Big Business

When Canadian filmmakers James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot were beginning work on their video-game-development documentary Indie Game: The Movie, they surveyed the landscape to see what else there was on the subject. And, well, there was nothing. “Absolutely nothing,” marvels Swirsky, 34, with a shake of his head; as if still in disbelief. “That was staggering, because video games are bigger than movies, they're bigger than music, and we have tonnes of documentaries about those things.”

The complete absence of insider video-game movies speaks, Swirsky thinks, to the prevailing sentiment amongst generations past that games are the time-wasting province of virgin teenage boys. “We came up against that old dismissive attitude when we were shopping or showing the film in traditional film circles,” he offers. “People outside of video games, people still think of it as this cute little thing. Like, you'll get some film producer say something like 'oh, video games, they're getting pretty popular now, right?' And you don't have the heart to tell them: 'no, they're more popular than movies, they're more popular than you; they long ago surpassed you in profits and revenues.'”

Swirsky and Pajot may've met with folks from traditional film channels, but Indie Game: The Movie had a far more new-millennial development, raising $100,000 to help its making via Kickstarter. It helped that the film had latched onto the superstars of indie game design – Braid creator Jonathan Blow, Fez egotist Phil Fish, and brothers in Meatboy, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes – as figures of a rising movement.

Swirsky grew up – in Winnipeg (and, yes, he “absolutely love[s] the fact that Guy Maddin represents us to the world at large”) – as a video-game nerd, 'til a two-year stint working at Electronic Arts in Vancouver as a games tester killed his love. “I didn't play a game for like eight, nine years after,” he sighs. Yet, when he encountered McMillen's flash game Aether, he connected with its expressionist approach in a way that some bellicose 3D behemoth could never: “You could tell that there was someone on the other end, that there was an actual person who made it,” Swirsky says.

So, the couple set out chronicling a rising tide of programmers harkening back to the 8-bit/2D/platform-and-puzzle gameplay of their youth with inspired nostalgia; making things that more resemble works of art than pieces of corporate synergy. Soon enough, art and life were thoroughly imitating each other, as Swirsky and Pajot threw themselves into an all-consuming project chronicling people who've thrown themselves into all-consuming projects; the finished film the product of “two-and-a-half years of working every day”. Says Swirsky: “It's, basically, the story of the universal experience of the creative process. You take everything that you have and you funnel it into this one piece of work, then you turn it out unto the world.”

For a long time, video games have been denied being discussed as creative expression, but a generational shift has given rise to a “larger discussion happening about taking games more seriously”. “For years traditional media treated [games] like this quaint little thing that teenage boys play,” says Swirsky, “but as a generation of game-players have graduated to positions of traditional power and influence, they're in the position to write about it, or talk about it, or make movies about it.”

Indie Game: The Movie runs from Thursday 23 August to Sunday 2 September, ACMI.