There's something in your games about personal suffering, but there's also something communal about that. I think the absurdity or comedy in QWOP, and to the extent there is absurdity in Getting Over It, are coming from different places. This is quite unlike QWOP where you press a button hoping for a certain thing to happen and something unexpected happens. But in Getting Over It, at least on a micro level, the character is doing exactly what you're asking him to do at all times. They're both games that maybe look easier than they are. I suppose I've never really thought about his deeply, but I think it's quite different what's going on it Getting Over It versus QWOP. Getting over It is in between, you get to climb, and the character responds, but then the extremely difficult situations come up later. ![]() But in Super Pole Riders you control a pole, but there are just some things that are very hard and lead to comic situations. In QWOP or KLOP, there's a complete feeling of incompetence within the first seconds. ![]() Then that's undercut by the way you control the game, but in different ways. In QWOP, it seems like someone earnestly tried to do 16 bit graphics with muscle tone gradients.Īnd then you have also typical goals: you have to get very far, get a lot of points, or be very fast. They all seem to have a tongue in cheek aspect to them, there are layers that often come across as earnest at first. I guess we can also talk about what would make them indie. It is much more of a set of specific relationships, tastes, fashion trends, and physical and digital situations. But I don't want to give any sort of procedural definition of what indie is to me. My strict understanding is that, of course, independent development was part of making games since the beginning of video games. When I say indie developer, what I really mean is I'm part of a loosely overlapping community of people who have been involved in the same spaces, physically and digitally, creating similar kind of work and referencing each other's work since the mid-2000s. They can't all possibly mean the same thing. There's been enormous upswing in people who identify that way. We're now at a point where the, I think, substantial majority of people at Game Developers Conference identify as indie developers. I think it's become more of an ill fit over time, not just for me but for the community as a whole. It includes low culture and popular culture and so on.Ībout that indie label, is it a label you like or is it just there? I should say, I take a very big tent-understanding of what artwork can be. I use artistic structures and language to talk about what it is that I'm making, and how I approach it, and what I hope to do, and who I compare myself with. I think that my work is artwork and I refer to it as artwork. I feel like if I introduce myself as an artist, people will misunderstand what I think what I'm doing, but I do view my work through an artistic lens. ![]() Would you say that you're an artist or that you're a game artist? Would you ever use the word artist to describe yourself? I am also part of a general academic community, not particularly games academia, but academia in general. If I think about the people who are in the community that I associate myself with, they call it indie games. I would see myself as part of indie games as kind of an international fraternity in some loose way. ![]() What communities do you see yourself as part of? I'm an indie game developer and a professor of game design at NYU. The interview was conducted on March 22nd, 2018.Īs a first question: what do you do? How do you describe yourself? This is part of the interview series for my Handmade Pixels book. Bennett Foddy is an educator and game developer behind “punishing” games such as QWOP and Getting over it with Bennett Foddy.
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