“Indie” games, or independent video games (games developed without support from a major video game publisher) have become quite popular recently in some circles of gamers, and I couldn’t be happier.
The majority of these games are so-called “casual” games, or video games aimed at a wider and generally older audience. They tend to be puzzle-oriented, and attempt to be both simplistic and addictive (see: Bejeweled). However, it is in this same world of indie games that you’ll find the most artistic, experimental, and innovative titles on the market today.
Aquaria, an indie action/adventure game
These two types of games barely even resemble each other, so why are they both lumped under the umbrella of “indie game?” That label, as I explained above, refers to a lack of support from video game publishers. By that, I mean financial support. These games are made on the cheap.
This limitation is what leads to the two different types of games. Game developers can focus on games that are quick and inexpensive to develop but have relatively high return (casual games), or they can push boundaries and work outside the box, because they don’t have the pressure of a financial backer expecting a commercially successful product. In a way, the developers of the artsy indie games owe something to the developers of the casual games — the digital distribution that allows for modern indie games to reach such a wide audience was largely pioneered in the name of casual gaming.
But major video game producers spend millions of dollars on massive projects like Grand Theft Auto and Halo. How can a small team of developers with a tiny fraction of that budget hope to compete? The answer should be obvious, but you’d be surprised how many times I’ve heard this exact question. Quite simply: more money does not a better game make. When a company like Electronic Arts invests a large amount of funding in a game, they want a safe investment. Experimenting is risky. Doing the same thing everyone else is doing is a safe bet. No one ever got fired for making a World War 2 shooter.
This is one of my favorite quotes, from the brilliant Brian Eno:
“Hollywoodization”: This is the process where things are evened out, rationalized, nicely lit from all sides, carefully balanced, studiously tested against all known formulae, referred to several committees, and finally made triumphantly unnoticeable.
A major game publisher throws money and people at a project, and the result is something accessible and safe. It isn’t groundbreaking, or even different in any substantial way from anything else on the shelves. But that’s all consumers expect, and it’s against the financial self-interest of the company to deviate from this line and take risks that might alienate consumers. Sure, they might end up with the next Sims (innovative, unconventional, and ridiculously financially successful), but they could just as easily end up with the next Grim Fandango (innovative, unconventional, and a financial failure).
Big publishers have their place, of course. Something like Bioshock could not have been done independently in our current game market. My hope for the long run is that indie games will increasingly become competition for big budget games, and hopefully this will put pressure on the game producers to innovate in order to stay competitive in the market.
In the short run, however, my hope is that “regular” gamers are willing to step outside their comfort zone of magic spells and machine guns and try something new.
A screenshot from the unrelentingly experimental and artistic "game" The Path
Something new, like The Path, a game that isn’t really a game. It’s more of an interactive, digital work of art. Emotional, symbolic imagery is the weapon of choice here. The Path is sometimes classified as a “horror” game, but the horror doesn’t come from sudden surprises or gore — it comes from those moments in our lives that shake our whole foundation and force us to accept human existence for what it is. It’s a game about growing up, understanding, and changing. It’s vague enough that you can easily connect to it, but it’s specific enough that the imagery and ideas take hold of you and stay with you for days. The only instruction given to the player is to “follow the path,” and in order to play this game you must break this rule. The only objective, if you can call it that, is to lead your “little read riding hood” to her “wolf,” a deeply symbolic encounter that results in your character walking slowly, through the rain, head cast down in despair, toward grandmother’s house. In a sense, the game makes you force the character into this. After your character walks through the rain to grandmother’s house, the game takes control out of your hands completely, as you walk through an abstract, expressionistic house that is constantly shifting around you and represents your character’s fragile mental state.
I could write a lot more about The Path, but hopefully you get the idea. It’s certainly no Halo. It’s nothing like a traditional game, and many critics intensely dislike it for this reason. One of the developers asked, on his blog, if the world was ready for The Path. At the time it struck me as an arrogant thing to ask, but in retrospect he was right to ask it. I really hope the world is ready for games like The Path.
