“We finally admitted New York in the winter is a bad idea.”
IndieCade East starts at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City today, and its co-chair (and former Paste contributor Simon Ferrari) is explaining why the games festival is being held in April this year instead of its customary February date. The cold weather has been a distinctive part of the event so far, setting it apart from its sunnier Los Angeles progenitor, but few would deny that New York is more hospitable in late April than mid-February. Even if, as Ferrari notes, “most of the people who come to the festival are New Yorkers.”
If you’ve never been, IndieCade East is an all-purpose symposium on the art and design of videogames. It crams smartly curated exhibits, lectures and panels from experienced pros, and (yes) actual, playable games into a single weekend of forward-looking fun, and that’s “fun” in every permutation of the word, from the intellectual satisfaction felt by thoughtfully pondering a work of art, to the pure joy of playing a new and addictive game. Ferrari and his co-chair Toni Pizza have overseen a busy weekend that tracks the collision of art and games.
If you are making it to IndieCade East this weekend, here are three things you shouldn’t miss.
1. Strange Arcade
If you’ve been to a games festival, you’ve probably seen idiosyncratic games that use unusual devices or untraditional controllers to explore new paths in game design. Strange Arcade collects some of the best of those games from the festival circuit in a single exhibit. Expect games like Line Wobbler, a festival hit that transposes a dungeon crawler onto an LED strip, and Codex Bash, where you team up to decode an espionage thriller using giant red buttons that look like they’re from an old game show (or an old Staples ad). Definitely make time for Superhypercube VR, especially if you’re still a skeptic about virtual reality, and the hard to describe game “platform” Tripad, which is basically a cube made of soundboard touchpads made for DJs. If you’re a fastidious record collector who cringes at the thought of scratches, you might want to avoid RainboDisko, a boardgame that uses a record player as the board.
The games selection at IndieCade East was curated by its Festival chairs, Brian Chung and GJ Lee, who run the New York-area indie games demo night Sheep’s Meow. “The weird thing about IndieCade East is you can’t submit games to it,” Ferrari explains. “They’re all selected along a certain theme. So that means it’s not as important that the games are brand new. A lot of times we take some of the most interesting winners from IndieCade West last year and we find the most common theme that we can build this big museum curation around. That’s what Brian and GJ are in charge of.”