CHARLES PRITCHARD
Special to The Leader
Two hateful tweets from the now-deleted Twitter account of one Philippe Poisson, better known in the gaming community as Phil Fish were directed at a Marcus Beer, a.k.a “Annoyed Gamer” and Agent MST, a self proclaimed “lover of video games.”
“Compare your life to mine and then kill yourself,” one tweet read.
“I just won the grand prize at IGF tonight. suck my dick. choke on it,” said another.
The two were targets of such toxic language after speaking negatively about Phil Fish’s, at the time, up-and-coming game called Fez. The game received critical acclaim and took the top spot at both the Independent Games Festival and IndieCade — competitions in which independent game developers create a game and compete for a number of awards and cash prizes.
At the 2008 IGF, Fez entered for and won the Excellence in Visual Arts award. It was entered again in 2012, when it won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize of $32,500. Fez is the only game to be entered twice into the IGF and win awards both times.
It was also the only game in which to receive a general, approving consensus from seven judges and jurors.
Around Aug. 22 of this year, Phil Fish’s company called Polytron was hacked by someone claiming to be “the head mod of /V/ and leader of 4chan.org and anonymous.” This individual leaked personal information for all to see, from financial to security information all in a 1.5 gigabyte file. In those documents, it was revealed that a number of people loaned out money to Phil Fish.
Ron Carmel, Nathan Vella, Aaron Isaksen, Kellee Santiago, Jonathan Blow, Kyle Gabler and Matthew Wegner all created a loan contract in which they loaned $67,500 to Phil Fish, with the understanding that they would receive a portion of the profits that Fez made in the first 365 days it was on the Xbox Live Arcade and the first 163 days it was on Steam.
These seven people also participated as judges for the IGF.
The IGF has released a statement to clear the air, though, claiming that “all submitted games are assigned to a random set of judges (nearly 375),” and that “each jury, made of up of seven to 15 members, takes another four to six weeks to play and discuss the games in private.”
However, the writers and developers running the blog “The Rotting Cartridge” called the IGF voting practices into question when it was revealed that their game, “Kale in Dinoland,” which used software to log user activity, was not installed by one judge, nor played by three judges; the remaining judges played the game for a measly five minutes, except for one, who played it for 50 minutes.
Even if these seven judges did not have that much sway at the IGF and if those at The Rotting Cartridge misinterpreted the logs given to them, there is still the problem of Kellee Santiago, one of Fez’s backers, who was the 2011 Chair of the Awards Jury for the 2011 festival. According to IndieCade, “the Awards Jury Chair organizes the process and serves to lead the meetings of the Awards Jury.”
That, in and of itself, is a conflict of interest, as she was helping to organize and discuss the voting on one of the games she invested in; furthermore, that game became a finalist and raised even more questions when it went on to win “Best in Show” and and “Best Story/World Design.”
With all this evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, a picture starts to come into focus that something is going on in the indie-gaming scene. All one can ask is whether this is it or whether the rabbit hole goes any deeper.