Sunday Times E-Edition

What’s up in the industry?

The artist Brett Murray’s depiction of a flaccid penis went down like a lead balloon. Naturally, it didn’t help that it was attached to the president of the country at the time; all kinds of other sticky race politics came into play. Nevertheless, digging into and satirising the “power” of the penis has not been easy for visual artists to tackle. Yet interestingly, it’s in the male-dominated arena of gaming that the demystification and parodies of male genitalia and posturing are finding expression.

Cape Town-based Free Lives created

Genital Jousting at a game jam as a joke. Featuring floppy penises wiggling their way around a series of challenges, not only did it find an American publisher, Devolver, but a substantial audience — 27,000 people follow the game on Steam, the largest online platform for PC games. There was so much interest in the prototype they spent up to three years crafting the game, which was released in 2016.

Satire drives their games. Broforce is a parody of

1980s and 1990s action heroes and films. Think oversized muscled men and outrageous amounts of violence and gore. In this way, the creative team, headed by founder Evan Greenwood, pushes the film trope to such an overstated place that it underscores its absurdity and detachment from reality.

Their audience is niche indie gamers. “We focus on one strong concept or hook, and then we build the game around that. Our process for doing that is very experimental and iterative. Often, the hook is some sort of joke,” says Ruan Rothmann, senior development manager at Free Lives.

Their games don’t only pivot on poking fun at aspects of masculine identity packaged by Hollywood. Their upcoming game, Terra Nil, centres on transforming a barren landscape destroyed by human exploitation to its natural state via a combination of technologies and tools. It looks like an oddly satisfying way to spend your time — greening the screen, so to speak.

As such, gaming offers an avenue not only for artists to poke fun at the status quo but to envision a future and, most importantly, allow viewers to become participants in building it. Being part of the art-making process and driving a narrative based on your own choices and actions offers a sense of agency that few art forms can match. This isn’t only due to gamers playing these products; in the making of games from the prototype to the final product, developers rely on their feedback.

This isn’t only motivated by a desire to connect with the gaming community but for practical reasons — it can take up to three years to build an indie game and it’s expensive and risky to create one that you’re not sure will appeal.

“We do a lot of small scope, experimental prototypes that we call game jams. For this we create a game in a short time frame, from eight hours to sometimes a week or a month. We put those games out for free and see which ones get a response. If an audience responds to a game, we’ll work on it a bit more. We repeat this process, continually gauging consumer response to the free version of the game. Then, if we deem it warranted, we move on to making a paid version,” explains Rothmann.

Gaming is the new frontier. All the recent developments in digital spheres, from crypto currencies and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to the notion of a metaverse, originated in the gaming world. It’s likely too, as the gamification of education takes hold, that we’ll learn about the world and condition social behaviour through gaming. As such, you don’t need to be a gamer to experience its impact.

Gaming is a nascent industry in South Africa. Most of the studios creating or coproducing games were founded around 2014. A handful — around seven — could be considered “large”, in the sense that they employ more than 10 people. Up to 50 are said to exist, based on a report released by

Tshimologong, a digital-focused hub in Johannesburg that provides incubation and acceleration programmes for start-ups. But the majority are classified as being established by hobbyists; people who tinker away at weekends creating games.

Making the transition from hobbyist to game developer — dubbed a game dev — isn’t easy. It might only cost $100 (about R1,700) to publish your game on the largest online shop for games — Steam — but competition is stiff. Almost 12,000 games were released on the platform in 2021. Of those, about 8% sold 10,000 units or more, according to Video Games Insights.

Game jams and hackathons regularly take place in South Africa. But few of the companies produce their own games. They co-produce them for US and Europe-based companies. There’s a paucity of viable prototypes being produced, suggests Rothmann.

“We are interested in helping up-andcoming local developers. We believe the best time to lend assistance is when someone has a promising early prototype but not the resources to take it to a point where it has demonstrated its viability and can be pitched to a publisher. Sadly, we rarely see games reach that first vetting. Maybe those games are not reaching us or people don’t know that they can approach us or don’t want to approach us,” he says.

What is the winning formula for creating a popular indie game? In Cape Town in early December gaming professionals will congregate at the fifth Africa Games Week to connect and exchange ideas.

As the majority of consumers of indie games are in the US and Asia (according to Steam’s live tracking statistics) it’s tricky for Africa-based developers to have direct insight into the kind they might be after. Mainstream audiences demand sophisticated products that the industry terms Triple A games — generated with budgets not too dissimilar to Hollywood blockbusters, between $50m and $80m. Such games would also need an extensive number of highly qualified specialists, which are in short supply in South Africa. Some have left for greener pastures or

Radical ideas about gender and climate change are being explored by South Africa’s top gaming company

are working in the gambling or banking industries, according to the Tshimologong report.

Free Lives employs 21 people. They are the most successful South Africa-based gaming company driving their own intellectual property. With a library of successful games, you’d think they have some inkling about the kind of games that would do well, yet Rothmann suggests they remain surprised.

“It seems that people generally aren’t good at vetting their ideas. We haven’t figured out a good, consistent methodology for that yet. Often it’s unexpected things that do well, and the things that you think will do well, don’t,” says Rothmann.

For this reason, they have to remain closely tuned in to the responses to their prototypes and in touch with their followers.

“Due to the iterative nature of how we make games, we’re interacting with the fan base of the game from very early on, through Discord and other forums. The constant feedback is rewarding and makes the game much better. You’re in tune with the player experience. So there’s less guesswork involved in figuring out which parts of the game are working and which aren’t,” says Rothmann.

In this way gaming aligns with the culture that defines interactions on social media platforms where “value” or “importance” are determined via consensus

indicated with “likes” and “follows”.

This can lead to creators pandering to the lowest common denominator. Some of the most popular Triple A games on Steam are not exactly in the satire vein: Payday 2 and

Counter Strike Offensive ,which top the list, are first-person shooter games.

Even the Free Lives games that have been the most popular — such as Broforce — are those that are driven by violence and destruction, even if parody is the underlying motive. However, the globalised nature of the gaming industry, which sees studios creating games for audiences that transcend or are not defined by national identities and boundaries, means that those with a niche taste for directing floppy penises around jacuzzis and restoring the natural environment can drive games that advance new and different values in entertaining ways. Perhaps, ultimately, whatever your values, no-one wants to be preached at; they want to play.

Floppy penises aside, SA’s top indie gaming company has turned to fighting climate change in its latest offering, writes Mary Corrigall We are interested in helping up-and-coming local developers. We believe the best time to lend assistance is when someone has a promising early prototype but not the resources to take it to a point where it has demonstrated its viability and can be pitched to a publisher

RUAN ROTHMANN

SENIOR DEVELOPMENT MANAGER, FREE LIVES

Lifestyle

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2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

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