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Opinion: In Defense Of That Recent Anti-Indie Column
by Jenn Frank [PC, Console/PC]
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February 10, 2010
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[In this spirited opinion piece, Jenn Frank, currently guest editor at sister site GameSetWatch, takes a look at the latest web snafu in the discussion of independent and alternative video games, concentrating -- interestingly enough -- on the response as much as the statement.]
I really like Jim Sterling's recent Destructoid column -- not necessarily because of any of the points it makes, mind, but more because of the ensuing, often aggressive responses from other gamers, developers, and reviewers.
There's a writers' resource called the 39 steps that I also like. Actually, it's just a list of helpful hints for good fiction writing, but it's a really, really good list. And a lot of its little kernels of advice, I think, can be applied to game design philosophies, too.
For instance, I've always really liked #23:
"Obscurity is not subtlety; intentional obscurity is pinheaded and unkind."
I do feel that way about games sometimes. I think you can be subtle without being deliberately mean to your player, or willfully alienating him. I think assigning ponderous meanings to mundane in-game actions is kind of a lazy way to work Big Existential Truths into your story. I think some games are disingenuous facsimiles of other, better games. I like 'indie gaming' on the whole, because I like creative underdogs, and because the games themselves tend to be shorter and easier to pencil into my calendar. Still, I've played some pretty terrible ones. Similarly, I don't think all puzzle games are great, even though I really like puzzle games.
So I'm pretty noncommittal. I think these opinions -- which are by no means the opinions of GameSetWatch, thank you -- are pretty low-key and moderate and not especially meaningful or groundbreaking or much of anything.
Now that I've fully shown my hand, let's gossip. I sure love gossip.
Currently, my Twitter feed is full of games journalists and artists whose dietary habits and foursquare updates I like to track. And today a lot of them were very apparently furious about something. Since bluster and ire tend to make me giggle (as long as those things are not actually directed at me), I did some backtracking and eavesdropping.
That is how I found all these little 140-character feuds and sparring matches with Destructoid writer Jim Sterling. I had trouble making real sense of those conversations, so I scouted out Sterling's February 7 Destructoid column, "Indie games don't have to act like indie games," which, OK, the title actually kind of made me grin in spite of myself, maybe because it made me think of this gem. (Also, when I first wrote this paragraph, I had not yet seen this.)
But now that I've read his piece, I'm a little confused about the commotion.
Jim Sterling's arguments themselves are inoffensive and moderate, but they're presented in a deliberately bombastic, even confusingly inflammatory way. But with all the brimstone stripped away, he basically says games can be artful and still fun to play, if they'd only try to be more fun and, sometimes, more playable. He says some games are hipster indie imitations, filching elements from genuinely good games, passing superficial, intentional obscurity off as real depth. And finally, he seems to think that some games get away with being bad because no reviewer will just come out and say they're bad, or why.
In fact, the brunt of Sterling's put-on umbrage seems to be with last year's game The Path. And probably his umbrage is fair, because not every player adored it, exactly.
In his review of that game, indie game critic Michael Rose takes great pains to explain that The Path is absolutely not a game, even as he goes on to repeatedly refer to it as a game (and "as a game," he says, "it's pretty boring"). Still later, Rose decrees that the 2009 un-game is "this year's weirdest game."
So even for the skilled reviewer, the critique itself involves some problematic conflation, and by review's end, Rose ultimately sighs that he isn't sure whether to recommend The Path at all.
Rose also writes,
"Unlike other recent attempts at arty gaming (see Flower), [developers] Tale of Tales have not drawn that line between and art and gaming well enough."
Apparently, though, neither can players: do we want to game, or do we want to be art patrons? Are we distressed when we're asked to do and be both at once? How fun should a game be? How fun should art be? Should art be painful to play? How, exactly, should we criticize painfully unfun non-game art?
But I am getting away from my real point, which isn't actually Jim Sterling's column at all, or my defense of it, or what I think about game design, or whether The Path is good or bad or fun or artful or even a real game.
The main point of interest, here, is all the responses Sterling's editorial has elicited. In Destructoid's own comments sections, there's quite a lot of "Finally! Tell off those pretentious indies!" There are also some better conceived comments that try to negotiate the 'game' and 'art' thing without conflation (though you'll find more meticulously careful conversation in here instead). There's some mudslinging, too, at mainstream games -- which, to hear it told by some, are apparently now bereft of artistic merit -- and at Jim himself, for being a blowhard.
I'd go so far to say that Sterling isn't really saying anything in particular, albeit in his trademark brassy way. So, as is always the way with the Internet, people hear what they would like to hear. And how people respond to the column says more about their own philosophies than it says about the column's.
So now, fascinatingly, you have all these mainstream game reviewers talking suddenly about how maybe mainstream games are creatively bankrupt, and they're championing the indie game scene and shaking their fists. And I like the noble, vocal intent there, but it's a little awkward to witness. Because Jim Sterling's final point -- that some games get away with being bad because no reviewer can bring himself to speak an ill word against them -- is basically proven all over again by the responses.
That's... kind of uncomfortable. Jim Sterling's epic troll ("indie games get away with being bad") has hoodwinked perfectly reasonable people into saying, essentially, that every indie game is great, which is just something of a literal impossibility. Oops.
Then, in the other corner, you have Jim Sterling's seemingly lone defender -- reputable, big-time game developer David Jaffe! -- who has taken the column's most salient points and run screaming in the opposite direction with them.
Jaffe even goes so far as to take "pretentious, full of shit 'journalists'" to task (and I do like the scare quotes around 'journalists'!) for "lauding and hyping these types of games."
Reading that, I reflexively wondered if this weren't some veiled insecurity, some sort of fearfulness about how the video game landscape -- how games are made, how they are bought and sold, or how we choose to talk about gaming -- is changing. But I think that would require Jaffe to take independently-made games seriously enough to be frightened of them, and I'm not entirely sure that he does.
Of these pretentious 'journalists,' Jaffe writes,
"Often times I think these writers go on and on about a lot of this arty farty stuff so it makes them feel like their own work is important (i.e. they are letting their readers in on something special and important versus simply writing about how many new weapons exist in modern shooter/alien invasion/football sim game #42)."
There might be some truth to that -- although, probably, my need to feel special and important is not all that keeps me from gushing about framerates and football sims -- but the real truth might be even more damning.
While good indie games are well worth championing, particularly for the benefit of those people who otherwise might not find them, perhaps game reviewers are reluctant to criticize badly made indie games because it feels too much like, say, crushing a house made of popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners.
The fact of the matter might be -- and this is very uncomfortable for me to type out -- a lot of reviewers don't take the indie 'genre' seriously enough to challenge or even criticize the bad games. It feels too cruel, too mean, in the same way it is cruel to kick a puppy or steal candy from a baby.
Maybe a lot of game reviewers really don't give indie games the professional and helpful criticism they really deserve, then, because they or we secretly deny indie games the status, the credibility, that we reserve for big-budget titles. Maybe, too, reviewers are prone to gush because those games consistently exceed their secretly low expectations.
Maybe.
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To that end, Jim Sterling's article was the equivalent of a big burly coming into a bar, tipping over a table to clear the floor and shouting "Who wants to fight!?!?"
And it was a good fight.
Gamasutra should do well to remember this. This isn't Heather Chaplin passionately decrying the lack of maturity in games by calling developers "stunted adolescents". This is an angry, frothing internet loudmouth - no different from any other angry, frothing internet loudmouth - who just happens to have carved himself a soapbox out of the bodies of game journalists who actually work hard and take their craft seriously.
Have a look at how often he uses the word "pretentious" in this article. It's almost parodic. There's no effort put forth to explain what is wrong with indie games, or what he'd change apart from "make them less indie" and less pretentious.
Let's break his argument down some. He has big problems with Tales of Tales. They're clearly the most pretentious of the bunch. Now let's look at the game The Path. It's called "The Path". The first onscreen prompt you get is, "Follow the path." When you do follow the path, the player gets a fail state. The game is about.... well you can fill in the blanks from here. If the average gamer is confused by a message as blindingly obvious as that, then as an art form we're in a lot of trouble. That's a Disney movie message.
His assertion that indie games should be more "fun" to play is kind of absurd. What about an art game placed in Auschwitz? Should that be fun to play?
This kind of silliness is present in every popular art form, but it's becoming frighteningly commonplace in modern pop-culture. Anti-intellectualism is worn as a badge of honor and any attempt to engage a topic that that doesn't involve copious amounts of blood letting is dismissed as if it were a conspiracy theorist in a tinfoil hat. When you extend that kind of thinking into video games it starts to get almost comical. For instance, how many articles have you read calling Heavy Rain pretentious? How is that even possible? It's a murder mystery. Last time I checked, that's genre fiction.
I think the game industry makes it very hard for anyone to really make decent games, because of how they have to use the tools the cost of them etc. I'm almost certain there's an easier way for anyone (and I mean anyone) to make good games. And to drive the knife in further, I've used them. But the industry simply won't accept that as proper per se. Probably because they know it would take from their pockets.
But anyways... Yeah, I look at indie games, but most of them are just down right archaic to me, it almost doesn't makes sense how much praise certain one's get, probably because they're indie and they want to pat them on the back or something.
That doesn't mean there aren't bad indie games or bad art games. When it comes to going easy on art games well, I see it less in terms of supporting the particular game and more supporting the push toward artistic games. Making a game that isn't a first person shooter, or a third person open world action game is, I would argue, considerably more difficult. We know what a good open world game looks like. We know what good FPSs look like. We have no idea what art games really look like. Experimentation not only in content but in mechanics is a fundamental process to creating an art game, and that's something most large publishers aren't willing to do. That said, we still want art games and the only ones consistently taking that desire seriously are the indie communities.
It's kind of like research in science. Your work may not be the big breakthrough, it may even fail. But you're still providing data. Even if that data is only what not to do.
I believe we should stop calling a game's style 'Indie' all together, and just use adjectives that actually have a clear-cut definition. Unique. Poetic. Cheapie-weapie...er I mean...low-budget.
And thanks for the Mega64 link. That made my lunchbreak.
What is not acceptable, however, is expressing praise over something that deeply moved and confused you more than anything you've ever experienced. No, if you say something like that, you're obviously a lying snob.
Take The Path: "It is bullshit. Pretentious, contradictory and unbearably dull..." Seems he just didn't get it. I think most people would agree that The Path is pretty and simple, both rather unpretentious qualities. By the end of it, its point is quite clear. There's no pretense there. I don't see any contradiction outside of the purposeful contradiction in the directions that is clearly a critical component of the art piece. While I wouldn't call it a ground breaking piece, it certainly is original enough to withstand being called "unbearably dull." Given contemporary pieces in the genre, I would say The Path is a fair example of an art/indie game - far from his "bullshit."
How can anyone take him seriously when he misses the mark so far on his prime example? Had he taken an honest approach to his criticism, I think he would have had a much greater impact on the criticism of art/indie games. Many people would agree that The Marriage is visually and semantically uninteresting, for instance. Perhaps even a poor example of an art/indie game, but few serious people would bother considering his criticism at that point in the article.
Finally, his argument that art/indie games are required to be fun is so ludicrous that I'll forgo commenting in fear of boring any readers.
in my mind, indie-games are more like games for game developers, not made for mass consumption. Its like showing someone a new way to put paint to canvas, an artist will be interested, a layman will be bored/ think you are stuck up your own ass.
in the graveyard, questions are asked about loss/victory conditions, protagonists, and in-game goals. most gamers couldn't care less about the answerers to those questions. to a developer though, it says things like, "you don't have to have a young male be the protagonist," and "why not have the player pay for additional outcomes in games?".
for a video-game critic to come in and bash indie-games as being stuck up their own ass is... well true for the audience s/he represents. however for developers, these types of games should be promoted. They are short, concise and ask questions. a developer could probably play a whole ton of indie games (like 3-7) in the time it might take them to play a single published-game, but they could walk away gaining more ideas to further the development of published-games, taking interesting indie concepts and putting them in a more available and accessible manner.
*and bear with me if I'm messing up my art terms, I don't read into art that much.
Jim's writing is inflammatory and often obscene, but his points and his opinions (and ability to troll a crowd) reveal that the man is quite intelligent. The Path "is" contradictory in that by following it's instruction you lose, it's pretentious in that it aspires to carry some meaning, and yet delivers it badly, and is dull in that it's mechanically uninspired. If I were an art critic I might debate for ours about the relative virtues of the path, but as a gamer, his points don't miss their mark.
Neither does he mention that "all" indy games are pretentious, nor that there is something wrong with them being so.. The entire purpose of the article is to challenge common conception of what it means to design an "indy" game (aka not all of them need to be artworks), and to challenge the writers that incoherently praise these games. Yet most people trying to argue him down are focusing on those two points he's not actually putting forth.
One of the commentators raises a good point, in that when you're playing a bad game, if it's art it's all right, despite the fact you are still playing a shitty game. This isn't a good attitude to have, if the game isn't good (an entirely subjective concept based entirely on the level of interest and enjoyment you maintain across an average play group, and their ability to grasp the concepts within their first play through and no form of guidance barring that which exists in game), then it should be criticised for being bad.
The marriage for instance, is as bad as abstract art can be in it's worst instances. It doesn't evoke anything in it's player except mindless boredom because it's mechanics and visual style don't convey any message UNTIL the concept has been elaborated on by the developer. Once this is done people can go around toting the fact that the marriage is a perfect representation of married life, except that you can't reach that conclusion BY PLAYING the game.
So yes art games are fine, but they need to be reviewed as both games AND art, or they aren't "art games".
Please elaborate.
into the curriculum where I teach, I wanted to add my 2 cents worth...
I think what the author of the Destructoid column is really "upset" about
is bad games. Regardless of metaphoric intent, a game that doesn't
engage or challenge the player won't hold their interest for long.
There are many "bad" games just like there is plenty of "bad" art.
Perhaps he should write an article called "Games Don't Have To Be Bad"
A lot indie developers are questioning the nature of game mechanics
a well as the game experience in an effort to use the game as a vehicle
for an exploration of the human experience.
Though some of these games may be of interest to the "typical"
gamer demographic, many will not. As an artist I can accept this.
Not because I want to be an inaccessible outsider, or feel that
I am on the fringe of culture, but because that is what is I feel "Art" is.
Art takes something that is familiar, and presents it in an unfamiliar
way. From that experience, we are able to make new connections
and develop new insights and understanding. Art enables us to make
connections to the past, as well as define who we are now, and what
we hope to become.
If the author feels that the games he references in the article do
not "speak" to him on a metaphoric level, perhaps he should focus
on that fact alone, rather than trying to use these limited examples
to critique a larger community.