GDC 11: Indies Show Their Might With DIY Arcade Machines, A QWOP Bear, Ninjas
Posted by Joshua_Kopstein on Monday, Mar 07, 2011
Photos: Emi Spicer
With sweeping victories for titles like Minecraft and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, indie game developers were the focus of just about everyone’s attention at this year’s Game Developers Conference. Fortunately they were caught sporting their best game-making duds all week in the form of some exciting and unusual attractions.
Nearby the expo hall’s IGF Pavilion, where attendees crowd over esteemed indie titles like Fract and Cobalt, the Winnitron1000 stands proud, a king among arcade cabinets. Hauled to San Francisco by Winnipeg, Manitoba’s game dev community, the machine is like a traveling sports team, packed to the gills with games by the region’s top creators. The Winnitron doesn’t stop there — Through a dedicated internet connection, it uploads screen caps and pulls new games, some of which, like a 2-player version of Vlambeer’s Super Crate Box, are exclusive to the Winnitron.
Game designer Alec Holowka says it started as a platform for relatively unknown indie developers in Winnipeg to showcase their work, modeling after Toronto’s Torontron. But with its constant connection to the net, the Winnitron is poised to completely reinvent the arcade machine from a static fixture to a robust social platform for gaming.
“It’s uploading shots of people’s faces from a web cam right now,” says Holowka, pointing at a pair of attendees getting started on a 2-player match of Adam Atomic’s Canabalt. Eventually, he says, players will be able to enter high score using their Twitter account. If someone beats your high score, it would tweet at you with the new champ’s user name, perhaps entreating both players to organize a live rematch.
Back at the IGF pavilion, another, slightly furrier arcade machine had just arrived. Kunal and Syed of NYC’s underground indie arcade Babycastles stood wearing bike helmets and looking a bit exhausted. They had just attempted, unsuccessfully, to ride a tandem bike to the Moscone Center while carrying some interesting cargo: The QWOP Bear.
Strapped to Syed’s back, the infamous laptop/teddy hybrid, which we first spotted at a rowdy Anamnaguchi show, was being carried around the show floor sporting Foddy’s hilariously frustrating track & field game, QWOP, which challenges players by mapping key presses to individual parts of the runner’s legs.
But not all the games here needed screens to play. Throughout the week, crowds of indies would gather in large circles taking various dramatic karate poses. They were playing NINJA, a turn-based game where you attempt to slap your opponents hands one improvised motion at a time. Needless to say, each round produces some pretty ridiculous poses and close calls. At the Experimental Gameplay sessions, one of the presenters compared it to a kind of living, playable stop-motion; a singular event divided into tiny slices of isolated action.
Check below for photos of all this and other noteworthy miscellany that went on at this year’s Game Developers Conference.
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Electronic musician and computer culture journalist. Contact: josh ◢at◣ motherboard ◐dot◑ tv
