Indie Cultures
Greg Costikyan offered a great opinion piece on Gamasutra the other day, about a lack of culture in games leaving the only options in extremely forgettable licensed IP. What makes it a particularly strong piece is the examples he gives of the incredibly homogenised boardgame mass market of the US, and the strongly cultural market for the same in Germany:
the contrast with Germany, say is stark. In Germany, there is what you might call a national boardgame culture, with major publications reviewing new games, a highly competitive set of publishers, and designers who are minor celebrities. Consequently, many, perhaps most, of the best new boardgames are published out of Germany, and the American market is treated to the same old branded crap.
While we have an indie game scene worldwide, it’s questionable how much of that is driving towards respectable commercialisation, both from artistic and financial points of view. This, in some respects reveals a surfeit of culture in videogames, or at least some massive bundles of tension between different camps of game development.
Before GDC, Leigh Alexander posted about the idea of Lo-fi games, and what constitute “true indie”. Typically, these kind of games have come from auteurs in the past few years, but the emergence of the aesthetic hasn’t gone un-noticed by commercial game developers of titles such as Megaman 9 and Bit Trip: Beat.
It all seems to circle round to perpetual arguments of who is stealing whose aesthetic and audience, who is authentic and who is faking it, with endless and I suspect ultimately baseless accusations flying regularly. For instance, Pixel-Junk:Eden was criticised by some as having no place in the IGF this year, with their entering dismissed as a cynical marketing ploy since they’ve already done well on PSN. Simon Carless, chairman of the IGF, was quick to point out that they entered before they’d been confirmed on PS3.
I went to a lot of indie games sessions and events at GDC this year, and have never had a clearer sense of stratification. The term “indie” has served fairly well for the past few years, but is becoming troubled. I see this as similar to 90’s British music, in which the term indie sprouted to describe anything on an independent label, but was then applied to a particular kind of guitar pop ala Oasis. There followed many complaints and arguments about the true nature of the term, how many who had stated indie were selling out to the mainstream. Popularity was something that could create rifts and wound the pride of artists and fans.
Games nomenclature has never really been any different. “Gameplay” is a very good example of a general term that has meaning for many, yet noone can define well and attempts seem to generate nothing but dissent. Indie seems to be heading the same way. It technically applies to everything from programmers building wonderful things in coffee shops and bedrooms, to extremely large studio chains like Kuju knocking out one game after another, to small almost unheard of publishers making awful impulse buy quiz games that don’t even sell through specialist games retailers. Companies like Kuju and Blitz are indie, yet in doing work for hire they are more like session musicians than struggling artists.
All of this demonstrate that at least we have an ecosystem, even if bits of it hate each other. These conflicts are going to fade, as the aesthetic drifts back out of fashion and mainstream businesses find different ways to sell. The eventual usefulness of the term indie will probably emerge as something outside of, though encompassing, what the smaller and more interesting game developers are doing, and I’m sure many of them will detest that. In discussions of the recording industry, “indie” is still used as a term to talk about smaller labels, just as it was originally, and it is no longer applied to guitar pop as it once was. It’s not a selling point nor a fashion anymore.
Ultimately, the stratification in itself is a good thing, indicating that there are many different agendas to game development, rather than the monoculture of American boardgame publishing. Even if the arguments do seem futile, they’re indicators of a healthy and fertile culture of games production.
(CC image by justinbaeder)
