Author: Gianfranco Berardi

Nathan Vella, host of the 2015 Independent Games Festival, closed out the awards show with a plea to the better side of everyone:

This past year has exposed a lot of hatred and some significant unpleasantness in our industry. As of tonight, there continues to be women, people of color, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer artists who are being trolled, and spammed, and threatened, and doxxed, and hacked, and even driven from their homes.

It’s no longer possible for those of us in this room to ignore or minimize these issues with our industry or these issues with our art.

I know you all believe it. I know you do.

Pause for applause.

But just as this year has exposed all that ugliness, it’s also exposed a new generation of creators and activists who are fighting for video games and video game culture. They’re fighting for us, the independent games community.

I really don’t think they want our gratitude at all. I think they need our support.

I think they need us to work together as a community to show people a new way to engage with each other and play.

So let’s all fight back against this hate the best way we know how: through our games, and through our teams, and through our collaborations.

Let’s make sure our games aren’t embodying any stereotypes or caricatures.

Let’s make sure as a community we are supportive of one another, and we are as welcoming as possible to any and all new voices.

To me, this really gets to the core of what it’s about to be an independent developer.

We don’t have any stock prices to fret over. We don’t have any entrenched political dogmas.

We own our art.

This gives us a real opportunity to be the change that we all want to see in this industry.

And I think that we can change, for the better, together.

We own our art.

Four small words that lay down a huge challenge.

While a number of people think that games are just for fun or for kids or shouldn’t be subject to grown-up criticism, games are important.

They have meaning imbued in them by their designers. The mechanics and aesthetics are communicating something about the world, and since games are interactive, it means the player is not only learning how to play the game but also to interact with the greater world.

While I don’t believe playing violent video games turns innocent children into killers, I do think that if the only interaction they are exposed to is “attack”, then it shouldn’t be surprising that people grow up to have trouble resolving conflicts.

Instead of figuring out how to create solutions to arguments or disagreements, people learn that destroying the opposition is the way to get results.

All that said, violent shooters or games played “just for fun” aren’t bad games. They are thankfully just one facet of the entirety of games, and having a healthy, diverse set of experiences allows for more well-rounded play, which should translate into more well-rounded players.

Now, I’m not saying I think games will bring love and kindness to everyone.

But knowing that there is a game about people who aren’t like me, and learning about the creators who aren’t like me, means I have a chance at learning about them as more than a stereotype, so when I meet people in real life I’m more likely to treat them as human beings worthy of dignity.

We own our art. What we create is our uncompromised vision of what we want to bring out to the world for others to experience.

What kind of vision of the world are you delivering to your players?

As someone with a full-time job and trying to work on a business on the side, I find that I don’t play as many games as a game developer probably should. Most of the games I have access to are many, many years old, so I’m a bit out of touch with the latest offerings from major publishers.

Most of the time, though, I don’t seem to miss it. There are plenty of indie and major publisher games that are available that I still haven’t played, so I’ve got quite the backlog to tide me over.

But some friends of mine were playing online regularly, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to spend some quality time with them and also join my first MMO since playing Runescape about a decade or so ago.

Unfortunately, Star Wars: The Old Republic isn’t available for Linux-based systems, and WINE support sounded like I could expect to install the game but not really find it playable.

What follows is basically me whining, so feel free to find a better use of your time.

I booted up Windows for the first time in over a year on my desktop system, and I start downloading the installer, which required setting up an account.

It turns out that it installs a launcher, which then patches itself by downloading for a bit. Soon, I’m able to…

…start retrieving the minimum download.

There is text that pops up to inform me that until the full game is downloaded, I can only play on the starter worlds. Ok, fine by me. I’m new to the game anyway.

Except, how do I start the game? The Play button is grayed out.

Then my system blue screens. I haven’t seen that color in a long time.

After rebooting, I find that the minimum download in progress is at negative 100%. After waiting and hoping it would resume from before, and after searching online for help, I found that rerunning the installer helped. I think it was downloading, but the progress percentage was displaying wrong, and reinstalling the launcher made it display correctly.

Then, I waited almost an hour before it finished downloading the basic client. Hey, the Play button is accessible now!

I texted a friend to ask what server they were playing on, but since they are probably having fun, I didn’t get a response right away, so I chose one that seemed probable, and I started creating a character.

Once the character was created, I had to “activate” the character, then I could play.

I saw a loading screen with some text about the smuggler’s activities when suddenly I was looking at my desktop.

Huh.

So I started the game again, and when I finally got back to that loading screen, it crashed to the desktop without so much as an error message again.

And then again.

So, a couple of hours later, and I still haven’t started the game, let alone been able to join in the fun with my friends.

And the best part?

My friend finally got back to me to say that he doesn’t remember selecting a server. He said they are part of Starfleet, and you can choose between Starfleet, Klingon, or Romulan.

Wait, what? I just spent the entire evening struggling to install and play the wrong game?!

At this point, I’m simultaneously happy that I don’t have to fight with Star Wars: The Old Republic anymore and frustrated that I now get to start the entire download-for-hours-without-playing experience again with Star Trek Online.

I understand that these are huge, expansive games with a lot of content, so I probably should have prepared my computer before the scheduled gaming session, but from what I read online, I’m not alone in needing to find time to play games only to discover that the time is spent downloading updates or patches or otherwise preventing game time from including game play.

For now, I’m going to bed.