Independent game development is, by and large, a solitary activity. Collaborations take place across countries, and even if your team is in the same city, chances are you communicate mostly by email. Consequently, I know other developers mostly by their games.

All that changes once a year at an event simply known as “Mittens.” It was founded eight years ago by a group of indie game developers who knew each other from the internet. Every year they pick a different location to meet and hang out for a week. This year we rented a chateau in France. For 26.

We came from all over the world. Canada, The United States, Britain, Australia, Poland, Spain, Holland, and Sweden, to name a few places. Many of us had never met before. We introduced ourselves by our internet personas and began the surreal process of learning each other’s real names.

We warmed up to each other quickly, and realized we had much in common besides our obscure taste in development software. Every single person I met was, in a word, creative. We started talking about character design and programming workarounds and other things that we rarely spoke of in real life. It was a chance to sit down and talk about the grind and frustration that went into games, rather than just the finished products. We complained about the long hours that went in to every aspect of development, and in the next breath we’d describe the “dream game” we each wanted to make. At the end I felt like my inspiration had been recharged.

Our interests expanded beyond the game sphere. When one member of our group decided he was going to write and direct a macabre short film starring all of us, we adjusted our wardrobes and accents to accommodate his vision. Sometimes I’d be sitting around drawing or having coffee, only to hear, “Can you come over here? We need you for a death scene.” Another of our group built a scale model of the chateau just so we could blow it up in the final scene of the movie.

Creativity is contagious. Once I saw how much time the others were putting into their own projects, I decided to take a chance and start working on something of my own. I began doing sketches for a short game I’d wanted to make for a contest, but the deadline was only three weeks away. Within a few days I’d made so much progress that people began volunteering to do voices for the characters. We ended up making the deadline by hours…something I would not hesitate to call a small miracle.

It was wonderful to work so closely with other game developers. There was a tangible sense of community: We were struck by our similarities and amused by our differences (Did you know that British people sometimes have different words for things?). But I’ve started to realize recently that the sense of community goes farther than that.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend the GameOn conference in Montreal. I spent a fun few days shaking hands with some of the research brains in the games industry. I sat in on almost a dozen presentations, and because my brain apparently thinks I’m still in university, I took eight pages of notes. But if you were to ask me what I got out of the conference, it would have little to do with what I wrote down.

People involved in the creation of fundamental game mechanics, such as pathfinding and realistic 3D animation, are necessary to what we do as developers. It was fascinating to me that these were people who spent their careers refining and perfecting game mechanics so that they may eventually be used by others. I talked to a local group of students who were developing algorithms to create entire 3D rendered cities with only a few input variables.

As someone who considered a career in academia, I was amazed that this kind of games research was taking place in an academic setting. It’s a field where progress in research means cooler video games for everyone. I believe I said something of the sort to one of the research groups, and now I play “Settlers of Catan” with them on the weekends.

What I took away from my experiences at the GameOn conference and at Mittens was a sense of scale. I got to see the work that goes into games, and to meet the people driving innovations in gameplay, rather than just seeing the final work.

One night, towards the end of our stay in France, a few of us from the Mittens group found a bar in the little town near our chateau. I noticed that one of the locals kept eyeing us, and feeling encouraged by my role as our semi-competent translator (I could say things like, “Hello, where is your inexpensive wine?” and “Hello, we need a lot of baguettes”) I went over to speak to him. He asked, with a bemused smirk on his face, who we were. After a moment’s hesitation, I replied, “Euh…we are the people…who make computer games.” And I’ve never been happier to count myself as one of them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 10:28 am and is filed under Look Lively, PEOPLE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.