensure Ice Water’s legal protection so that it can’t be sold and, should dissolution occur, its assets are distributed to other nonprofits. Badru explains how the process was kicked into gear by Donald Trump’s 2016 election and a desire to create more equitable structures of organisation; world-building, albeit reoriented towards reality. “I did a lot of soul searching, as did many
Americans,” he explains. “It feels like the way our work and economy is structured is not the way it needs to be. For me, a lot of it came down to me thinking, ‘What can I do myself outside of just voting?’”
Less explicitly political is Sokpop, a group of four Utrecht-based friends who joined forces with the simple aim of sharing the risk involved with making games. “If we’re all making solo stuff and one of us does really well, that can positively influence the others,” says Aran Koning, matter-of-factly. What’s different about Sokpop, which also includes Tijmen Tio, Ruben Naus and Tom van den Boogaart, is that it uses Patreon as a game subscription service that enables the foursome to flex their creative chops in a prolific fashion while still earning income. By promising a new game every fortnight, Sokpop is being funded by 1,390 patrons to the tune of $4,866 every month, which is split equally between members. The audience might not yet be huge but it’s certainly devoted, which is really all the group needs to sustain itself.
Patreon is a smart move for Sokpop, whose members cite Clarissou’s own French collective Klondike as a key inspiration. In a recent blog post, Valve released figures for games released on Steam, its online marketplace. While more games than ever are finding success – defined by Valve as earning over $10,000 in the first two weeks after release – so, too, are more than ever ‘failing’ (those earning below $5,000 in the same time frame). Sokpop hasn’t shunned Steam – you’ll find the collective’s Patreon titles mostly as bundles alongside larger, standalone releases such as the god game Simmiland – but what’s clear is that by pooling the Patreon income, the collective is hedging its bets against unpredictable and often opaquely operated storefronts.
It certainly helps that Sokpop has finely crafted a brand, despite surprisingly limited formal collaboration between the outfit (of the two group efforts, one was a success while the other, Oh Crab!, was ironically enough a disaster, described by Sokpop as a “sitcom game that you shouldn’t buy”). Across a diverse array of titles – from cyberpunk adventure Blue Drifter to underwater exploration Fishy – a low-poly, pastel-coloured aesthetic has emerged. In what can often feel like an increasingly homogeneous independent space, you can probably tell a Sokpop game just by looking at it. Koning, however, puts it more bluntly. “I don’t feel bad ripping off anyone’s style in the collective, which is kind of nice,” he says. “It’s our collective style, another resource we share.”
A few hundred miles to the west of Utrecht, the Berlinbased ten-person software collective AAA is taking a different route as it attempts to embed collaboration into every facet of its creative practice. On its second project, 2017’s Data Mutations, each member produced audio, textures, 3D objects, shaders or text, creating a game from the shared resources. The resulting anthology is striking in its variation, whisking curious players through eerie deserts, cosmic art galleries and other surreal spaces. “The actual way we work together is a huge thing that informs the works we’re making,” says founding member Jira Duguid, describing how AAA is an attempt to unlearn the hierarchies and “skill-heavy asset creation” that define mainstream game production. “When we collaborate, we’re trying to develop software in game engines which don’t replicate professional structures.”
The collective’s hybrid outlook, incorporating both the videogame and art worlds, was born of Duguid’s desire to find a community in Berlin galvanised around the idea of games as art. None existed – so they set about establishing it themselves, naming the event Art Games and cycling through an array of venues before settling on the art and science hub SPEKTRUM. AAA member Jessica Palmer attended an early meetup where they watched a demo for a game which looked like a “guided acid trip in the Oculus Rift. I was like, ‘I’ve finally found people doing weird shit with game engines,’” they say. “I was so excited.”
“IF WE’RE MAKING SOLO STUFF AND ONE OF US DOES REALLY WELL, THAT CAN POSITIVELY INFLUENCE THE OTHERS” ARAN KONING
While the initial group bonded over shared outlooks, politics and creative interests, AAA has grown into a more specifically defined entity which seeks to act independently of institutions that don’t align with its values and preserve the agency of its members, even amid such deep collaboration. Merle Leufgen stresses another vital aspect of the collective: looking out for the wellbeing of its members. “My definition of collective goes beyond just working together,” she says. “Taking care of one another outside of being productive is really important. It’s different to a co-working group or a team in the company at your day job.”
Utopias, AAA’s latest project, is another ambitious anthology work, albeit stitched together more discreetly than 2017’s Data Mutations. Across nine hopeful worlds, the group explores heady subjects including ecological utopia, emancipation and transhumanism, often through dazzling visual presentation. Crucially, the collective members describe the project in terms of the entire process which led to its creation, from experiments in group decision-making to the sharing of resources and information. While various collective members admit its production wasn’t always enjoyable, working collectively — in the most literal sense of the word — produced meaning in itself. “What’s hopeful or optimistic is that none of us would have been capable of anything near as much by ourselves,” says Chloê Langford. “It’s important to try to do things differently, to remember that we can and there are other ways.”
What, then, does this slow blossoming of collectives mean for the game industry? Certainly, their existence speaks to the persistent work of their members and a desire to find commonalities in perhaps harder-to-find places. Collectives, too, appear to challenge the fundamental idea that a single creator can ever be meaningfully responsible for an entire collaboratively constructed work. And for those with hopes of more just economics, their structure challenges not just the indie entrepreneurs which have ascended throughout the last decade but the increasingly unequal salaries doled out to a deeply stratified industry.
For Dief, they might evidence a new, entirely separate means of working, far removed from the major game studios which now span many continents and thousands of workers. “Trying to make art at a sustainable scale which doesn’t mean getting sucked into the industrialised complex of games requires new structures.
I’d like to think that at this point in the games industry we’re going to fracture harder and harder. The people who make free-to-play – things like Fortnite or esports – that’s effectively it’s own space. And hopefully we’ll curate more ways for people to stay alive while they’re making small things, whether they’re selling it on itch.io or if they have a Patreon subscription,” they say. “As an American, I’m more aware each day of how we need to support each other, and how scary things can be. And I hope – I think – Glitch is an example of what is sustainable. People are going to need new means of staying afloat and while Glitch City isn’t a financial entity, it does help people stay afloat emotionally.”
Perhaps such collectives, ever-evolving, slowly uncovering innovative ways of working together, are a necessary reminder that the act of creation extends far beyond the videogame itself – whether that’s the executable file we download to our computer, or disc we hold in our hands – to encompass the workplace it emerges from. While videogame unions grapple with knotty, often problematic real-world labour conditions, collectives can think more imaginatively. They might not operate on the grand scale of Le Guin’s science fiction but, in their own small way, offer an alternative to the status quo and even provide inspiration for the new wave of game makers. “You can make a super-cool videogame without funding, without being a corporation, and when you’re not motivated by commercial restraints or the same conventions of other games,” says AAA’s Palmer. “We can do whatever we want.”