It’s a balmy night in Tokyo. I tap my nails against the bartop in Gallery Conceal, Shibuya. I’m jostled by a thick jam of game developers, all clutching laptops and chatting loudly.
The gallery is a tiny minimalist studio with a quaint bar and a vintage shaved-ice machine nestled in the back. The eternally attentive server grins and hands over my beer.
“Arigatou gozaimasu.”
Game makers of every nationality and background intermingle. The diversity of the community here is heartening: Japanese developers and gaikokujin or “foreigners” are exchanging ideas and business cards.
This is the fourth meeting of Tokyo Indies, an informal event set up for small budget game developers in the region. It’s busy tonight; the Tokyo Game Show, Japan’s largest video game expo, finished the day before, and many of the developers in attendance here were in town to show their game to the 270,000 attendees.
The creators of intriguing games like Band Saga, Vane, and Barkley 2 are present, showing trailers and giving introductions. I strain to look over heads at the projected images. The responses from the gathered crowd are lively and interested. But this feels like something new.
In the west, small-budget games have become increasingly visible thanks to Youtube, social media platforms and digital stores such as Xbox Live and Steam. Game makers have started developing more idiosyncratic, open-ended experiences, often without the help of a publisher. Minecraft is the famous example, but offbeat titles including Thomas Was Alone, The Stanley Parable and Fez have flourished in the new digital economy.
The Tokyo Game Show is centred upon serving Japanese gamers and their commercial tastes. This has traditionally meant that giant publishers such as Capcom, Sony and Konami have dominated the show floor. But indie studios are now big draws at western video game expos like PAX, Eurogamer Expo, and Gamescom. Specialist events like Wild Rumpus, Rezzed and IndieCade are also flourishing.
So what about Japan? Does “indie” really exist in the same way here?
2013 was the first year that small-budget game makers were provided a space at the Tokyo Game Show. However, the indie section was inside the kid’s area, which was outside the main halls. This year, the indie presence was much more noticeable. The large Sony-sponsored indie booth was right in the middle of the floor between Konami and Capcom, indicating that the PlayStation manufacturer is serious about supporting independent design in Japan – just as it has been in the west.
But the signs of a new indie developer community in Japan are strong outside of TGS too.
Originally from Boston, USA, and now living and working in Tokyo, Alvin Phu started Tokyo Indies four months ago, and the meet-up has been growing in popularity. The games are interesting.
I’m particularly impressed with Ojiro Fumoto’s Downwell, a 2D-platforming game for mobile platforms that takes its inspiration from Spelunky. It’s very literal: your character goes down a well and has guns for shoes. You press one button to jump, and whilst jumping you can press again to shoot. It’s funny and has a feeling of the labyrinthine lo-fi dungeon games of my childhood. Ojiro-san is developing it by himself whilst he studies here in Tokyo. He’s the young hope.
Phu is excited about Ojiro’s game too. “Yeah, there are a lot of younger people like him with the talent,” he says. “It’s been two years to develop to this state. You know, in the beginning [small-scale games development] wasn’t that big in the US either – it’s taken 10 years. It’ll happen in Japan; there’s probably going to be a lot of big games coming out soon. And that’s why I’m still here. Everyone’s like, why are you in Japan? Why don’t you just go back to the States? I know a lot of discouraged foreigners who went back. But maybe I can contribute something.”
The Canadian developer Sagar Patel, who lives and works in Kyoto, is here too. He just celebrated the first anniversary of Kyoto Indies, a similar event that he runs in, you guessed it, Kyoto. He explains that the catalyst for the indie community starting to form here was the success of Bitsummit in Kyoto, the first indie game festival in Japan. The event was started last year by James Mielke of Q Games, the veteran Japanese studio behind the revered Pixel Junk game series. It encouraged collaboration, feedback and support for small budget or solo developers working throughout the country.
“That started the chain,” Sagar says. “When Bitsummit happened, the people who run TGS were like, ‘Heeey, what’s this indie thing about?’”
But the spirit – and financial realities – of “small budget” developers wasn’t immediately understood by the organisers of the Tokyo Game Show. “They were about to charge a thousand dollars for a booth until Sony swooped in and said, ‘Oh, we’ll cover it’,” Patel explains. “But it’s getting better. The fact that Bitsummit was so popular with press and foreign press is making them realise it’s something. The second Bitsummit was huge. The Kyoto government got involved as well because they liked it and they wanted more local businesses to partake. Then the TGS people came over and had some meetings.”
Bitsummit, Tokyo Indies and Kyoto Indies all have one thing in common: the main instigators of these events are westerners interested in creating a community around games in Japan. But indie games as a cultural movement in the west encompasses many problems still being struggled through, including the idea that developers who strike out on their own are only legitimised by commercial success. There are huge risks in going indie, too, particularly in the US where healthcare can be very expensive, and good healthcare is often attached to jobs within large corporations. Artistic experimentation is ostensibly encouraged, but largely, the community is predicated upon salable aesthetics. In the west, indie game making is still largely seen as product development, rather than creating something purely to express yourself.
But Japan has already addressed this gap in expression in a way that the west hasn’t. Japanese dōjin or “hobby” game makers have already been developing small- to no-budget games from their homes for years, and a huge community has risen up around their distribution. Making a dōjin game often involves taking another established creative work, like a comic, and creating a small-scale fan tribute to it. Games in this genre can vary in quality from little experiments to fully fledged, polished game experiences, depending on how dedicated the developers are – and the scene predates any imported western indie game culture. Dōjin has an extremely active and established community that is celebrated over a number of events such as Comiket, the word’s largest dōjinshi fair.
Patel says dōjin games have a very different sensibility to the indie scene in America. “I feel like there are cultural things holding [a larger Japanese indie game community] back,” he says. “The shyness, the unwillingness to show things … but slowly it is changing. Some things, such as Madoka-inspired games are not really pushing the boundaries, whereas Downwell – the game with the guns for shoes – that’s really pushing the boundaries. It gives me hope.”
It’s possible, however, that this “boundary pushing” is being observed by Patel and I from a very western perspective. Downwell is explicitly inspired by Derek Yu’s hit “roguelike” game, Spelunky (Ojiro displays Spelunky proudly on his laptop desktop), and because it comfortably sits in this pedigree, I can feel myself immediately warming to it.
Is what we perceive as boundary pushing in this game just extending our own western tropes, prejudices and genres? How is that different from the way that dōjin riff on previous work? Are we all just riffing all the time? Is “indie game” really an aesthetic in itself?
In Part two tomorrow: what is the difference between dōjin and indie games in the Japanese development scene – and how optimistic are small studios about the future?
