beyond "indie": a reprise

some two and a half years ago, Anna Anthropy wrote a post (and gave a micro-talk at GDC) titled "beyond indie". in it, she says:

"the indie label doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion except a needless sense of distance: calling a game an indie game or an author an indie developer just enforces the illusion that it’s an exclusive club, an inner circle to which most people aren’t admitted.

so my challenge to all of us is to stop thinking and talking in terms of indie games and indie developers, to get beyond the idea of an indie scene, to center the discussion on GAMES made by PEOPLE because there are going to be a whole lot more people making a whole lot more games and the indie label has become a moiety — a distinction we don’t need to make in an era where there’s no distinction between who can make videogames and who can’t."

there's still a lot of truth to Anna's words, but the usage of the term has also changed somewhat in the past couple years. the idea of "indie" implying a small handful of games made by an inner circle certainly very much applies to larger cultural representations like Indie Game: The Movie, or how a lot of the community around the IGF or IndieCade functions, but the label itself has also gained traction outside of those venues as a marketing term. most major games press has designated "indie" coverage now, and several "indie" games have gone on to be very successful in venues like Steam or The Humble Store. it's also the standard line parroted in the games press about next-gen consoles that Sony is "working with indies" in order to inject lifeblood into their current products, the PS4 and the Vita.

while the "indie" moniker has often been the subject of a lot of mockery (one example being the "Optimistic Indie" meme from 2011), it only seems to have gained greatly in usage and popularity since then. "indie games" now basically encompass anything and everything that isn't games made as part of the AAA development cycle. the popularity of things like Minecraft or Indie Game: The Movie means it's a moniker newer game developers readily desire to identify with because they want to be part of some scrappy cultural vanguard, either commercially or artistically (or both). but this also means that "indie" has become most readily identified with commercially successful developers working outside the AAA system, rather than the massive swath of interesting new games that have also been labeled "indie" but are seen as only as curiosities or failed experiments when evaluated on the terms of success dictated by the most culturally visible ones.

so while "indie" is still a derogatory term for a lot of self-identified "gamers" (search for "shitty indie game" on any major gaming website forum if you don't believe me), it's still very much growing as an established part of the industry. as if adding a nail in the coffin, a Sony spokesperson just this past week declared that "the Indie revolution is over" because Sony is now beginning to do what it needs to to adjust its old business models in order to more readily encompass indies as a viable part of the industry. Sony, of course, wouldn't have done this if they didn't see the writing on the wall. the industry has seen the success of "indie", in the midst of its own creative and financial stagnation, and is now readily attempting to co-opt it and pull it back into itself so that it can keep its machinery running.

but if the "indie revolution is over", what has been its lasting impact? has it been merely a way to inject lifeblood back into the industry by making smaller games more commercially viable, as Sony is trying to frame it? what about the legacy of the kinds of games that often appear on places like freeindiegam.es or forest ambassador? will they fall even further under the radar and have even less visibility once the industry fully co-opts "indie"?

i don't really know the answer to these questions. there at least seems to be more movement towards pushing beyond the idea of "indie" lately: there's Different Games, a conference run at NYU, that focuses on recognizing what we might think of as "unconventional" games, both digital and non-digital. as a name, i'm fond of "different games", if only as a meaningful but unspecific way to distinguish them from what normally gets labeled as a game, but it's lack of specificity means it's not particularly useful to be adapted as a widespread term. there's also the label "queer games", which was adapted to mean many different things by many of the speakers i saw at QGCon in Berkeley this past month. but "queer" obviously comes with a lot of baggage and implications as well. whatever the case, "indie" has proven itself to be an increasingly oppressive label that needs to be dropped.

the videogame industry is financially unstable and filled with deplorable labor practices and highly retrogressive values. becoming subsumed into the industry doesn't seem wise for either ideological or long-term financial reasons. i suggest we rescue what's worthwhile and get the hell out before the ship crashes and establish ourselves somewhere else. there are vast territories of the human experience that games can speak to, but these are rapidly narrowing with the widespread adaption of "indie" and all the implications that come with it. if we're at all concerned about the longevity of any of things done by game developers outside of the AAA system in the past five or so years, i believe we must drop any and all remaining identification with the label "indie" as soon as possible.

games criticism: a reader (with introduction)

a couple weeks back, journalist Helen Lewis asked in her blog for the UK publication the New Statesman why we're still so bad at talking about videogames. in that article she talked about the failure of the so-called "new games journalism" to substantially improve the larger discourse surrounding games. i agree with suspicion of the NGJ and her notion that most of the discourse surrounding games is still extremely inadequate, but our agreements end there. i saw her characterization of particular games to be a bit clueless (particularly when she said that the only real critique of a "narrator" character in FPS games is in Bioshock) and her criticism completely centered on current AAA games and commentary on them in the "major outlets" for games journalism, as if valuable and meaningful discussion couldn't possibly be happening anywhere else, or about any other games. it irked me so much that i finally decided to email her. this is what i said:

i feel very strongly that (as i said on twitter) there is a revolution in game criticism starting to happen, but it's happening outside of the major media sphere. at least in my case, if you're a new writer who wants to engage others with some kind of honest, serious criticism of videogames, you're probably not gonna look to try and get it published in the same major outlets that you view as part of the problem in the first place. it's the case now, at least more than it was before, that you can still get a fair number of views (though definitely not in the same numbers) through a personal blog - and you don't have to worry about the format and how you fit into larger aims of whatever outlet you're supposed to be representing. and i think doritogate has shown just how much PR has a poisonous, controlling, deeply ingrained effect on much of the discourse that happens around videogames. any and all meaningful discussion is mostly channeled through talking about whatever the current 50-hour triple A game is, which keeps the buzz alive for these companies to sell them. even if a lot of games writers in that sphere don't think they're buying into that, it really feels like they're required to buy into it to even have a voice within that sphere.

and i'm sorry to say, but while i agree with much of your article, i think it also showed that you don't have much of an awareness is going on outside that sphere. which i completely understand! it's very hard to get anywhere near exposure and audience i would like just by writing in a blog and praying for some people with lots of twitter followers to retweet my articles. but i think it's of dire importance for these different spheres of game criticism to be much, much more closely engaged with each other, instead either not knowing or not acknowledging that one another exist. if we want a serious dialogue to happen, it has to come from all fronts, not just the ones we're used to seeing things from before. it is really frustrating, to me, to not feel like i'm being acknowledged as part of the conversation, and not feeling like what i'm saying is penetrating beyond a very small sphere because i'm writing on my own blog. i know why this is, but i'm not sure what i can do to start to change that, short of emailing a bunch of journalists like you and trying to get involved in a conversation.

i really, really want the conversation to change. there has to be something newsworthy beyond the discussion of current triple-A games with maybe the occasional indie title thrown in. we need brutal honesty more than ever, and i have serious doubts whether the position that the PR machines have put much of games writing in can really allow for that at all.

she then (very graciously) asked me if i wanted to make a reading list of good game criticism as a kind of rebuttal to post on her blog, so i did. here's the article, with a little introduction from that email:

i'm going to break the list up into individual sections that'll hopefully be more clear than a massive link-dump. this is not meant to be a completely comprehensive list of valuable writings about videogames, only a collection of interesting trends and themes i've come across in recent writing. take from it what you will, and i'm open to suggestions.

http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2012/12/videogames-critical-reader-liz-ryerson

the idea is to try to find different themes in current criticism so we can see the connections and the interactions between people and media that may seem otherwise completely disconnected. if nothing else, hopefully this will serve as a useful starting point for people who are not insiders but want to understand the different kinds of debates that are starting to emerge in this sphere. of course, this is all filtered through the warped perceptions of one missus elizabeth ryerson...

I did the soundtrack for Anna Anthropy's new game Dys4ia, which you can play here:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/591565

I've also uploaded the soundtrack here, for anyone interested:

http://ellaguro.bandcamp.com/

More on the game later!