Travel back to the time when I was ganked by my mother while playing the internet and the unique events of Vietnamese indie games

Being 'ganked by mom', a phrase that evokes painful memories for many gamers in Vietnam, is the name given to a nostalgic indie game experience event in Ho Chi Minh City organized by young Vietnamese game designers.

The games at Mother Gank can be as simple as childhood memories of a trip to Saigon Zoo in Blood, Tooth & Tears (right) or teenage thoughts in Inside my 10-year-old head - Photo: BTC

Taking place from now until August 18 at Reading Cabin (District 1), Mother Gank is a small event for participants to experience indie, truly "homemade" games made by students in subjects such as programming, level design...

Organized by a team of teachers and students at the Game Design Department of RMIT University, the games in the program were developed by students in just 1 to 2 months and were all the highest-scoring products of the course.

These are very unique works, full of experimentation and personal imprint.

Without flashy graphics or clear end-to-end layouts like commercial games, the games you can experience at Mother Gank are often simple, short, and sometimes incomplete.

The computer used to experience the game here has an interface that takes players back to their childhood, the era when Yahoo and ZingMe still dominated social networks - Photo: BTC

However, when playing, participants can feel the love the young people put into each segment.

Because after all, games are like paintings or movies, they are also places where their owners confide their thoughts about life as well as their artistic mark.

Need more playgrounds for Vietnamese indie games

Do Dzuy Anh (30 years old) - a Vietnamese-American lecturer teaching at RMIT - and independent game developer Henry are the initiators of this event.

Mother Gank was inspired by similar meetings of independent game developers in the US, Australia, Japan... with the aim of creating a space for these games to be accessed and experienced by many people.

Mr. Henry (30 years old) said that in an era where games are increasingly industrialized and commercialized, he is especially impressed with the unique personality of indie games developed by Vietnamese students, which is also the motivation for him to initiate this event - Photo: TO CUONG

Here, attendees can sit down and chat with the game creators themselves, listening to them share their ideas, inspirations, and stories behind each game.

A typical example is Panda (real name: Bui Truong Thinh), author of the game A game about me . He shared with Tuoi Tre that the inspiration for the game comes from the art of water puppetry - a traditional form of Vietnamese theater.

With this game, Panda wants to tell a story about his own confusing crisis period when he was in high school, a time when he was struggling between too many choices and didn't know which direction to take for the future.

Admitting that he is not good at design, Panda uses the seemingly silly drawings of a child to tell a unique story about his own journey to adulthood - Photo: BTC

Unlike the large experience booths often seen at gaming conferences in Vietnam or internationally, Mother Gank 's gaming corner is located in a small room with only an old curved monitor and an ivory white keyboard with many stains.

This is almost an installation art piece, recreating the cramped space but filled with memories of internet cafes and video game shops that were once associated with the childhood of many young Vietnamese people born in the 1990s and early 2000s.

A small corner at Reading Cabin suddenly turns into a time machine taking participants back to the early days of internet cafes in Vietnam - Photo: TO CUONG

At that time, the Internet had just been introduced, internet cafes sprung up like mushrooms, becoming a meeting place for kids who loved games, Yahoo chat, listening to music from Le Quy Don forum or watching the first clips on YouTube when Facebook was not yet available.

Although once considered a gathering place for a type of "social evil" that haunted parents at that time, the culture of internet cafes in Vietnam is the place that helps millions of children approach the "eighth art form" from a time when they were not yet interested in painting, poetry or cinema.

The future of Vietnam's art game industry

The game design industry in Vietnam is still relatively young. Unlike game programming - where the focus is on technical aspects - game design includes more creative roles such as art direction, sound design, story building and player experience.

This is a field that requires multidimensional thinking, combining technology, aesthetics and emotions. Those pursuing the game industry today often choose the path of developing commercial games, with formulaic gameplay and monetizing players through in-game items.

With the task of guiding a new generation of game makers in Vietnam, Do Dzuy Anh is proud of his students' products and wishes to create many new playgrounds for game makers in Ho Chi Minh City - Photo: TO CUONG

However, the organizers of the Mother Gank event like Henry, Do Dzuy Anh or Panda are still extremely confident about the future of the Vietnamese art game industry.

They believe that within the next 5 to 10 years, Vietnam will have internationally recognized indie games - not only for their quality but also for their unique identity in storytelling and design.

For them, games are not only entertainment but also an art form - where game makers can both tell their own stories and create real economic value from what they are passionate about.

To Cuong

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/du-hanh-ve-thoi-di-net-bi-me-gank-cung-su-kien-doc-la-cua-game-indie-viet-20250720134200116.htm