Slamdance Announce Game Design Comp
Independent games designers offered opportunity to showcase talent at film festival
The Slamdance Film Festival will play host to the Guerilla Gamemaker Competition, a contest aimed at showcasing upcoming independent game designers. Held in Park City, Utah from the 16th - 18th January, the competition will show the work of 12 finalists alongside the main festival.
Slamdance, which competes with the more famous Sundance (winners include Reservoir Dogs) nurtures, promotes and champions independent works and talent in the film industry. So what, you're legitimately wondering, is it doing running a games contest? We’ll let Peter Baxter, the President and Co-Founder of Slamdance, answer that:
The market for casual and hardcore gaming is expanding, and digital distribution systems such as Xbox Live Arcade will hopefully open previously unseen avenues of distribution for independent designers. It's this group that Slamdance is targeting for the competition. It’s hoping to showcase the creative variety that the industry - outside traditional studios - spawns.
"We are very excited about the finalists for this year's GGC," said Sam Roberts, Slamdance's Games Competition Manager. "This year's entrants range from biting indictments of modern corporate culture to fantastical adventures crashing castles. We have interactive fiction, beat-em-ups, non-traditional puzzle games, and experiments in flow theory. These games push the edges of what games can be and can try to be, experimenting in art style, gameplay, metaphor, story, concept and time."
The title on the list that made us stand up from our new Wii and really pay attention was flOw. Yes, you were probably wondering what ‘experiments in flow theory’ mean in a games context (and if you weren't there's probably something wrong with how your brain works). flOw is nominally a puzzle game, but in reality seems to remove itself from any genre our we can come up with. It follows a micro-organism as it moves through a surreal biosphere where players must eat, evolve and head down towards the abyss. To really understand why we're excited, though, you'll need to check out the screens below.
We plucked out flOw not just to pimp what looks like a unique upcoming release but to highlight the sort of game we hope/want/need Slamdance to show off to a wider audience. This is an ideal opportunity to show the world that gaming isn’t just thumb-twitching brain-liquidising shooters, but that it is also a genuinely creative medium.
Anyway, standing on this soapbox is making us dizzy. For more on the other 12 competition finalists click here to make your way in an orderly fashion to Slamdance's website.
Slamdance, which competes with the more famous Sundance (winners include Reservoir Dogs) nurtures, promotes and champions independent works and talent in the film industry. So what, you're legitimately wondering, is it doing running a games contest? We’ll let Peter Baxter, the President and Co-Founder of Slamdance, answer that:
"Video games today are as important and influential as movies have ever been. The type and standard of creativity we are seeing at Slamdance Games is akin to the trail blazing days of independent filmmaking, a time that artists reacted with more imagination and against the generic fare of the movie studio."
The market for casual and hardcore gaming is expanding, and digital distribution systems such as Xbox Live Arcade will hopefully open previously unseen avenues of distribution for independent designers. It's this group that Slamdance is targeting for the competition. It’s hoping to showcase the creative variety that the industry - outside traditional studios - spawns.
"We are very excited about the finalists for this year's GGC," said Sam Roberts, Slamdance's Games Competition Manager. "This year's entrants range from biting indictments of modern corporate culture to fantastical adventures crashing castles. We have interactive fiction, beat-em-ups, non-traditional puzzle games, and experiments in flow theory. These games push the edges of what games can be and can try to be, experimenting in art style, gameplay, metaphor, story, concept and time."
The title on the list that made us stand up from our new Wii and really pay attention was flOw. Yes, you were probably wondering what ‘experiments in flow theory’ mean in a games context (and if you weren't there's probably something wrong with how your brain works). flOw is nominally a puzzle game, but in reality seems to remove itself from any genre our we can come up with. It follows a micro-organism as it moves through a surreal biosphere where players must eat, evolve and head down towards the abyss. To really understand why we're excited, though, you'll need to check out the screens below.
We plucked out flOw not just to pimp what looks like a unique upcoming release but to highlight the sort of game we hope/want/need Slamdance to show off to a wider audience. This is an ideal opportunity to show the world that gaming isn’t just thumb-twitching brain-liquidising shooters, but that it is also a genuinely creative medium.
Anyway, standing on this soapbox is making us dizzy. For more on the other 12 competition finalists click here to make your way in an orderly fashion to Slamdance's website.
Games:
flOw
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