Adam Hammond - The Far Shore: Indie Games, Superbrothers, and the Making of JETT

Near the bottom is the top of a cement wall that has a statue of a set of hands with palms turned upwards on top of it. Between the two hands, in the horizon, is a docked spaceship on a small patch of land in a lake. Across the sky there is a small diagonal contrail from a jet that is flying towards the right. The sky has an image of a planet superimposed on it. Over top of the planet are the edges of a spaceship going through the sky.

INDIE GAMES, SUPERBROTHERS, AND THE MAKING OF JETT

ADAM HAMMOND

COACH HOUSE BOOKS, TORONTO

copyright Adam Hammond, 2021

first edition

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Title: The far shore: indie games, Superbrothers, and the making of JETT /

Adam Hammond.

Names: Hammond, Adam, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210334525 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210334576 | ISBN 9781552454206 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770566682 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781770566699 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Superbrothers (Firm) | LCSH: Video games. | LCSH: Video games industry. | LCSH: Video gamesAuthorship. | LCSH: Video games Design.

Classification: LCC GV1469.37 . H35 2021 | DDC 794.8/5dc23

The Far Shore: Indie Games, Superbrothers, and the Making of JETT is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 668 2 (EPUB), ISBN 978 1 77056 669 9 (PDF)

Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email sales@chbooks.com with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

It was late October 2013, I was in Montreal, and I was feeling famous.

Satisfaction is a dangerous feeling, but as I walked from the train station to my swanky hotel, I let it wash over me. I was teaching a popular course, The Digital Text, at the best school in the country. This course had led to a book contract. The day before, Id been a featured panelist on an international radio broadcast. I was in Montreal on an all-expense-paid trip to give a lecture about a videogame. The day after that, I would travel deep into the woods of Quebec to meet a reclusive and mysterious genius, the creator of the videogame I was lecturing on, and the subject of that contracted book.

I took this feeling into my hotel in Montreal, which was indeed almost impossibly swanky. I told them my name, the person behind the desk said I was all paid up and led me around the corner to my room not up a flight of stairs, not into an elevator, for the room, swankily, was right there. Perhaps the swankiest part of this room was the bathroom, which was wall-to-wall with mirrors. Perfectly clean, immaculately reflective, bevel-edged mirrors that surrounded me on every side, telescoping mirrors on trestles that let you get very close to whatever body part you wanted to look at. I had never been in a room with so many mirrors. And because I had never been in a room with so many mirrors, I saw something I had never seen before. It was on the back of my head: a corona of wispy brown hair barely concealing the scalp beneath it. In its centre, no larger than a toonie, was a small but definite bald spot.

As it happened, I had been thinking a lot about bald spots around that time, though in a completely different way. Two of the people Id written my dissertation about, the English writer Virginia Woolf and the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, had interesting things to say about the part of my head that, I now saw for the first time, was mostly hair-free.

In A Room of Ones Own, Woolf writes about a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. Her argument is that men will never understand themselves unless women are given the chance to describe that small spot to them that we need others to help us understand the things about ourselves that were blind to, that the perspective of any one person is always necessarily limited, and so silencing half the population is a grave mistake.

Bakhtin says something very similar in his essay Art and Answerability:

I shall always see and know something that he, from his place outside and over against me, cannot see himself: parts of his body that are inaccessible to his own gaze [] the world behind his back, and a whole series of objects and relations, which in any of our mutual relations are accessible to me but not to him.

This is the foundation of Bakhtins ethics: if there are things I cannot see for myself, then I need other people, and I should be good to them so that they will be honest with me.

I was planning an article about the curious fact that these two brilliant thinkers, neither of whom was aware of the other in their lifetime, had written about such similar things in such similar ways at around the same time. But standing in the swanky bathroom, the intellectual appeal of baldness vanished. I thought instead that it was incredible that the one place you cant see for yourself in a normal reflecting surface, like a mirror or a puddle or a pond, is the place that goes bald, as if all the other patches of hair stay put only because they know theyre being watched. (I also thought about my clearly unethical girlfriend and other friends who had been staring at this bald spot, probably for years, without telling me about it.)

The symbolic consequences of my discovery began to hit me in waves. I had gotten used to thinking of myself as a kind of youthful renegade. With The Digital Text, I was teaching a new kind of course, breathing new life into an old subject. I was on my way to investigate a totally new cultural phenomenon, indie videogames an art form without a long history, without much of a critical tradition, mostly without rules. All this youthful energy was sucked into my newly discovered bald spot as if into a black hole.

Maybe indie games werent some bold, new, vital burst of energy in the videogame world, but just a marker of the mediums encroaching middle age. Born in the sixties, videogames had been dismissed since then as childish and adolescent: trivial, violent, crude, stupid. The new arty subgenre of independently produced videogames that I was here to investigate was something different: without the need to please huge audiences, the small teams who made them were free to be weird, angry, and wilfully obscure. What attracted me was the aura of rebellion that surrounded them: a punk rock rejection of the corporate model of big-budget videogames in favour of the personal, the handmade, the iconoclastic.

The universe seemed to be telling me I was wrong. Maybe indie games were not a force of youthful energy, but a sign that this youthful energy was giving out. It occurred to me that maybe indie games were the bald spot on the head of the videogame industry.

When I was finally able to reorient myself, I began to focus on more mundane matters: namely, how totally unprepared I was for my trip to meet indie-game royalty Craig D. Adams, the mysterious genius known as Superbrothers. I had forgotten to pack T-shirts. I had forgotten to pack deodorant. Possibly because I was a budding academic and not a real journalist, I had forgotten to pack a notebook and a pen. And there was something else. Id known this all along, but it struck me with real force for the first time then: I knew absolutely nothing about videogames.