Indie Game: The Movie—The Image

The image I chose comes from the final few frames of a documentary I thoroughly enjoyed, which as the image itself indicates, is called Indie Game: The Movie. This image has been on the internet for a while as an advertisement for the film and this shot has been reworked for the film’s poster, but given a more cartoonish style. After a series of industrial cityscapes, the filmmakers chose to conclude with a series of shots culminating in this one: a Super Nintendo controller hanging from a set of power lines. The shot really gripped me when I saw the film. I really love the use of color in the image in the sense that despite being incredibly gray, it still feels lively to me. The fact that something so intentionally manufactured and literally plastic (an SNES controller) seems to mesh with the shot of the sky behind it was really intriguing to me. Had this shot been taken during a bright sunny day, it wouldn’t have the same impact for me—highlighting Berger’s point that photography’s “primary raw materials are light and time” (85). On a cloudy day, this dangling controller somehow seems to complement the murky sky. There’s also the realization that came with the image for me: given the nature of games, and especially during the era that SNES was made in (early 1990’s), the notion of playing games outside was fairly novel. Sure, the Gameboy was coming into its own during this era, but in general, aside of the recent surge of touchscreen phones and gaming, videogames were something almost exclusively played while indoors, and you had to use the television screen or a computer monitor to play anything besides the most primitive of LED-based games. Aside of a garbage can or some rather bizarre modifications, I doubt anyone has seen a Super Nintendo controller outdoors, let alone dangling from electrical wires like an old pair of shoes. The contrast between something decidedly symbolic of the digital age and an open (yet cloudy) sky is what I think really drew me to the image.

The image itself draws on multiple traditions thanks to its source. It is obviously associated with videogames and film given that it is a game development documentary. As a documentary, it comes preloaded with the notion that, unlike Hollywood movies, this is the true story of what happened, as opposed to simply being based on a true story. The film follows the lives of four men at different stages of making indie games— Phil Fish (creator of Fez) who is in his fourth year of tumultuous development, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes (co-creators of Super Meat Boy) who release their game during the film, and Jonathan Blow (creator of Braid) who has finished his first massively successful indie game and is working on his next. The lives of these individuals are explored by the film, but also the games they’re producing/have produced. So while Indie Game: The Movie comes in the form of a well-known film genre and therefore a lengthy film legacy, it also draws on over 25 years of gaming history. Clips of Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Tetris are shown next to Fez and Super Meat Boy as the creators explain why they began making games. Given the types of games these developers are producing (2D platformers with cartoonish graphics), there is some logic supporting the promo image’s connection to the earlier days of gaming. It seems to me that connecting this image to a 2012 film based on games being released for the Xbox 360 and modern computers, yet showing an SNES controller from 1991 in their advertisements doesn’t make a good deal of sense. The image itself, however, due to its source, is inextricably bound to the lengthy traditions of documentary films and videogames.

Several questions came up for me after I started really examining this image:

1. The first and most obvious is: does this image contain any of the same messages without the text accompanying it?
2. In this same line of surface-level questioning—how did the controller get up there? Was it an effect simply done for the film? Or did they happen across this as they were filming? How contrived might this shot be, and does it matter if it is real or not?
3. What impact does this image have on someone who doesn’t have nostalgic experiences of playing with a Super Nintendo console/controller?
4. Given that the Super Nintendo as an entity is not mentioned at all in this film (clips from the original Nintendo are shown, but not the SNES), why would the filmmakers use this image— not only as an advertisement for their film, but also, given that their likely audience would be a group of gamers that would notice the absence of the SNES in the film?
5. Similarly, what does the choice to use an SNES controller in the promotional images say about who they were trying to target with their advertising? What population of the gaming public (or public at large) might have no clue what this thing dangling from the power lines is?
6. Does the fact that this still frame comes from a video clip matter at all when interpreting it? Does its initial medium matter when considering it? Why or why not?