You Meet The Nicest People Making Videogames

I'm in for $25.

Attaboy!

Let's get a few more, I'll post the last quarter around payday if we only get two more.

Given that money would be at the stake, I advise objective analysis first.

Yes, these are passionate and noble reasons, but there is a significant likelihood the result may turn out to be unintentional self-indulgence rather than a tool for reaching new audiences. Please follow my reasoning below.

The crucial question is, what would be the the means to get a lot of people to watch a documentary about an unknown subject, by an unknown director? Without a good and working answer to this question, a considerable part of the to-be-audience would be the same folks who donated to the budget of the movie.

If most of the audience who saw the completed movie were people who already knew what the "indie thing" is, production budget was wasted (that is, if getting unaware people to discover indie gaming is the real motivation).

Given the risk on ROI (the definition of "returns" should not be narrowed down to financial profit, it can also be awareness, gained by effort), why not choose a low risk way, finding a partner who is willing to invest all the production costs, for some mutual benefit ("win-win")?

I am quite sure one (or more) of the European Public Broadcast Television stations can be that partner. And their "win" would be getting a programme that can target a large demographic.

You guys in the US may find the idea particularly hard to grasp, but we euros do have tax-funded TV channels that keep on producing QUA-LI-TY programmes on a wide range of non-profit topics. Certain indie games and devs were already covered by a few of these stations*, though no programme I am aware of was focusing on the phenomenon itself.
And it would be high time to make that happen.
*See former PTT posts here and here.

It would help to pick an english language channel, for obvious reasons. Even better, one that is not only locally available but present on cable networks all over the world – I think BBC World would be an excellent candidate (have you seen their mini-series "Games Britannia" yet?).

Prepare a proposal and approach the programmers, they are just as keen to find subjects for the expected amount of broadcast time their contract demands as indies are to introduce their stuff to potential new enthusiasts. There are contacts within indie and commercial gamedev circles who are involved with the media, and pulling some strings would certainly raise the chance of success.

In regard to making the viewers interested: people like freebies, and many indie titles come without a price tag – that must be given an emphasis in the programme, even though it is not universal with every indie-produced game.
NOTE: it would be interesting to get webstatistics from devs whose sites were mentioned in such a programme, following the airing date and the next couple of weeks.

With some proactive help the programme may also find its way onto Teh Torrentz and Teh Tube – a few well-selected keywords in the description (something along "Did you know M***** W****** 2 and B**S****2 are not the only kind of computer games produced?") will lure additional viewers, a few percent of whom may be interested. Still a good deal – high "bounce rate" but close to zero investment needed –, all hail P2P and videostreaming technology.

So a huge audience can be reached, and some of these very large number of viewers can be made aware of the "indie thing". But that would only be a single step. Required investment can be practically eliminated by good partnership, but any awareness raised will be fading back to oblivion at insane speeds unless there is a follow up.

So, do you people find my suggestion solid? And if so, what will be done to make it happen? And what could be the next step to follow up the momentary growth of interest such a TV programme can generate?

The (original) project sounds to me like an overindulgent attempt at a jolly.

I would much rather have seen an article about some of the actual game development projects looking for funding through the site (hint hint!), but I can appreciate the desire to record the current state of affairs and possibly bring new people into the fold...

Hoping that a project like this could in some way promote indie gaming among general population seems a bit too ambitious to me. There's very little to support a goal like this, because the cultural impact of computer gaming in general and indie gaming in particular is relatively low. Gaming is part of a bigger phenomenon.

However, I see this project as more of a community service - a kind of mirror into which actual and aspiring indie authors and their audience could look, and see themselves, and learn something about each other in the process. Like teenagers' diaries, this could be a useful tool in a search for identity - if done right (i.e. with a dose of self-criticism).

That said, I'm not going to donate, because I'm clearly not part of the community this project is aiming to serve (also, there's an unpleasant vibe of vanity in the idea of "give me money and I'll give you a postcard / a call / screen time").

Sometimes I'm actually tempted to start a blog with a focus on local developer biographies. There are just so many genuinely talented people who could have brilliant careers under different circumstances. And yet, the only sort-of recognizable name in the local industry is a shameless poser who just got lucky, because one of his buddies was an editor-in-chief of the biggest local gaming magazine back in the 90s.

@IB: I think it could be a good movie that I'd like to see so it's worth if for me to pay to see it, not everything has to be a home run. Perhaps Kickstarter isn't the best funding method for this project in the 5-figure range, it seems like the nature of that site is better suited to 4-figure budgets. I'd encourage the author to refactor his budget, shit man, back when I was producing games I drafted a 5-fig budget, spent some sleepless nights wondering about how I'd get that money, and then refactored the thing to 50% of the original projections.

There should be some kind of feature in Kickstarter to support budget analysis and refactoring, to help the project offers meet the donor bids.

@Zild: using this site to drive traffic to indie game Kickstarter pages is definitely something that I'd like to do, got any examples in mind? I'd like analyze some of the budget proposals as well. I did a casual game with pro quality implementation and assets for under 10k so I'd bet most art projects could be done for that range.

@JZW: What's local for you? Just curious. I agree and I think that's a fine function to serve, I also think there's potential for breach into mainstream awareness though not at a mass level, but worthy enough. There's a sort of revolution going on with people expressing things and distributing said things and the mass democritization of game design is at the fore of that. I think this mirror happens to catch other mirrors in it's view and there's quite of lot of depth on the table.

Holy shit, this thing got about five grand pledged between when I wrote this post and now, about a day. I wonder how much I contributed to that by driving attention to that page... this post has gotten 389 click-throughs and I don't know how many people clicked the link off the front page, but about 7% of the click-throughs are now backers of the project, some 28 new people. Cool.

Usually, when I say "local", I mean "in my country" (i.e. "not international"). This is a fairly important distinction here in the continental Europe, because the many lingugal barriers tend to confine any given community to the country of its origin, while modern technology makes it easy for one to connect with anyone who speaks the same native language.

Curiously, an enterprise that reaches entire US is local in the above sense, but an enterprise that reaches both Latvia and Estonia isn't. The distance being measured is cultural rather than physical.

hey, guys, i'm the director of this project, and i'd like to speak to a few of the concerns brought up.

but first, i want to thank you for posting and talking about this at all. pardon my pathos, but this is truly heartwarming.

-audience
i'm a journalist, and my focus is mainly on the arts and education. my audience tends to be very general, and my approach to this project is to open up certain trends in independent games to the sorts of people who otherwise might not be aware of them; to people who may not play videogames at all, but might benefit from knowing about what's out there. this documentary isn't my only means to achieving that end -- i'm also running workshops in game development and contributing to an exhibition going up in san jose this fall.

-fundraising goal
it's a lot of money. about a third of that is equipment. the rest is three to four adults driving ten thousand plus miles, with frequent stops, over the course of a month. i'm not sure there's any project on kickstarter with as high a funding goal, however, if you compare this to another documentary, chances are the camera alone dwarfs my entire budget. my budget doesn't look like those budgets, and it's not because i have anything against cameras that cost as much as houses, but mainly because i'd like to make sure my crew is comfortable on this trip (no heavy equipment, nothing that a team of three can't set up and tear down in fifteen minutes or less), since we've already got this strange space mission ahead of us. comparisons, though, don't matter much -- from the start, i was sure there are people who'd like to see this through, and so far i've gotten nothing but support, and i am eternally thankful for that. this is entirely doable.

-rewards
postcards, pictures, phonecalls from the road -- these are all things i've personally appreciated from friends and family who've been away, and so that's what i've decided to offer people. how often does anyone get anything personal in the mail anymore?

the interview reward is the sort of thing that can be dangerous, however, i have mitigated that by limiting the reward to two pledges (and setting the donation rather high), and i have faith in the people backing the project to really just want to see it done. i figured it'd be fun to do. you never know what might come out of this sort of thing.

thanks again, everyone!

@the99th: I have not had a chance to even skim the projects yet, although I think I shall do so at some point over the coming weeks. I did however look briefly at "Inevitable: dystopian tabletop gaming", as dystopian societies interest me. (I originally started following Greg due to my love of his RPG "Paranoia"). "Inevitable" has already been fully funded.

Presumably it would be worth checking out other such sites as well - I cannot remember the names of any others, but I recall reading about the ransom model and being directed to one such site by (coincidentally) the Paranoia blog. (paranoia.costik.com - although the site is currently experiencing technical difficulties)