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Last Friday, Penny Arcade Report posted an article that detailed the issues that indie dev Kurt Bieg had with the indie game community. It was pretty disheartening, especially since it clashed so vividly with my own experience. The indie community has been an enormously positive force in my life, and so, as before, I want to take a moment to defend it.
The latest in the misguided indie backlash
It’s not uncommon to feel some occasional frustration with the indie scene (see the annual rant session at GDC’s Indie Game Summit), but Kurt was unusually harsh in his condemnation. The article is full of quotes that paint the indie game community as an exclusive and disingenuous clique, motivated by an insular agenda, that despises the casual gamers who just play games for fun.
Kurt, in disgust, has decided to drop out of the indie community. This is a shame in itself. His game Circadia is exactly the sort of game I’d like to make someday, and he presented some interesting stuff in last year’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop. The indie community is poorer without his voice and perspective.
Several prominent indies responded to the article. I collected part of the Twitter conversation. Some of the responses were defensive or lashed out, which I imagine didn’t do much to help change minds.
We can talk about this
Kurt’s two primary complaints are that the indie community is incestuous and anti-casual:
“Now indies make games for other indies, or for awards, or for kickstarters. Every game is the next greatest game forever and ever and ever, and honestly, I find myself mostly disappointed and uninspired when I play them.”
“Then I remembered the many conversations I had with game devs who hated casual gamers, hated those who played the ‘ville games, hated people like my wife, even though only a few decades ago we were in pizza shops dumping quarters in machines while people scoffed at us telling us we we’re wasting our money.”
I’m not privy to the “many conversations” that Kurt cites, but I’ve never personally heard indies speak ill of casual gamers. I’ve heard them complain about the design practices of casual game companies (Zynga etc.), but that’s not the same thing. When someone criticizes a cigarette company, does that mean they hate smokers? (No.) There are plenty of well-regarded hardcore or niche games in the indie scene, but there are casual games there, too. I wish Kurt would stick around to help advocate for more.
As for the “incestuous” claim, Kurt has a point; indies do tend to speak well of indie games. But that’s not evidence of an exclusive cabal with selfish motives. Usually, the main reason is that indies share the same interests and are genuinely enthusiastic about the same things. (That’s why they formed a community, after all.) In other cases, they’re choosing to be more forgiving of risky, experimental, limited-budget work. And in some cases, it’s just difficult for friends to criticize each other’s work in public. (Liz Ryerson has made this point too.)
But that’s not a good excuse, and I agree that more indie-to-indie criticism would be helpful. If conducted respectfully, we could get a lot out of it. You’re allowed to have your own thoughts, and others are free to disagree with you. Personally, I think that the 8-bit aesthetic is overused, and that grindy unlock mechanics (as in, say, Ridiculous Fishing) are distasteful, though I struggle to articulate why. Maybe I’ll give it a shot soon, and I’ll hear the other side’s perspective, and we’ll all be better off for it.
So Kurt is not wholly wrong in his complaints. But he’s not wholly right, either, and his frustrations stem from problems that can be worked out. A blanket condemnation of the indie community really isn’t justified.
Don’t gloss over the good
When talking about problems in the indie community, it’s easy to forget the good that indies have done. I experienced a lot of that good firsthand.
When I was a student, just getting seriously into game design, it was the lectures by indies Jon Blow and Chris Hecker that first introduced me to the concept of exploitative game design, and ultimately led me to understand design as something more than just a craft. Along with early indie games like Audiosurf and flOw and Everyday Shooter, they were the ones that first made me think that I could build personal, ambitious, meaningful games.
When I was making my first commercial indie game, I was inspired directly by Eufloria. I posted my game’s beta on an indie game forum. By chance, the co-creator of Eufloria, Alex May, saw it and critiqued it. His insight helped me make a better game, but more importantly, the mere fact that he noticed and responded was hugely encouraging. Later, around the time I released the game, I needed business advice. Kellee Santiago and Eddy Boxerman each spoke to me for over an hour, giving personalized guidance based on their own experience. Later, when I moved to a new city, Andy Schatz took the time (during crunch!) to meet with me and help me find the local indie community.
I’m leaving out a lot of details, of supportive online conversations, meetings at conferences, talks and videos and podcasts and blogs and articles that guided and motivated me. But my point is this: these people were celebrities in my eyes, and owed me nothing, yet they treated me with respect and generosity from the beginning, even though I was just another aspiring game dev.
Then there are the games themselves. There are too many great ones to name, but the last five indie games I’ve played are Fez, Monaco, Year Walk, Cart Life, and Howling Dogs. If you compare them, you'll find incredible variety between them in terms of mechanics, setting, tone, et cetera, and yet they’re all personal and successful in their own ways. Each one has inspired me to make better games, nudging me towards greater ambition. Even the ones that I didn’t like have taught me something.
This is all from one person’s perspective, but I’ve received so much support from the indie community that I can’t accept the picture that Kurt painted. I can’t believe that the indie community is insular, or exclusive, or disingenuous, or full of hatred.
I don’t know what Kurt saw that pushed him away, but based on what I have seen, it’s not all bad. Come back.
- @E_McNeill
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The boundaries between being in the group and out of the group are fuzzy and are almost always a matter of opinion. Immense efforts are spent policing these boundaries. The eternally popular question of "What is an indie" can be seen from the perspective of gatekeeping and rephrased as "Who is part of our friendly, helpful group? And who is not?"
The very interactions you personally find so affirming can come across as judgmental and distancing.
Example 1:
Inside the group, the inevitable chanted "Zynga insult" slipped into an article becomes a coded token "This is an ehtical group norm that we all share, yes?" Boo and hiss on cue. It is rote signalling like wearing a team baseball cap or gang colors.
Outside the group, it also can deliver the payload "Don't make games for 40+ women. People, like that silly wife who pay for F2P or casual games are manipulated suckers." (Have you seen various indie comments on F2P games? It is easy to interpret them as aggressively close minded. I see them more often than not as holy-than-thou attempts at preserving perceived group values.)
Example 2:
Inside the group, you give kind kudos to friends who obviously deserve a break. We are all indies, we are all suffering. All groups emphasize victim hood independent of their degree of being victims. It is a tactic that strengthens internal support.
Outside the group, those same kudos can feel like preferential treatment that an outsider will never benefit from. Especially when they are delivered from a position of obvious power...by someone with a hit game, a large public network, or spotlight access at industry events. The outsider doesn't know the 'right' people, they don't use the appropriately coded language.
So you end up with these interesting responses to the outsider who impinges upon the group:
- You can reject them. Ignoring minorities often makes them go away.
- You can attack them and hope you diminish them enough that their thought crime doesn't infect or harm 'your' group. The twitter comments you link to qualify.
- You can try to convert them. I'd classify this essay as such an attempt. "Join us"
- You can join them yourself if you find their arguments compelling
- You can attempt to find common ground, often in the process creating a 3rd group.
All the best,
Danc.
I understand that you mean this to be taken as a dispassionate analysis of group psychology (right?), but I admit I'm feeling a lot of judgement. You offer the inside and outside views of two examples, but even the presumably-desirable "inside" views are negative, presented as hateful groupthink and overwrought victim-playing. You translate the disapproval of design techniques into disapproval of the players (a common, damaging, easy-to-make mistake that I hoped to refute in the original article). Not to mention the rhetoric of "policing boundaries", "thought crime", etc.
There do exist communities that are characterized by rigid, policed boundaries. There are also communities that are formed when people notice a natural cluster of like minds and draw a big, fuzzy line around them. The indie games community is very much the latter type. We have no membership cards, no gated clubs, not even an accepted definition. Individuals may disagree about who is indie and who is not, but it is impossible for someone to be evicted from the community. If you keep showing up to the conversation (here, on Twitter, on TIGsource, wherever), you're still part of it.
It is, however, possible for someone to decide to avoid the community of their own volition. That's what Kurt did, and since (I argue) the indie community is not as monolithic or bounded or hateful as he fears, it's a shame for him to put walls in place where none existed before. I'm not trying to convert him to the "indie" side; I'm trying to point out that "indie" still includes casual, self-critical, accepting voices. He doesn't need to change to be a part of the group.
My real worry, and the focus of my "backlash" posts, is that the indie community will have walls built around it from the outside, with people defining themselves in opposition to some imaginary set of flaws. People will start to deride and reject anything "indie" as too avant-garde or else too derivative, too elitist or else too lowbrow, too broadly-defined to mean anything or else too narrow and monolithic. "Indie" became cool, and now maybe we're on the other side of the hype curve. I just don't want to see the indie community wither, especially after I've seen the good that it can do.
I do think that attacking a business model is not the same as attacking those who are customers of it but, otherwise I think Daniel is right. People on the inside always feel attacked even by something as general as Daniel's comments because they perceive themselves as the hero of their own story.
Contrary to popular belief this criticism extends to literally EVERY community in the world. All of them. Some of them are better about paying attention to this and some are worse but none of them are very good at it. As famously brought up in discussions of facebook we can only handle a certain number of relationships. Many spots are taken by family, others by good friends, and others by coworkers. That leaves us limited social capacity for intentional communities or more general hobby groups.
And the connections in these communities rarely work out in an ideal way. In theory it would be great if Person 1 had 50 relationship slots open for other indies and was friends with persons 2-51. Then Person 2 was friends with 27-77. And out of 1000 indies the relationships were spread similarly where a given 2 people were likely to have no more than 50% of friends in common.
But in practice our feelings are much less even then this. Although Notch for instance is only friends with 100 people about 750 of 1000 count him as someone important to them. So they spend the time that could be spent on a reciprocal relationship on him because he is, in this example, so awesome that its worth a 1 way relationship. And there are a lot of people like that. Each individual may only have 10 of their 50 relationships spent on one ways, but thats 9000 of a possible 50000 or w/e number that are lost. A significant %.
So with only 1000 people we may have 100 left out in the cold using those arbitrary numbers. We could also consider tiers of indies where one layer has the top 10 guys, then 25 guys, then 50, then 65, then 100, then the 250 upper average guys then the 250 lower average guys then the bottom 250 that are left out. And really the top 10/25/50 guys take up so many relationship slots with 1 ways that those numbers are far too ideal compared to how it really is. But in any case scoring a 2 way relationship with just 1 of the top 120 people is worth a dozen relationships with lower level players in the community.
At least financially there are hundreds of people with ideas that are just as good as the ideas of people who DO get a celebrity/relationship bump and thus become popular.
And all this text ignores several other aspects like I am assuming that all these people are making "the right kind of games." It causes even more anger if you are excluded not by chance but by systematic devaluing of your style of game creation.
McNeill claims that the indie movement has no "membership" cards. Lacking explicit hoops to jump through does not make indie devs open to all. Implicit walls are just as powerful and often more insidious for their fuzziness compared to explicit ones.
McNeill uses typical deflection and straw man arguments to protect his community's image. The kinds of arguments used by people to argue against class or race privilege for instance. I highly doubt people think there is a concerted effort by some sort of cabal to "police" indyness. Rather its the instinctual unconscious group dynamics operating as they do in any community that are putting people off. Its not a unified monolithic effort to exclude that is the problem. Its the low level interaction with individuals to consciously or not exude ideas in lockstop about what is and isn't and who is and isn't indie. When 20 people individually, perceiving this as an act of their own unique volition, make a statement to you that is consistent across all 20 random people, its reasonably and correct to conclude that the group believes and possibly unintentionally enforces this feeling.
Communities are inherently exclusionary because humans cannot, and should not, operate in enormous groups. The most dangerous assumptions people make based on labels are the positive ones, as we can see with the army and the church and the boyscouts in the news recently.
The fact of the matter is that indie isn't open to and inclusive of everyone because it can't be.
Hateful groupthink? No. Standard groupthink. Groups are defined by their shared and generally unfounded beliefs about how things should be and what constitutes good.
People give jobs to their friends. Or tips, or interviews, or recommendations. Doesn't matter what the exact gift is. People give gifts to GET friends. And the friend gives back to keep getting those gifts. Every time you "help each other out" you are sending a message.
E McNeill feels judged by Daniel Cook for this reason:
He judges other people for the same behavior. When someone else does it its favoritism and exclusion but when he does it its good and proper.
This isn't exclusive to him. That is the same behavior exhibited by every community in history. What we do is right, what the other does is wrong.
The indie community isn't good or magical or more helpful than any other community. WoW fans are not any better or worse than Guild Wars fans. They are exactly the same except for the cause of their accretion.
E McNeill perceives his group to be better and more helpful than other groups and Kurt Bieg perceives it as worse and more insular. Its neither. Its average. Of no particular specialness. Inconsequential in the scheme of the country or world if you prefer to be non-American focused.
Wall of text crits for 999999999999 damage.
But they are bad when they become a part of "identity" because they inherently mean they have to make an "us" vs "the others" distinction. Proclaiming I'm "an indie" always leads to issues of whether you actually belong or not. This isn't even really useful in my experience to make these distinctions. So let's all stop using it as a form of identification.
Treat people as individuals and games as individual products/experiences to critique and support. We'll all be better off for it.
Kurt's piece has no value and should not have been posted, but this is the press and drama brings in readers. This isn't worth discussing.
That's like leaving the Atlantic Ocean for the Indian Ocean. (prevalence of pirates in one over the other notwithstanding)
Bieg admits his wife played a game that really wasn't for her, and felt.... disgusted about it?
I do not play shooting games, they are not my cup of tea... I am not disgusted by them, they just does not appeal to me.
I have other games that I play and Enjoy, those are games that are made for me.
Indies are all about making games that major software houses do not. It shouldn't surprise that casual gaming is a bit lacking since it has so much space in the mainstream industry today.