Sundae Month Game Collective TECH Alters the Meaning of ‘Play’ ISSUE B Y S A D I E W I LLI A M S
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he candy-colored landscape and light electronic music belie the message that you, “a lonely spaceport sanidrone,” receive when you sign up to play: “One day, you’ll find your way off this ancient death trap of a planet.”
Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is not a happy video game. SUNDAE MONTH, an artistic game-design collective composed of Champlain College students and graduates, recently released Diaries.. It’s a critique
OLIVER PARINI
World to Burlington: The Vermont International Film Festival B Y SA D I E WI LLI A MS
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smiles when she talks about movies. So does SETH JARVIS, her right-hand man. The executive director and outreach coordinator, respectively, are two of the busiest bodies at the VERMONT INTERNATIONAL FILM FOUNDATION and at the organization’s yearly festival. But even as they rush to prepare for the 10-day affair — which begins this Friday, October 21, in Burlington — Yadin and Jarvis speak about the selected films with more than a little reverence. Perhaps that’s because they and four more members of the programming committee spent almost eight months scouring the landscape of modern cinema for gems, and developed an affection for certain titles in the process. Many of the films they winnowed from that search focus on current issues, ranging from gender and sexuality to refugees to rebellion. At this year’s festival, Yadin says, RLY YADIN
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of capitalism featuring a space-station janitor who, while stuck picking up trash, is constantly forced to reassign, or reidentify, their gender. That theme can be traced to the game’s principal creator, 22-year-old JAMES SHASHA, who identifies as genderqueer and nonbinary and prefers the pronoun “they.” Shasha is currently completing their degree in creative media at Champlain. Sundae Month’s other two founding members and coowners are 22-year-old RYAN HUGGINS, who graduated with a degree in game design last year, and 21-year-old LEVI ROHR, who’s still a student. Diaries isn’t the young group’s first game, but it’s by far the most successful to date. Picked up by independent publisher tinyBuild Games, it was released on September 16 on the gaming platform Steam. Since then, Diaries has won the Honorary Autodesk Award for Best 3D Game and has been shown at the Montréal Independent Games Festival and other indie game events around the country.
From The Hanji Box by Nora Jacobson
A copy of Diaries was recently installed in the gallery at Champlain College with other games the collective has designed over the past three years. Those include Rohr’s Petrichor, which invites the player to wander through a forest; and Shapedown, which involves catching different shapes in a rotating square. Gallery curator CHRIS THOMPSON compares Sundae Month to an indie-punk band. “They’ve got this rock-and-roll attitude,” he says, “but what they do is more like an art collective.” The principal creatives of Sundae Month draw on the skills of their close friends, usually fellow students, for each project. For Diaries alone, Shasha collaborated with 11 other artists on everything from vocals to music to art. “Most people, they go study game making, then work for a [highly rated] game company,” Thompson says, “and they make texture maps of crates in a basement, and they do that for three years. And then they get to move up to doing texture maps of someone’s backpack. This group is like, Fuck that, we’re doing our own game, we’re doing it right now and we’re going to do something that’s really interesting to us.” Sundae Month’s creations don’t conform to expectations for a typical video game, Thompson notes. Take the
a few things will look different. She’s particularly pleased that nearly half of the filmmakers represented are women — a drastic departure from Hollywood norms. Returning festivalgoers may also notice an increase in the number of fiction films over documentaries, which have historically dominated VTIFF. And, last but not least, “I think it’s the first time ever that we have chosen a Vermont film [for] the opening night,” Yadin enthuses. “I’m very happy and proud about that.” That would be The Hanji Box (2016), directed, written and produced by Norwich-based NORA JACOBSON. The fictional tale, filmed in New York and Vermont, chronicles one woman’s conversation with herself about adopting a Korean daughter. “I think international adoption is a very curious phenomenon,” Jacobson reflects over the phone, “that only exists in what we call ‘first-world countries,’ where people have the [ability] to pay quite a bit of money to get children.” “Curious” may be a careful choice of words, but that carefulness also characterizes the film, in which one woman’s