Feeling poleaxed by an indie games interview video
When you work in games, you are often painfully aware that there are still, somehow, hordes of people out there in the world who think that all consoles are "a Nintendo," or that all videogames are for 12-year-old-boys, or that your dream job would certainly be to work on Fortnite. Many game developers have these kinds of people for parents. When I used to discuss my job around family, I could see a kind of garage door closing behind their eyes, locking their soul off from me, or whatever. It's very clear that no matter how many more billions our industry makes per year than the film industry, many people out there still somehow consider it completely outside the flow of Regular Society.
However, day-to-day, game devs are not really thinking about or focusing on these people. Indie games in particular are kind of the sweet, rotten heart of videogaming, the kind of thing normies don't know about and in fact don't even know how to purchase. I personally am extremely insulated from this kind of person - because my husband and I have both worked in game dev for over fifteen years, most of my friends in real life work in games. My parents have been forced to learn basic things about my industry, because I won't shut up about them. I no longer have to see the garage door close at all.
But a friend of mine shared this video of an indie game dev representing Kitten Cup Studio explaining their game, Capy Castaway, on local television in Toronto. It took me RIGHT BACK to the kinds of conversations I had in 2011, freshly in my first games job:
(The studio itself posted this shorter, even scarier video on instagram. They're very good-natured about it!!)
The funniest stuff is in the back half of the video. A purchase game... does this work on Roblox??...
Regular people kind of hold one another to a bar of cultural familiarity - if you're making new friends with adults, you're gonna be asked about the latest prestige TV dramas, or sports, or movies. But for some reason, even though games are totally culturally mainstreamed, most people still don't seem to hold their adult peers accountable for knowing basic things about videogames. They don't consider it important to even know where to buy videogames, or whether or not all videogames are interoperative (through Roblox!) or not. (1)
Anyway!!! We are now in this funny and weird and even kind of charming situation where games are mainstreamed enough that a cute indie game can get an interview on the morning TV news!!! incredible!!!... but the television interviewers assigned to ask you questions about art and culture are so unfamiliar with games as an art form that they utter "...It's a purchase game?" in that terrifying tone of voice!
I've written before about why I think it's culturally acceptable to treat games as somehow scarier and more alien than, say, movies or TV shows. My theory is still the same: people feel this way about games in large part because they take too long to play. Most people who didn't keep a hobby of playing games from childhood through adulthood don't find ways to fit high-profile, super-long ones into their life. (This is why we must destroy all 80-hour-long AAA videogames, steal their development budgets, and make 2-hour microgames with the money instead.)
Anyway, this interview is a delicious temperature check, for me. A periscope into what remains of game-ignorant Normie World. When I was getting started in the industry, the idea that you could get interviewed about your indie steam release on TV for any reason would have been a joke. We're currently at the level of cultural penetration where they actively want to interview you, but they also don't know enough about your corner of the entertainment industry to know whether you are Roblox or not. Ahh, well!!
1 - My other anecdotal evidence about this is that all my videogame posts - the posts about my art form, my craft, the things I care most about in my professional life - do dogshit on this blog, because so many of my readers are getting here through the loathesome bear blog discover page (which I hate, fear, and disrespect). I assume this is some normie pipeline I accidentally acquired from posting too much. My mental image of the average bear blog discover page reader is the guy who says "A purchase game???" in this interivew.