Video games rule. I got really into screens around 2020 and let me tell you, it’s amazing what they’ve got these days.
You can now live out all your fantasies: accidentally falling off a cliff during a moment of panic, having unsettlingly accurate knowledge of what’s in your pockets, and living in a community where everyone is happy to talk to you (about rumours of weird noises in the forest). All from the safety of a fraying bean bag.
It’s difficult to make the case for video games as a medium. Almost everyone has, through intention or misadventure, been exposed to a good film, a good song or read the Wikipedia summary of a good book. But video games seem somehow partitioned off, set apart from ‘legitimate’ forms of entertainment – the bleeps and bloops of the freak’s oubliette.
Your brain either contains a fond gaming memory already or your only association is your nephew cloistered away in an unsettlingly dim room hollering cutting-edge slurs through the sounds of relentless murder simulation. Lately he’s started naming every automatic rifle over breakfast, claiming he can taste blood on his back teeth. You are right to fear. Something is wrong. Intervene.
Games don’t figure into the picture of local creative talent. When a band from Sheffield makes it big, their city of origin becomes part of their story, and they become part of the story of their city. When a film is shot or set in Sheffield residents take interest, because the shapes of our environment have been regurgitated into art.
But the games built on our doorstep are not incorporated into the cultural landscape in the same way. We have The National Video Game Museum, we have Sumo Digital, but there’s very little infrastructure to inform people about what experiences are currently produced in our city. For smaller games developers, there are minimal pathways to make their works known to the people of their communities.
Video gaming is a goliath. Its economic bootprint exceeds both film and music and we (Britons) are the largest consumer in Europe (the continent). Despite its continued growth, rot has set in at the largest studios as they oversee record numbers of job losses. Talent is haemorrhaging out into the oceans (which I am using as a metaphor to represent the void – things are categorically not better overseas).
So we are entering an era of smaller independent studios. Nimble and untrammelled by brain-destroyingly vast shareholder obligations. Capable of escaping the What-If-You-Shot-A-Gun imagination vortex in whose event horizon live the majority of the big-title ‘triple-A’ games, perfectly frozen in time.
For this reason I have been speaking to Sheffield’s smaller developers about their creations and motivations.
Coded Black
In a culture of games-as-dopamine-fulfillment Coded Black is an urgent and fascinating work. The first game by Maisha Wester,
scholar of Gothic Literature and Horror Film Studies directly confronts
“the suppressed histories of anti-blackness in the US and UK”.
It is a game of exploration: as you progress the narratives
of the central characters you navigate an expansive environment serving
both as story location and interactive exhibit on the history of
anti-black racism. Hovering symbols both scattered and hidden mark the
locations of high resolution archival content bringing specificity and
clarity to historical moments of resilience, humanity, and horror.
A public education resource and work of gothic historical
fiction miraculously hybridised into something both gripping and
sobering.
Maisha told me:
In the states, I’m in two cultural
studies departments, American Studies and Black Diaspora Studies, and it
was during the 2015 elections when I was teaching this course about the
formation of America and its politics. I was having students analyse the
debates and they pointed out time and time again the fallacies, the
misrepresentations on both sides, but many of them still felt compelled
to say “Trump still feels right”.
I knew why he felt right. Trump not only finds a
way to make someone else to blame for your misery and suffering, but he
feeds it to his supporters wrapped in a narrative typically stolen from
horror films and gothic literature. Of course it feels right to you –
he’s feeding you The Walking Dead,
only with Mexicans. And these students weren’t the extreme end of the
student population. We had a white nationalist student group on campus,
who brought in speakers. Meanwhile, we had the Klan coming into the city
and flyering.
That’s when I started thinking: I’ve got to find
some way of getting to engage with this context. Because when I give it
to you directly, you assume I haven’t given you all the information or
you assume I’ve tweaked the facts. The surest way to get a student
to engage with content is to meet them where they are – and gaming is
big.
We also need to get rid of this mythos of the
UK as the land of racial equality. It’s nicer here because you don’t
have guns and on the whole you’re less likely to be lynched. But in
terms of the history and in terms of the systemic inequalities and in
terms of using a racist narrative to promote a particular political
ends, the intersections are scary.
The game’s not all the violent, depressing
stuff. There’s dark comedy in the storylines. There are two figures that
show up, The White Witch of Rose Hall, there’s also the story of
Benjamin Lay who was originally from the UK, who was not an abolitionist
until he moved to the Caribbean and learned about the injustice and the
evil of slavery. One of my favourite stunts he’d pull was to put a
packet of blood in the bible and then during a driving abolitionist
oration he would say, “You’re making Christ bleed!” and he would stab the
bible and it would explode with blood. So he makes an appearance.
I’m showing the real horror that racial
violence, racist systems and ideology create. In some ways I’m building
on what Toni Morrison said. She was notorious for insisting she wasn’t
writing Gothic fiction. She said, “The gothic is the place of imagined
monsters and imagined horrors and I’m talking about reality.” But for me
that doesn’t make the writing less gothic – it makes reality gothic.
That’s what I’m doing here, reminding people
that racism produces real horror. It’s not just in terms of physical
violence, it’s emotional violence, systemic violence. People might say
it’s just a lack of inclusion, it’s not real horror – but it is.
Trans Theft Horso
Trans Theft Horso is an adventure game feverishly
distinctive and porridge-thick with bold sensations. You play Adric
Belfonte on a quest to retrieve their brother’s hormones on a narrative
adventure relentlessly dripping with detail. There is a pancake flipping
mini-game available from the title screen.
Developer Benjamilian Swithen said:
I never understand how anyone can enjoy a thing without wanting to make it. Because I enjoy computer games, I have always wanted to make computer games.
I made a game in 2022 called Buy Hyacinths.
Despite its name, it’s a free game. It was about one of the first sheep
to go to human university. It won the Bronze Medal at the Melbourne
Queer Games Festival. It was not a widely-noticed game, but it was the
first one I made.
Trans Theft Horso is a role-playing game of a sort
in which you control Adric Belfonte and in which they go out into The West
very reluctantly. Many things befall them and they have to make some
tough choices while petting animals and fighting admirals and pursuing
the two great GG’s (horses and gender gladness).
You are a person who
walks around a map. Sometimes on that map you fight people, but much
more often you talk to people. You have a fair amount of control over
what happens in those conversations, but let’s be honest, not that much.
There’s a lot of railroading going on. I just try to disguise it. This
game is a story at core.
This will sound pretentious but the video game is an
auteur’s medium if you want it to be. You have full control over every
aspect, from making the graphics yourself, writing the dialogue, writing
the music, the sound effects, choosing what the menus are like. It is
something over which you have a huge amount of control in a way that
would be very difficult to do in other mediums, such as film, without
having an impressive budget.
The budget you need for a game is time. And patience. Mainly patience. But also mainly time.
When Buy Hyacinths was awarded at the Melbourne
Queen Games Festival I played all the other medalists’ [games] and they just
seemed very sad. They were queer stories told with huge amounts of
sorrow and grief. I thought: I would love to do a story about queer life
and experience in which the character has no particular doubt of
themselves, they don’t really need to persuade anyone else they are who
they say they are, they’re just like this. They’re trans but they’ve got
stuff to do. If at any point they need to reflect on who they are, they
just have a peace, a confidence and a gladness.
Learn more
Trans Theft Horso is available on Steam and Itch.io.
A screenshot from to a T, which Lizi of Furious Bee was lead programmer for.
Furious Bee
The story of game development as one of
hulking AAA Studios and microscopic solo dev projects leaves out the
least represented part of the sector: outsourced labour. Outsourcing has
become fundamental to the development and completion of big projects.
I
spoke with Lizi Attwood and Ross Mansfield of Furious Bee, a small studio based in Crookes that are regularly hired for contract work by larger studios.
So what kind of work do you actually do for the companies that hire you?
Ross: For me, I’m a 3D artist. I specialise in
vehicles, hard surface models it’s called. I generally work on racing
games. People come to me if they need a specific model, or series of
models. It’s usually more unique bespoke stuff people come to me for.
Creative stuff rather than production type cars, because there’s so many
outsourced studios that can copy a car model for cheap.”
Lizi: My work is a little bit different because it will
either be for two or three months because someone needs help finishing a
project. Or, like lately, on my last project, to a T,
I was the lead programmer. So I’m looking after all the other
programmers from start to finish. A completely remote team, but I’m an
integral part of that – planning and delivering the whole thing. Six
years in total for the game, but four years for me.
Do you have a sense of what’s the cause behind the
contraction of the UK gaming sector and the mass layoffs? I was aware
there was huge growth and investment during the pandemic and that level
of consumption obviously didn’t continue in the years following – but is
there more to it than that?
Lizi: The investors don’t necessarily know what was
good about the companies they’ve bought. To them it’s just a
spreadsheet, when the numbers aren’t looking great they just strike them
off.
Ross: There’s increased costs across the board and
decreased revenues. It’s quite shortsighted. A lot of those bigger
studios are expected to have a hit every time, so when they don’t they
just draw a line under it and close it. But it’s unrealistic to expect
to have a hit every time. And the worst ones are where they’ve spent 10
years developing a game. But really the reception of the game when it
launched wasn’t the issue, it was the ten years developing the game.
Lizi: The recoup cost is insane if you go over even two years. The amount of money they waste is unbelievable.
And why is there no culture of local connection with games? Why are we disconnected from game development happening locally?
Lizi: Well, in triple-A studios, they almost want to
hide you away. When you’re working in a studio like that they don’t want
the outside world to have any kind of access to you. They spend time
hammering into you: you can’t talk to anyone.
Ross: Definitely at big studios like Rockstar, you
can’t speak to press or you can’t speak to anybody about anything you do
at work. Because any little leak can affect share prices and investor
negotiations.
Lizi: Then, once it’s out, a lot of companies just wipe the slate clean and then move on.
Ross: It gets handed on to marketing and PR teams who
take the game to shows. But the actual developers get moved on to to new
stuff.
Lizi: It stops being anything to do with you at that
point. And it takes you a while to get outside of that mindset once you
own your own company, to remember you can talk to people if you want –
you won’t get in trouble.
Ross: But for indie teams, it still kind of works in
the same way. A lot of indies are engaged with fans on social media, but
not so much in real life. Possibly for good reason. There are a lot of
weird gamers.
Lizi: There are companies that warn you not to post
online because you can potential become a target. If you get labelled as
the “lazy dev” for some problem that a hundred thousand people hate –
it could be potentially dangerous.
Yeah, a lot of developers are forced to market
their games through these idiosyncratic digital spaces which are
anonymous and prone to toxicity. To me this would be an advantage of
having something that connects to local community, so smaller developers
particularly have another avenue to speak to people about what they’ve
made.
Lizi: And in fact it’s really beneficial from a
commercial point of view for an indie to find a really great niche
because you can really rely on those people. If you have a small number
of people who absolutely love what you’re doing, you can just focus on
those people and survive very happily like that.
Ross: I don’t know what platform you could use. Whether
it would be an event, a magazine or local TV. But it’s important to
raise people’s awareness of what games are, different genres, different
types of games. The general public mostly think that video games are
Call Of Duty and it’s just played by kids. Generally when we tell people
we make games that’s what comes into their head and they say “we don’t
play games”.
Lizi: But they do play Candy Crush…
Ross: Yeah, they do play games. Games are such a wide medium.
Learn more
If you are interested in game development or working on a game and interested to meet with local developers, the recently created Play Sheffield are running monthly in-person meet-ups. The next one is at the Showroom cafe on Thursday 2 October, 7pm.