WANDERLUST

aring to be different is often met with suspicion – something that’s as true in videogames as it is any other part of life. Unfamiliar concepts may be turned away by overzealous gatekeepers, or interrogated in the belief they hide unseemly motives. That was never more true than ten years ago, when the indie boom brought a wave of games that seemed to reject established rules of genre and interactivity in favour of more contemplative experiences. Some were derided as ‘walking simulators’, or accused of failing to meet arbitrary standards of what constitutes a game. But like them or not, these titles capsized old debates about games’ ability to tell stories or evoke emotional responses – and the pivotal year in this shift was 2012, when a trio of developers decided to stop and smell the roses. And, detractors aside, it turned out plenty of players were equally ready for a sniff. One fresh-faced company that strolled into the fray that year was Giant Sparrow, with its flagship title , a game where the most taxing interaction is applying paint to your otherwise-invisible surroundings. “There was a significant segment of players who were angry that this game existed,” creative director tells us. This pushback was a result of zero-sum thinking, he reckons – “If there were games that were not about challenge, that was an existential threat to games they loved” – and of expectation. This audience thought they were getting a puzzle game, perhaps something more like , but was never supposed to be anything of the sort. “When they played it, they were like, ‘This is a shitty puzzle game’,” Dallas says. “You’re right, it a shitty puzzle game. Moving forward, I’ve tried to be clearer about what to expect, but that’s hard when we’re making a game where the whole idea met similar resistance that same year, as his studio The Chinese Room released as a commercial product. No surprise, perhaps – here was a game that truly embodied the moniker, as you wandered an Outer Hebridean island heading towards your narrated fate. As Pinchbeck sees it, the reaction to its release was an early example of the now exhaustingly familiar patterns of online outrage. As such, he doesn’t see any point in engaging with it. “Some of the stuff thrown at us was so extreme that there was no dialogue to be had,” he says. Nor did he find the arguments convincing. “Because [] came from a real love of firstperson games; I wasn’t having anything to do with this ‘You hate games, you’re destroying games’ thing.” Besides, Pinchbeck is old enough to recall how experimental games had been back in the 1980s, on home computers. “[They were] absolutely barking mad,” he says, “so I’d always considered games to be a medium that constantly pushed its own boundaries.”