The Case For Video Game Making On Reality TV

Photo via Flickr user Alper.
Since its debut over 20-years ago, Iron Chef is about two respected cooks creating delicious food for the lucky ducks judging them. That simple competitive concept, over time, stretched over professions from stand-up comics to set designers, eventually getting mutated into Hell’s Kitchen. When reality television came for game makers this year through a Disney-owned production company, it awkwardly banked on those latter elements, leading to a total fucking fiasco.

“I definitely do believe an Iron Chef style game jam could totally work,” says Cale Bradbury, a Canadian developer working on The Dezert. “While you do have a potential winner and loser, both could be awesome games, you could want to play both.” 

He was invited to be part of GAME_JAM, a reality program by Polaris, a gaming-focused YouTube production company owned by Maker Studios bought by Disney shortly before shooting. 

A collection of fairly major developers also joined: Nidhogg’s Mark Essen, Stanley Parable’s Davey Wreden, Depression Quest’s Zoe Quinn, SoundSelf’s Robin Arnott and Rock Band Blitz’ Adriel Wallick. Because Polaris had worked with games, mostly YouTube personalities, there wasn’t much caution until filming began. “At first I was a little blown away at the size of production,” Bradbury says. “When I heard it was something for YouTube I expected it to be something much smaller, but there were tons of people running around everywhere—it was really kind of surreal those first few minutes. I expected a team of maybe, like, ten people with cameras.”

The affair was working with a not-so-modest budget of around $400,000. A full blown set decorated with an office facade and Mountain Dew logos. This didn’t feel much like a game jam to Bradbury, where developers usually group together for a sleepless weekend of game making. Here, with the interruption of challenges or the constant re-shoots (Bradbury says it took a lot of takes to get an excited reaction for the prizes, like a year’s supply of Mountain Dew), game-making itself was pushed into limbo. 

“I’d say the whole thing had a weird feeling from the get-go,” Bradbury says. “Maybe an hour in, while we were still making games, usually at game jams you show up, sit down and get to work, riding on that initial excitement high. It just felt stranger and stranger as time went by and we hadn’t done that much.”

To Polaris’ defense, production seemed to be destroyed by one Matti Leshem, an e-cig huffing brand consultant who sought to drum up conflict, force participants to change their attire and ban any beverage other than water or Dew from the set, as Indie Statik reported. When he started pushing the idea that teams with women were at a disadvantage, it ended with the contestants walking off. After the first day of a planned four-day shoot, the half a million invested GAME_JAM was kaput. 

“That felt pretty sleazy,” says Bradbury on hearing about Leshem’s questions. “When it was all going down I definitely knew that I didn’t want to be there.”

From all the additional hands that came with funding, GAME_JAM drifted away from the community it wanted to document. It also suggests that game making may not be a prime candidate for reality television, with or without titanic assholes on set. 

The indie game community in particular prides itself on sharing and support, while game jams are rarely seen as developers pitted against each other. They’d sooner throw their gloves down against the clock, so you can imagine the upset when GAME_JAM’s crew secretly tried to remove 20 minutes from one of the challenges.

Zoe Quinn cannot talk about the GAME_JAM incident after signing a contract, but it’s clear the affair has prompted her into action. She’s putting together Rebel Jam, a new documented game jam with all the competitive angles snipped out. “We’re going to try and be as non-invasive as possible to the game developers,” Quinn says, “we’ll film the process with some YouTube celebrities as an introductory-101, showing the outside world what game developers do at game jams. Cool parts of the community that mean a lot to me instead of making a Hollywood production out of it.” 

Quinn says that some “coder-versus-coder” style affair may miss the point, citing popular kettles like Big Brother. That said, she did say that if someone aimed at an Iron Chef affair, which I didn’t bring up, then “there might be a space for that sort of thing.

“I just don’t really see the point, it seems like that would be more for entertainment value than showing people what game jams are like. Every game jam I’ve been to has been an incredibly supportive environment. My favourite part is when it’s two in the morning, everybody’s sleep deprived, and everyone just gets silly and has fun.”

“This is tricky,” Bradbury says, “because I feel like I’d be interested in seeing something much different than what the average gamer would. I’d be really interested in seeing the process, the steps that they take, the reason behind decisions they end up making. Definitely interested in seeing the prototype game, all the stages along the way. Truth be told, I’m not sure what would really ‘work.’ I’m excited to see what Rebel Jam ends up doing.” Bradbury isn’t sure if he’s going to register yet.

Independent game developers are the face of their entire enterprise, if they sob or rave in front of a national audience, that’s going to stick. They don’t get to go back behind the scenes. Take outrageous quote-machine Phil Fish and the cancelation of Fez 2—like or not the game hinges on very few. Reality television is high-risk for game makers. When he considered walking off GAME_JAM, Bradbury first consulted with his co-developer about the effects it would have on their game. 

A lot of reality television thrives on ugly meltdowns, and that’s exactly what Leshem hoped for. Iron Chef banks not just on food porn, but also on process. It ends with an array of delicacies and more handshakes than fistfights. Iron Chef came up a lot in these conversations, so the program obviously seems to have earned the same amount of respect as it gives its participants. Home audiences don’t even get to smell what’s made in Kitchen Stadium, but games, reproduced on personal devices as soon as they go live, can be fully enjoyed by anyone.


@kingfranknstein