The CBGBs of Indie Gaming: With Sportsfriends, Juegos Rancheros is Shaping the Future of Gaming

Remember Flynn’s Arcade? You know, from the opening scene of Tron. Jeff Bridge’s character was an ex-software dev turned arcade owner and host of the titular cabinet. Blah blah blah. I don’t need to give you a summary of Tron here, you’ve seen it or know it, but if you’re like me then something in particular sticks out about Flynn’s Arcade.

I grew up in a small podunk town where the closest thing we had to an arcade was the Pizza Hut that housed a single sad Galaga machine. There was a time in America, though, when arcades were huge. The origin of video games was social, more at home in adult oriented bars and arcade clubs than the archetypal dark basement. Games and Sports have been social events for the vast majority of human history, barring the occasional lone game of Solitaire. Arcades were no different, but in the ensuing years of the slow demise of arcades, the only thing left today are busted up Chuckie Cheeses, the kid equivalent of a destitute Las Vegas weekend trip.

Juegos Rancheros is a monthly meet-up hosted by Brandon Boyer, founder of Venus Patrol, and the chairman of the Independent Games Festival. I’ve been going to Juegos for about half  year now and it’s consistently the most thought provoking and fun local event I go to. You should go too.

I decided to cover Juegos this month for Loser City because they were presenting Sportsfriends, an indie game compilation that encapsulates the scene fostered by Juegos. Four Games: Pole Riders, Bariball, Hokra, and Johann Sebastian Joust.

I was actually introduced to most of these games nearly three years ago in London. I was studying abroad and decided to go to this thing called “Wild Rumpus.” Wild Rumpus was started by some friends of Brandon Boyer, and is structured like Juegos Rancheros, but more British-y and with a better selection of house ciders.

So when I saw that these games had been collected into a single package for commercial release, I was pretty excited. Aside from Pole Riders, available online as a flash game, none of these games have been released publicly. They’re in person games only. This art gallery inspired approach has been gaining traction in indie game circles for the last few years. Another example is the recently release Nidhogg, which has toured all over the world before finally coming out on Steam this April. The format works best for socially focused games that have a finely tuned competitive aspect, and Sportsfriends are some of the finest examples of that game design philosophy.

Games have been social for most of human history and really only in the last 15-20 years that we’ve come to think of them as 1P only events. Sportsfriends brings that back.

Let’s start off with Pole Riders.

Pole Riders is made by Bennett Foddy, Philosophy PhD, and bioethics researcher at Oxford University. He also made QWOP, a weird-ass flash game that has probably crossed your path at some point. Foddy has a design aesthetic tightly focused on systemic play, particularly the kind based in physics. Pole Riders takes some mastering to get down, but the goal is simple. Two people (or two teams of two people) must push a ball to the opposite end of the field. The ball is suspended on a wire, and the most effective means to get it going is to give it a flying kick from your pole vault. The game feels as natural as a game of soccer. In a world with these crazy physics, you could easily see such a game popping up. While the basic goal is simple, the struggle between teams can turn into a titanic contest of wills, with edge-of-the-seat back and forth dramatics. Things can easily become locked down into a stalemate only to suddenly rush forward for a goal at the last moment. It’s hella fun, and the refinements that Foddy has added for this commercial release are a nice touch.

Next up is Hokra.

Hokra Trailer from Ramiro Corbetta on Vimeo.While Foddy’s Pole Riders has the chaotic drama of physics based gameplay, Hokra is a precise as a razor blade. It’s a field game in which two teams compete for possession of a ball. Two members on each team must take a ball to their goal zones to fill up a meter by passing it back and forth and avoiding the incoming tackles of the opposing players. Hokra seems simple at first, but it’s a tightly balanced game, and the difference between low level and high level play becomes more and more apparent as the night goes on and people start figuring out strategies to use with their partners. Communication is key and two rightly synced players can play a game of keep away that leaves their opponents grasping for thin air.

BaraBariBall was the new addition, and my favorite that night.

BARABARIBALL TRAILER from noah on Vimeo.BaraBariBall is sort of like basketball meets Smash Brothers. Once again, there’s a ball and two teams of two players. Your goal is to take the ball over to the opposing teams side, drop it off the edge of the arena, into the water, and have it sink all the way down for a couple of points. Falling in the water loses your team a point, but getting the ball in gets you two points, so if you grab the ball in suicide, you can still gain points. On the other hand, if you don’t do that you can make many more points but it’s a far riskier proposition as the ball sinks slowly and the other team can try and swoop in for a recovery.  Players can pass the ball, and attack. Your attacks hurt your teammates so you have to be in constant awareness of your spatial surroundings so that you don’t end up whacking your friend halfway across the screen. You have a limited number of times you can jump in succession before you “go critical.” At that point you are out of jumps, liable to drown easy, and weak against enemy attacks, so your mobility and defense will play conflicting roles, requiring thought and tactics to use properly.

Last was Johann Sebastian Joust.

Johann Sebastian Joust from Die Gute Fabrik on Vimeo.A videogame without any video, with Johann Sebastian Joust  each player holds a motion sensing controller as music plays and you can only move as fast as the music plays. So slow music plays, and you have to move slowly, but as the music speeds up you can move faster. If you move too fast then you lose. The object of the game is to try and make the other players lose while protecting your own controller from being batted around or otherwise jostled into disqualification. It’s sorta high tech tag with an element of fencing involved. It’s a specific example of what sets the ethos of Sportsfriends apart. This isn’t a game you can play online. It’s a game you could play at home, but it’s infinitely better in the social environment of a bar or party. It is technically a video game, as it’s electronic, but there are no sprites, no high score screens, and no joysticks involved. It’s a technologically enhanced version of games that humanity has played since we first learned to play games.

I honestly believe that 20 years from now people will look back on Austin’s indie game scene as historically important for the development of the medium, in the same way that people look back at the Café Guerbois as being historically important to the development of painting, or CBGB for punk music. The people making indie games here today are some of the first of a generation of people who not only make video games, but grew up with video games. We are a multimedia literate generation, and that aspect can be seen in the tone of the community that Juegos Rancheros encourages. Its roots are in video game culture, but also in music, and movies, internet jokes, animation, TV, books, and the personal relationship you foster over a beer. It’s as much a scene as any music scene and perhaps a far more important one as the fledgeling new medium of videogames and other forms of interactive art have bounds of untapped potential and more room to grow than any previous medium that has come before. Call me an optimistic bag of wind, but I truly believe that interactive forms of art are the future, and we will look back someday and remember that we saw some of that future in it’s infancy ourselves.

Check out photos David took at Juegos Rancheros here.
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David A. French is a filmmaker and photographer who lives in Austin.