What Is Indie?

To return to Matt’s point, I certainly wouldn’t count Lucidity as “indie”, but given LucasArts’ recent reshuffling, the team behind it may have been smaller and may have had a tighter budget, in which case, would Gray agree? I probably should have asked him myself, but a lack of foresight doesn’t mean I’ll start putting words in his mouth. His perspective on indie (I was going to write “the genre”, but managed to stop myself, as that’s another big question in itself) is doubtless interesting, and he continues with a funny, if valid, observation:

“It’s about an intensely personal experience – something where you can feel the tastes and personalities of the game’s developers. Sometimes these personalities are meditative and philosophical like a wizened grandfather, some times they’re kitschy and unapologetically bizarre like an aunt who only owns pink furniture coated in cat hair, and sometimes they’re drunken, violent, and manic-depressive like that girl you dated for a month in junior high.”

I’ll invoke Hatsworth again to illustrate this point, but that pretty much speaks for itself. In my few months working as the indie games section editor at Resolution, I’ve had to follow the scene a lot more closely and go digging for interesting things to write about. Every single experience, from Where?, to Edmund, to Pirates, Vikings and Knights II has been just what Kyle described. Typically, in big commercial games, the most you’ll be able to see is the collective attitude of the developer – Naughty Dog, for instance, has a kind of cheeky trademark, from Crash Bandicoot via Jak all the way to Uncharted. It’s not personal, though. What they produce will struggle to be as distinctive as something like Ace Team’s Zeno Clash or Tale of Tales’ The Path just by the nature of the game’s development. Gray emphasises his point: “It’s about a concentrated (and typically different) experience. It’s about trying to stand out without the financial or marketing means to do so. As a result, the games that do make it are markedly different than “mainstream” titles – be it through the game’s visual style, personality, or gameplay.”

“Another important part of being Indie is not being a slave to technology any more.” Lemmy and Binky are very right indeed. The resurgence of 2D could be largely attributed to indie games. “If you want to make a relatively low tech 2D game and sell it, it’s feasible to do that, and you could still have a successful game (by indie standards) with a bit of creativity and talent. In commercial games they are so bound by player expectations of 3D graphics, physics and everything else that the sheer work and cost involved providing these ‘required’ aspects of the game mean that no risks are made, and everything becomes by the numbers and kind of the same as everything else.”

//A risky business
The ironic thing is that the bigger the investment in a game, the less risks it’s likely to take. Microsoft can pour millions into developing and promoting their star franchises, but how much has combat really evolved since the very first Halo way back in 2001? Luckily, indie is there to be many things to many people. There are plenty of fun, goofy time wasters out there alongside more serious titles, retro de-makes, mods and fan developed entries into favourite series’. All of them are ambitious in their own way, and only a fraction are about space marines and their oh-so-brown surroundings.

Lemmy and Binky elaborate on how different it is from a developer’s standpoint. “One of the major differences between working indie and working commercially is you don’t get task sheets plopped onto your desks and called in for meetings about progress every couple of days. This is both a blessing and a curse since it means you have to motivate yourself to work when there’s Left 4 Dead to play, and a pub just outside. We find it best to stick to fairly regular 9am to 6pm-ish working hours and treat it just like any other job, but with the benefit of being able to nip off for a crafty pint if the creativity juices aren’t flowing. And working from home means no more long commutes into work, so the whole day, both the work day and the evening, end up feeling much longer.”

Well, you can’t argue with that.

“Indie” seems to cover an incredibly wide spectrum of content in video gaming. It’s so wide, in fact, that it’s practically a medium itself, able to knock out stuff that wallows in age-old industry tropes alongside forward-thinking and ground breaking masterworks. It’s an environment for ideas in which they can be realised very quickly indeed, tested and put out there for our consumption even if they’re not quite what the developer was trying to make. Inevitably, there’s a lot of rubbish as well, most indies would probably admit that some of their own work was lackluster, but oftentimes it was because a project was simply far too ambitious or a genius idea didn’t quite pan out.

We’ve discussed differing viewpoints on how to define indie, but I think I’ve saved the best until last. Justin Leingang, who I’ve showered with praise several times before and will continue to do so until everyone has tried Glum Buster, gave the most succinct and resonant answer. No offence to the others, of course – each response has been great in its own way and I’d like to thank my contributors for their complicity and thoroughly interesting thoughts – but Justin’s in particular felt so astoundingly right.

“Indie is creating something with purpose to provide the perceiver with some new, positive learning experience – whatever the magnitude, profundity, or significance.”

Profound indeed.

Thanks again to Kyle, Matt, Justin, Lemmy and Binky for their time and contributions to this article and, in turn, making it worth reading.

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