Over the summer, I spent a month at Stugan, a Swedish “game development acceleration camp”. That may sound like a faintly sinister concept, but it was in fact stupidly idyllic. The eight-week event, organised by alumni from game publishers Rovio and King, took place in adorable red wooden cabins perched on a hill overlooking a lake – apparently called “Bjursen”, although we just called it The Lake, because we couldn’t pronounce anything correctly. While not working on our game development projects, we watched meteor showers from a nearby mountaintop, swam beneath the Northern Lights, and sat around a campfire getting sloshed on schnapps.

The Stugan attendees were from all over the world, but we’d ended up in this tiny corner of Scandinavia, brought together by the one thing we shared: the desire to create and play video games. I turned up three weeks late, and already an outsider as the only journalist, but within a few days I felt like I’d been welcomed as one of the team. There with me were people like Ivan Notaros, an incredibly talented Serbian developer who was ostensibly making a game called House of Flowers based on his experience and knowledge of the war in Yugoslavia in the 90s, but spent much of his time making tiny games, procedurally generated art, and incredible low-res photogrammetry of us as a group. There were Michael and Laura, a married team who were making a game despite being animators rather than programmers, using their artistic style to inform what their project, Thin Air, would become.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stugan (Swedish for ‘cabin’) is a two-month game creation retreat. Developers have to apply to attend, and if selected get to stay for free

Auston and Diana, another couple, were making Catdate – a game that seems like a simple dating sim (but with cats) but revealed itself to be a touching, meaningful exploration of connection, friendship and learning how to communicate with others. Robbie, Dorianne and Marc, the only three-person team, all from South Africa, were working on Kingdom in the Sky, a project they’d been unable to work on for months because of their full-time jobs. Mira and Tanja, a team of two women, one Swedish and one Danish, collaborated on their two-player game Tick Tock, when they weren’t playing incredibly tense rounds of Magic: The Gathering. The trailers of these games, and the others made during Stugan 2016, are all worth watching.



It’s largely because of Stugan that I’ve started making my own games. My first - Awkward Dating Simulator - has been downloaded over 1,000 times already, which is amazing and terrifying. Next year, I’ll be taking part in Train Jam - a 52-hour train ride from Chicago to the annual Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, where developers make games as the scenery rushes by. I’m doing it just to be around those people and that feeling again.

Train Jam (@IndieTrainJam) The best kind of inspiration #trainjam pic.twitter.com/bZco7u7irk

There has always been an independent game development community. In the early 1980s, small teams made their own games, downloaded them on to cassettes and sold them at trade fairs, bypassing the retail business that was growing around software. In the 90s, the rise of the internet meant these developers had the ability to sell their games digitally, to a global audience, without ever having to produce or distribute physical copies. More recently, platforms like Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and the PC games service Steam have given indie developers access to huge online stores where they can sell their often offbeat and idiosyncratic games alongside major releases.

Now, perhaps more than ever, independent games – and the communities that make them – have a vital role in video game culture. The mainstream games business, similar to the mainstream movie business, is mostly about noise and bombast. Triple A titles are sold on action and violence; the industry’s biggest annual events E3 and Gamescom are cacophonous battle zones, where the loudest, brightest booths inevitably win (last time I went to E3, one major games publisher was issued a warning by the event organiser because their booth was so loud no one else could get anything done).

Indie games can often be about action and violence, too, but the creative atmosphere is very different. Instead of E3, the indie sector runs events like Mild Rumpus, a sweet, relaxing space taking up one corner of the otherwise frenetic GDC, where attendees could play titles like Lieve Oma, a game about taking a walk in the woods with a beloved grandma, or Beeswing, a semi-autobiographical game set in a small village in Scotland. This summer, London’s Somerset House hosted Now Play This, a collection of innovative experimental games and installations, beautifully curated and housed within a disused wing of the grand building. Here we played reflective, artistic titles like the painterly pinball sim Inks and beautiful Where’s Wally-like puzzler Hidden Folks.

Recently, the first ever IndieCade Europe event took place in Paris, nestled in the alcoves of a grand 18th-century museum. The highlights for me were games like Chalo Chalo, a simple but brilliant multiplayer racing game that feels tense despite its treacle-slow movements; the incredibly heartbreaking Killing Time At Lightspeed, in which you can read your friends’ social interactions, but you’re light-years away, so every page refresh is another two years into the future; and Old Man’s Journey, a game about exactly what the title suggests, with a stunning art style.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Simple but brilliant … Chalo Chalo. Photograph: Sparpweed/Redshift Media

Within these quiet, gentle spaces, there is an atmosphere of care rather than competition. AAA games are still, for the most part, thrilling and worth talking about, but, for me at least, they’re a business. At Stugan, people talked about their projects, worked with each other, and understood when others just needed to walk up the mountain alone. In the indie game community, when problems arise, people discuss them and share resources and experience. This almost certainly happens in the mainstream industry, but there it’s confidential and hidden. Here, it is simply a part of how things work. Successful indie developers like Tom Francis (one of the attendees at Stugan and the guy behind crossover hit Gunpoint) write development blogs and talk about their design issues in video updates. Small studios even set up webcams and live stream the development process.

It’s this transparency and openness that makes the community feel welcoming. There is a softness, a kindness, a sincerity, that you don’t see often in the churn of the games industry at large. Being an indie developer is incredibly hard work. A lot of teams meet and collaborate online, often living thousands of miles apart, so their work is carried out through late night Skype calls and Google hangouts; they conduct hundreds of long-distance relationships with players and other developers through social media streams; they have to manage and juggle time zones as well as any international stock trader. So when an event takes place, it can often be more like family reunion than a showcase. Developers hug each other tight because they don’t know when they’ll next see each other.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Orchids to Dusk Photograph: Pol Clarissou

This sense of openness and compassion is flowing into the games. An emerging generation of developers want to share themselves through the work they produce, to connect with others in the same way as singer-songwriters in the 1960s or indie bands in the 1970s and 1980s. They’re willing to be vulnerable with strangers, and they’re willing to explore the parameters of what games are in order to communicate how they feel. Pol Clarissou, another of the Stugan alumni, makes games like Orchids to Dusk, in which there is limited interaction, and nothing you can do to save yourself – a game that teaches you the world is sometimes just as it is, and the only thing you can do is experience it.

In the last year we have also seen games like Cibele, in which creator Nina Freeman provides an incredibly personal semi-autobiographical story of heartbreak. We’ve seen Lucy Blundell’s uncomfortable morning-after narrative, One Night Stand, which puts a stranger in your bed and asks you how you feel now you’ve woken next to them. These games – so open and honest with the feelings they explore – exist because the developers couldn’t see their lives, selves or experiences reflected in mainstream games, and so created them themselves. In turn, that inspires others to do the same.

This growing counter-culture of highly personal, highly experimental game design has faced criticism, resistance and even aggression from incumbent communities – the self-identifying ‘gamers’ – who think they know what games should be: the same thing they’ve always been. Many people who demand guns, explosions and intensity (which is all good), somehow see the existence of quiet, kind, thoughtful games as a threat. In 2013, when the developer Zoe Quinn released her interactive fiction game Depression Quest on PC, she was threatened with physical harm. Dealing with mental health was considered provocative. Somehow in video games, vulnerability is a political act.

The games I saw being made at Stugan, being shown and shared at IndieCade, Now Play This and Mild Rumpus, are important and they will not be pushed from the industry. Video games are culture, and culture reflects life. For a lot of people, life is hard right now: global economies are failing, money is tight; 2016 has been a year of mourning and political upheaval, old certainties have crumbled. It’s no coincidence that we’ve seen an explosion of interest in self-care concepts like hygge and mindfulness. In difficult times, we seek simple, meaningful pleasures: we need to take care of ourselves, we need to wrap ourselves up against the cold.

Not all of the games I’ve seen this year are comforting or “nice” in the sense of being pleasant experiences. But they are real, personal and powerful. Like all true art, they invite us into the most intimate thoughts and feelings of others. Sometimes that’s what is needed: a way back to the warmth.

Five personal games to look out for in 2017

A selection of highly subjective and intimate projects set to arrive next year

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The kind of place you want to climb inside and live in … 29. Photograph: Humble Grove

29 (Humble Grove)

The borderless, softened colours of 29 evoke the kind of place you want to climb inside and live in, even if one of its inhabitants is a huge, many-eyed monster. It follows two housemates, both transgender and non-binary, as they co-exist and explore their corner of the world. Their story is told in snippets and parenthetical observations, and it’s beautiful, calm and quiet.

Vignettes (Pol Clarissou, Armel Gibson and Pat Ashe)

Sometimes there comes an idea that’s so perfect and simple that you wonder how it hasn’t been done before. Vignettes is a game, at its heart, about rotating things until they change into other things, but it’s so much more than that: it’s a game about appreciating design, noticing details, immersing yourself in simple interactions. Many games give you control over the world; Vignettes gives you control over one object, asking you to focus, almost like cognitive behavioural therapy, on one thing at a time.

Ooblets (Nonplayercat and Perplamps)

Pokémon is great, but the thread of any Pokémon game is to fight to the finish line. Ooblets is more like a walk in the woods, accompanied by a host of cute lumpy friends that toddle behind you like something in between a puppy and a two-year-old. Its palette is that of an old-fashioned sweet shop; its design is Adventure Time-esque, sweet but knowingly humorous. Every gif that the (two!) developers post on Twitter is filled with lightness and the kind of heartwarming loveliness that we could definitely do with right now.

Old Man’s Journey (Broken Rules)

OK, first off, Old Man’s Journey is the only game I know of that has given out temporary tattoos as part of their promotional merch. Secondly, this game is an absolute joy to look at and play. It’s reminiscent of a run-down but well-loved seaside town, in which you help an old man clamber around, sitting down now and again to reminisce about his long lost past. It’s beautifully layered, creating a sense of depth and warmth that invites you to explore and discover more.

Secret Legend (Andrew Shouldice)

When we’re most stressed, we retreat into behaviours that remind us of the safety of childhood. Nostalgic experiences are soothing, because they coax out memories of happier, simpler times. With soft, dappled light, gentle colours and music, and a very obvious Zelda influence, Secret Legend is the game to play if you want to escape from everything new into something that feels so comforting and familiar that it might have just been in your pocket the whole time.