LOST WORDS
Sketchbook Games’ creative director Mark Backler hasn’t lost his vocab – he’s telling us why indie is so important
OPM: Where did the idea for the framing narrative of the journal in Lost Words come from?
Mark Backler: The game originally started from the Ludum Dare game jam with the theme of ‘minimalism’, with the intention of it being a bit like Tetris, but dropping words instead of blocks and you had a playable character too. The idea was that you’d drop words from a quote which landed vertically in ascending length order so you could climb up them with your character to reach a goal at the top of the screen. When I ran the game before I had physics on the words, though, the character dropped down and landed on the sentence which hung in the middle of the screen, and I thought that that was really striking and much better than my original idea so I went with that instead! I liked the concept so much that I kept working on it after the game jam and it grew from there. I love narrative games so I knew I wanted to add a story to it, and as you were walking on words a journal seemed to make perfect sense.
OPM: Do you think games stimulate the imagination?
MB: Absolutely. All art and media has the potential to inspire people and stir their imaginations and I think that with games this is especially so, due to their interactivity and allowing for a much greater breadth and depth of engagement than other mediums.
OPM: Do you think the indie games space allows you to explore things not possible in Triple-A games?
MB: I think that there’s definitely more freedom with smaller teams and being independent. It’s a lot easier to take risks. I think some Triple-A companies find it hard because when you have teams of hundreds or thousands of people and your burn rate is phenomenally high, it can make big studios quite risk-averse. Although in an industry like videogames, sometimes not taking risks is the bigger risk, as if you’re doing what’s been done before then there’s probably nothing making your game stand out from all the rest. Having said that, some companies have done very well by jumping on bandwagons but you never know if that will work out or if the wheels are about to fall off!
We are seeing bigger companies try out more experimental concepts, though. Hellblade is a game that sits beyond indie but still wasn’t a Triple-A budget, and Ninja Theory did a great job of
“I THINK THERE’S DEFINITELY MORE FREEDOM WITH SMALLER TEAMS.”
using that as a means to help cast light on the real-world issues of mental health and psychosis. They did that through partnering with the Wellcome Trust, who we’re also working with for Lost Words in order to examine the link between grief and memory, in collaboration with Cambridge University researcher Caitlin Hitchcock. Another great example is Life Is Strange, which is a really wonderful game from a big studio that looks at issues like suicide with a high degree of sensitivity and nuance.