Independent Videogames

Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics

Paolo Ruffino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367336202
• eBook ISBN: 9781000201154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Product Design

Independent Videogames investigates the social and cultural implications of contemporary forms of independent video game development. Through a series of case studies and theoretical investigations, it evaluates the significance of such a multi-faceted phenomenon within video game and digital cultures.

A diverse team of scholars highlight the specificities of independence within the industry and the culture of digital gaming through case studies and theoretical questions. The chapters focus on labor, gender, distribution models and technologies of production to map the current state of research on independent game development. The authors also identify how the boundaries of independence are becoming opaque in the contemporary game industry – often at the cost of the claims of autonomy, freedom and emancipation that underlie the indie scene. The book ultimately imagines new and better narratives for a less exploitative and more inclusive videogame industry.

Systematically mapping the current directions of a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly difficult to define and limit, this book will be a crucial resource for scholars and students of game studies, media history, media industries and independent gaming.

1 After independence

Paolo Ruffino

Studying independent videogames

What are independent videogames? A brief history of an unresolved question

This book collects research produced around independent videogames and their makers. The authors of this volume have been investigating how independence has framed discourses surrounding videogame production in North and Central America, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia over a period of more than a decade. The duration and geographical extension of this research are significant. It is symptomatic of the pervasiveness of the notion of independence in videogame culture. As this book will attempt to demonstrate, independence can be identified across a broad range of practices and contexts, and in very distant geographical areas, such that it can no longer be ignored when trying to understand how games are made and played. This collection argues that at the root of the notion of independence there is a struggle to find alternative modalities to make, play, and distribute videogames, and that these modalities are now part and parcel of the global game industry. At the same time, it also shows that studying the videogame industry and culture requires an understanding of other contexts of creative production, such as cinema, music, and fashion, where the notion of independence has been used and debated for much longer. Yet this does not imply that independence can be easily understood, or that it has the same meanings across such a broad spectrum of human activities. Independence is a common thread across (game-)making practices in different areas of the globe, but it also generates productive contradictions at a local level.

In 2012, Bart Simon from Concordia University edited an issue on independent games in Loading… The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association. Published on January 1, 2013, the issue exemplifies the initial curiosity on the part of the research community. Prior to the issue’s publication, it seemed relatively easy to identify in the discourses produced by players and developers a general idea of what made a videogame “independent”. However, on closer inspection, a more precise and unequivocal definition appeared much more difficult to determine. The general understanding was that independent videogames were made by individuals or small companies, with limited budgets, and distributed privately or via online platforms bypassing traditional publishers. But it was difficult to determine whether these new modalities of production could be defined as being more or less independent of those relations of power that characterized previous forms of game development, and whether they offered a real form of creative and financial emancipation. Moreover, the independent scene had distinctive aesthetic traits, which defined it in terms of audiences, but which were not necessarily related to the claims of economic and technical independence from the systems of production and distribution of the mainstream industry. It soon became clear that seeking a fixed definition of independence was a pointless task, as it changed across the various actors involved and their temporary and fluctuating interpretations of their own work. Garda and Grabarczyk (2016) made this problem more prominent when they argued that there is a difference between being independent in terms of creativity, distribution, or financing methods, and that, in each case, these three areas do not necessarily overlap or co-exist. Their analysis calls into question the various degrees, types, and modalities of independence that co-exist within game culture. As Simon asked in the introduction to the issue of Loading…: “Are we talking about a social movement, an art movement, a cultural scene, a fad, an ethics, a value orientation, a social identity, an assertion of authority, a cultural politics, an accident, a new form of capitalism…?” (2013, 1).

In 2002, 10 years before the publication of the journal issue, Eric Zimmermann was already writing about the apparently irresolvable problem of defining independence by articulating a series of opposing arguments. Published in the catalog of the exhibition Game On, his piece posed the existential question: ‘do independent games exist?’ (Zimmermann, 2002). The answers were set out against a list of cultural, economic, and technological factors, which demonstrated how contradictory trends were framing the new contexts of game-making, with no ultimate resolution across such a spectrum. Independence appeared as being defined through an intractable tension between opposing trends. A similar belief can be grasped from the words of game developer Molleindustria, who interpreted independence as a “degree of compromise with the capital” (Molleindustria, 2012). In his view, rather than being a defined status, independence is negotiated with and through various cultural, aesthetic, technological, and economic factors. Temporary positions of independence can be obtained when making decisions regarding how videogames are made and how they are published, according to Molleindustria. It matters for whom, and with whom, developers make videogames, and how they consider their inevitable relations of “dependence” as an opening toward new spaces of creative and economic autonomy.

Yet independence cannot be disentangled from its historical and geographical specificity. Questions over its meaning and potential cannot ignore the fact that the concept has emerged in videogame culture at a specific time and place. The argument that self-funded and self-distributed productions, relatively independent of a publisher, existed before in the history of the medium reinforces the importance of understanding why certain modalities of labor only came to be known as “independent” in the early 2000s. In light of a saturated market and the difficulty in effectively defining independence, by 2014, articles on gaming websites were already claiming that “indie is over”, and that the movement had lost its momentum. The online distribution platforms were overcrowded with titles made by developers who aspired to work on their own games and make a career as independents, in what came to be known as the “indiepocalypse” (see the chapter by Nadav Lipkin in this collection). Many people thought that the promises of creative and financial independence had already gone, leaving a hyper-competitive market saturated with low-budget titles. The problem that was emerging at the time is still clearly visible in 2020.

Bennett Foddy, in a talk at IndieCade East 2014, argued that such an understanding was based on a false historical perception of the medium that had brought many North-American developers and commentators to identify low-budget productions and the absence of a publisher as entirely new phenomena. Similar productions, as Foddy argues, existed before the “indie” tag became popular. In parts of the world such as the UK and Europe, the videogame industry in the 1980s and 1990s was characterized by small studios and titles produced independently of a publisher, and by the wide distribution of programmable home computers, which encouraged game-makers and hobbyists. Similarly, the early years of the medium consist of experimental work largely produced outside of an identifiable industrial complex. “In the beginning”, Foddy argues, “everything looked like an indie game” (IndieCade, 2014a). Independence was the name given to an approach to game production that was not entirely new, but re-branded as new at that particular time and in the particular context of North-American game development.

Anna Anthropy developed a similar line of argument at another talk at IndieCade 2014 (IndieCade, 2014b). The queer and trans game design scene existed long before the indie tag became popular, and it provided a context for all those who felt marginalized by the industry. Before the indie movement became popularized, games were already being made by “freaks, normal, amateurs, artists, dreamers, drop-outs, queers, housewives, and people like you” (Anthropy, 2012). Software such as Twine provided a free and accessible tool for many game-makers who desired to produce biographical and intimate accounts of their life experiences (see the chapter by Bonnie Ruberg in this collection). “Trans women invented indie games”, Anthropy declared provocatively at IndieCade, showing how less visible communities of developers proliferated prior to the 2000s, offering welcoming contexts of mutual assistance. Furthermore, Heikki Tyni and Olli Sotamaa also noted how the LAN and demo party scene subculture in Finland in the early 1990s has framed and shaped the local game industry (Tyni and Sotamaa, 2014). Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux also argue that non-Western cultures of modding and hacking, popular in China and Japan, and the many construction kits and level editors produced in the 1980s and 1990s are regularly ignored when historicizing independent videogames. They conclude that “ironically, the emergence of the term indie game as a label and genre in the late 2000s signals the moment independent game development became dependent” (Boluk and Lemieux, 2017, 34).

However, while a broader perspective on the different ways in which videogames have been made and played can certainly reveal something new around the geographical and historical specificity of independent game development, it still does not tell us why the notion of “independence” within videogame culture came about in a specific time and place. As Laine Nooney argues, responding directly to Foddy’s intervention, there is no “true” history of indie development. Many early forms of experimentation that might resemble contemporary indie games did not have, in their own time, any major industrial complex to be independent from. Moreover, the indie label has been used in the past to distinguish hardware or software producers from others and to claim a degree of artistic merit, in ways that are not immediately comparable to the values and meanings associated with the same word at the beginning of the 21st century. In other words, a historical analysis cannot overlook the contemporary fascination with being “indie” that brings together game developers to festival and workshops, that creates forms of aggregation and the sharing of knowledge via social media, that encourages many to experiment with game development and take creative risks, and that equally generates promises, anxieties, and new forms of social exclusion. As Nooney concludes:

“Indie” is a referent for a curious balancing act between art and business, commerce and creativity, one made possible by very specific technological affordances, the economic operations of late capitalism, varied aesthetic imperatives about the contours of “personal expression,” a kind of neoliberal hucksterism around the power of individual creativity, and the endlessly scalable conditions which drive our creative desires.

(Nooney, 2014)

When trying to understand the meaning of independence and its historical specificity, we should identify the various discursive performances and practices that are organized around this notion in all their complexity and contradiction. The academic research around independent videogames, to which this book is dedicated, has been trying to provide a structure for such an investigation.

While presenting a panel on independent games at the DiGRA 2013 conference, Felan Parker argued that, to say it with Bruno Latour, academic researchers should “follow the actors” who mobilize the concept of independence in their discourses and practices (Latour 2005, 12; Parker, 2013). Parker claims that early studies on the history of independence had already revealed a much more complex reality where the definition of independent, mainstream, “formal” or triple-A varies depending on where and when the text was written. Martin and Deuze (2009), for instance, have observed that the appeal to authenticity and self-expression in the videogame industry emerges predominantly (but certainly not for the first time) around the early 2000s, when similar tendencies were visible in the marketing and promotion of digital and creative products. The newness of independence must also be understood, according to the authors, alongside the desire to market these new products as such.

Following Parker’s suggestion, the chapters in this book are organized around specific analytical contexts. In so doing, the collection creates a strategic mapping of the notion of independence, exploring how historically and geographically situated actors are currently defining the new meanings associated with the concept. Such a perspective, which gives the same importance to both global and local dynamics, echoes the analysis of Aphra Kerr in her book Global Games: Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked Era. Kerr argues that understanding local contexts and interactions is the only viable strategy for comprehending the trans-national networks of production, consumption, and distribution of the videogame industry (Kerr 2017, 201). In a similar vein, the Creative Territories research project, which looked at hubs of game development in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands, concludes that “video game makers […] live in interconnected, overlapping, local, regional, national and global ‘places’” (Creative Territories 2015, 4). This collection takes as its point of departure the realization that the temporary and strategic definitions of independence given in specific geographical contexts are fundamental to understanding the global contemporary videogame industry.

While trying to compare this editorial project with previous publications and interventions in the same area, we should also acknowledge that independent videogames in 2020 are an even more intricate topic of research. At the time when Parker was writing, independence appeared as a series of contradictory tendencies, as Zimmermann had already noticed in 2002, but it was still identifiable in the discourses produced by game developers, in the marketing of new products, and in the distribution strategies of new platforms. As Jennifer Whitson has pointed out, in the early 2010s game developers started to find “escape routes” from consoles and move toward mobile and social platforms (Whitson, 2013). This process has broadened the contexts in which independents can work and distribute their games, incentivizing the involvement of game-makers in multiple projects and platforms. For us, writing in 2020, the knots of independence are even more difficult to disentangle. They have become blurred, almost transparent, in the broader discourses around game production. As recent publications and industry reports have revealed, the practices that came to be defined around this notion are now the standard condition for those who are involved in videogame production. No longer an exceptional or alternative choice, independence, in all its myriad meanings, is now considered the most common type of employment in the videogame industry, or at least a required stage in the career of a game worker. “Following the actors” might be even more difficult in this scen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1 After independence
• Part I Cultures
• Part II Networks
• Part III Techniques
• Part IV Politics
• Part V Local indie game studies
• Index