under commons & comitia: different ways to exhibit games

A HERO AND A GARDEN was exhibited at a gallery in yokohama called under commons recently-ish & it was a cool experience!

i've exhibited my games at many events in japan before & i've had my games exhibited at art galleries overseas, but it was the first time i've had a game of mine exhibited at an art gallery in japan. as a result, it was also the first time i've actually been able to see an exhibit with my game in it.

it was an exhibit showcasing various indie games, & the games were all in spaces that were designed to match the game. it had a different feeling than game events where every game is demoed on the same table with the same chairs within the same set amount of space.

funnily enough, it reminded me a bit of exhibiting at comitia 152 (rather than any other game event). i drew a comic earlier this year & sold it at comitia along with some games, but the difference for me for comitia vs the game events i usually exhibit at was that at comitia, in general, everything was complete.

by complete, i mean that everything on display was generally in its final form. at game events, usually, all you get to see is demos for unreleased games. a lot of the stuff being shown is still in development - it might become something entirely different upon release (or never be released at all).

at comitia, if you like something you see, you can buy it right there & take it home with you. this is not something you can usually do at an art gallery, so you need to take time to fully appreciate whatever you want to see there...

but that's a bit difficult with a game, unless it's very short. in general, for art galleries i've been asked to just share the game in full, rather than a demo, which i think makes sense, because what i want people to see is the game in its entirety...

but they can't really do that in most cases, since people aren't sitting with one game for that long in an exhibit where there are other things to see too.

i guess one option is to go with a demo that shows just a snippet of the game, & then people who are interested can play the game at home when they have more time, but it's hard to know where to 'snip'. with a book or comic, people can pick it up & flip through it to see whatever parts they want to, but that's harder with a game.

i've been to galleries for games where they only show development materials & don't have the game available to play. while i think that works for a game which people are already familiar with, it doesn't work so well for introducing a game to more people...

i think under commons did a lovely job of showing the games it chose, with the games themselves on exhibit along with supplementary material like interviews, art created based on the games, &c.

at comitia, meanwhile, i sold games without actually have the games playable in any way at all, so people would look at the game art i have displayed & just buy them based on that. people would sometimes ask me about the games as well, so i'd ask them what kind of games they liked & suggest games they might enjoy based on that - much smaller scale than what is done for a gallery exhibit, of course, but it felt like curating a selection of games out of the ones i made to fit a specific audience of one.

i've been a bit tired of exhibiting at 'regular' game events honestly, because it always feels just like marketing marketing marketing & it's not really the way i want people to encounter my games. selling my comic & games at comitia as well as having A HERO AND A GARDEN exhibited at under commons showed me different ways i can do things, & i think i want to explore that more in the future!

(i thought maybe writing this out would help me figure out what i want to do with events in the future since i've been feeling 'evented out' for a while, but i don't know if i've been able to accurately describe what i've been feeling... i just know that while i felt nervous at under commons & comitia just from the usual anxiety i get from being at an event, i enjoyed both of them a lot & came back feeling like i wanted to go to similar events again, while at game events lately i just come back feeling exhausted.)