Fast Five – Brandon Boyer

Whoops, we asked for more of these than there were days in the leadup to Freeplay, so we’ll be having more than one for the last few days.  We’re very excited to have Brandon Boyer out for Freeplay to talk about how All Play is Personal.

What are you working on right now?

More than it would probably appear! Apart from some light admin on Independent Games Festival goings-on (before the full-on storm hits with the submission deadline, and the judge-wrangling begins in earnest), I’ve generally gone dark to finish off a few bigger projects that have been simmering for too many months now. Things to do with iPhones, and to do with websites — and all to do with indie games, of course. In my “spare time”, I’m trying to make a Facebook app to help the world fall in love (though their API is current stymieing this), and because I don’t feel like that’s nearly enough, I’ve begun outlining a book I’d like to write. And then also there’s two, possibly three, more game festivals to attend/speak at this year, post-Freeplay. Man.

What do you think the biggest change with what you do will be in the next 5 years?

It’s already been a pretty wild ride over the past five or six, since I started getting involved with writing about games, but what I’d like to do with the next five is become more intimately and systemically involved with promoting and championing the best games the indies are producing to as wide an audience as can be mustered — more than simply typing words onto a website. Exactly what form this will take is to be seen (and I have no doubt the landscape will be as unrecognizable in 2015 as our current state was in 2005), but I’m thrilled to continue to be even a peripheral part of This Thing That Is Happening for as long as the community finds whatever it is I do valuable.

If you didn’t do what you do, what sort of thing would take up your time?

Every time I take a half-step back in that direction I find I’m pretty happy to not strictly be in development any longer (I spent five-ish years in Flash/multimedia dev before starting to write full-time), though there’s always at least a good half-dozen projects (games and otherwise) on top of the ones above that I’d desperately like to see created. Beyond that, I sort of half-figured that I’d end up involved with radio (and honestly would still love to be) or music (I’ve got a deep itch to resurrect my old indie label). Strictly speaking, it’s all really the same song and dance: I would like to construct a mountaintop from which to yell about amazing people creating amazing things across all media, and then spend nights tinkering on a few things of my own.

What are you most looking forward to?

Finishing what I’ve started and crossing my fingers that it has the intended effect. Seeing more people from outside “the industry” coming in and creating something no-one could have foreseen (known in some circles as “The Parappa/Katamari/Electroplankton Effect”). The further decline of “games” as market-research-honed demographic-targeted boxed products and the further rise of “games” genuinely appreciated as affecting, creative expression. The flourishing of a market with enough savvy and playful curiosity to sustain that. Both the first truly-compelling, and the very last merely-compulsive, “social” game.

What are you playing right now – digital or otherwise?

Not nearly as much as I wish I could or probably should be! It’s taken me like a year, but I’ve finally become semi-obsessed with Marvelous’s awesomely meta-parodic Half-Minute Hero ( http://www.halfminutehero.com/ ). I’m pretty sure Mikengreg’s ( http://www.mikengreg.com/hello/ ) forthcoming New Thing is going to be a Pretty Good Thing (there are very few reasons why it shouldn’t “pull another ‘Canabalt’”). Tak Fung and Rex Crowle’s Epic Win ( http://www.epicwinapp.com/ ) only barely counts, but I need it desperately to keep me on task, and Capy’s console port of Clash of Heroes ( http://mightandmagic.us.ubi.com/clashofheroes/ ) literally can’t come fast enough. It’s been too long since a game truly made my neck-hairs stand, but I’m more than a little positive Fez ( http://polytroncorporation.com/?page_id=61 ) is going to be that game.

Brandon is the chairman of the Independent Games Festival, and some sort of amorphous, intangible lump of writer-critic-curator-appreciator-promoter of art, with emphasis on the “lump”.