Found here, on Pitchforkmedia.com of all places.
I thought it was pretty interesting anyway. As a long-time gamer, I'm thoroughly bored at the prospect of more powerful hardware, because all it means is only the biggest developers will be able to make anything decent. What about all the little gems that pop up every now and then, and spread just because of word of mouth? I think the gaming industry sorely needs its own "indie scene", if you will.
Thoughts?
Get That Out of Your Mouth #13
Video Games Go Punk as Fuck
by Chris Dahlen
If I'd known the 2005 Game Developers' Conference and the Independent Games Festival would be so exciting, I would have ditched my pregnant wife at home and trekked out to San Francisco for the wheeling, the dealing-- and the outrage. Based on the blogging and the news reports, the conference held last month was infiltrated by smart, creative people who are discouraged by their jobs: The talents who are most likely to make innovative, exciting games complain that no one would let them do it.
At the "rant" panel, gaming veteran Greg Costikyan challenged the standing-room-only crowd, "You can choose to starve for your art, to beg, borrow, or steal the money you need to create a game that will set the world on fire. You can choose to riot in the streets of Redwood City, to put down your tools and demand an honest wage for an honest eight-hour day. You can choose to find an alternative distribution channel, a different business model, a path out of the trap the game industry has set itself. You can choose to remember why you love games, and to ensure that a generation from now, there are still games worthy of love. And you can start today."
Video games have removed the "toy" stigma to become a major entertainment industry. Analysts predict that gaming will be bigger than music by 2008, and game sales are beating movie box-office revenues. But cash makes people cautious: The industry is swamped with sequels, first-person shooters, and Grand Theft Auto rip-offs, and the biggest speech of the whole conference seems to have been the preview of XBox 360, which will make games bigger, more powerful-- and way more expensive to develop. The major publishers are boring and cautious, and they're raising the barriers to entry so high that it takes millions of dollars, Hollywood talent, and a Danny Elfman theme song to get a game into stores.
Naturally, some people are looking for an alternative. Indie games already circulate on the Internet, from MUD's, to free Flash games, to a wide swath of PC games; you can find '80s arcade or adventure throwbacks, high-concept physics experiments, and pornographic Flash games where you try to get a cartoon to take its clothes off. Blogs, industry support groups like the International Game Developers Association, and events like the annual Indie Game Jam, have laid some groundwork, and the Game Developer's Conference even tailored a contest for indies: the Independent Game Festival, which judged 78 entries. Most of those were PC games, but the festival also gave three awards to its first console game, Alien Hominid, which is a case study in how to take every risk and use up all of your savings to make a game.
Alien Hominid started as a Flash game developed by Dan Paladin and Tom Fulp, who hosted it at Newgrounds.com, the popular Flash animation community that Fulp founded. It applied bright, cartoony violence to classic 2-D scroller gameplay, and it was a hit on Newgrounds when producer John Baez, who was working with Paladin, suggested that they take a chance and make a console version for the PlayStation 2.
"There were 84,123,783,287 barriers to conquer during the process," says Paladin. To build a PlayStation game you have to convince Sony to sell you a development kit, and you need a license from Sony before you can release it. The Alien Hominid team built the whole game-- in 18 months of round-the-clock work-- before they pitched it, to get the best shot of winning Sony's approval. They got the nod, and since then they've also ported it to the Nintendo GameCube.
"We weren't a sequel or a licensed character, which was pretty rare in 2004," says Fulp, and the team was also concerned that their 2-D action wouldn't thrill Sony. "They prefer games that push the technology and make the system look good, so we didn't exactly fit that model. Although I personally think the visuals rock."
Alien Hominid has scored press from gaming and other magazines, all the way up to Playboy, but it's still squeezed out of the limited shelf and cabinet space at retailers like Wal-Mart or GameStop. Says Fulp, "What we need is more boutique gaming stores for rare titles. You see stores that focus on indie music and movies, but games are always a mainstream market. You never see that hole in the wall video game store, unless it's imports." They've had the best luck promoting the game on Newgrounds, where almost ten million people have tried the simpler Flash version, and they've promoted it at comic conventions. They also make money on merchandising: they sell action figures of the game characters, a plan that's inspired by indie music. Says Baez, "Our whole merchandise angle is straight out of watching bands sell t-shirts at their shows."
Many developers-- including Greg Costikyan, in his 1999 essay, "Gaming Needs an Indy Label" Ðcompare their dilemmas to other media, and look for ideas from other independent movements. You almost wish the veterans of music could step in and give advice: why not lend out Steve Albini to the game industry? (Who wouldn't play a Rapeman console game?) If you carve out the basic problems of working independently-- getting funds, distribution, press, and fans-- each medium faces the same issues, with different parameters.
Take music. In the early '80s DIY heyday, anyone with a week's pay and marginal skill could start a band, and it was a small leap to tour and cut some 7"s. But more importantly, the music scene grew because of the fans-- a dedicated audience that followed artists, published zines, bought records by mail order, and scrambled some eggs for them when they crashed at their homes. And most of those fans only bought indie.
Sure, this level of grassroots support depends on attitudes that, at a certain point, become noxious. The "indie scenester" is a bad cliché; outside of the Saddle Creek message board it's hard to find people who are so pure-blooded indie that they won't buy major-label records, and won't even listen to a Kylie Minogue or a Britney Spears single. But some of the best records of the '80s would never have happened without the support of people who bought most of their records from ads in Maximum Rock and Roll.
And speaking of zines, gaming needs a stronger and more creative press. The glossy magazines are trade rags and marketing tools, and even most of the websites are uncontroversial and hype-driven. A strong niche press would draw attention to these games, or at least cause friction. Can you imagine an indie gaming magazine that would give a scathing review to Halo 2 solely because it comes from Microsoft?
While the music scene has grassroots strength, games cost far more to make than records: the average entry to the Independent Game Festival (IGF) cost about $50,000, and Alien Hominid's budget hit $1.3 million. In that light, it makes sense to look at independent films. The Independent Games Festival resembles an early Sundance, and it follows the same premise: It's open to all comers, but it weeds out the vast majority that nobody would be interested in, so that your audience will stay for what's left. At film festivals, anyone can send in a tape, but only the winners get an audience; the same process landed a select set of finalists into the Festival.
Independent films also proved that people want entertainment, not huge budgets. No amount of special effects can make The Day After Tomorrow a better film than, say, Evil Dead II, and even as video game publishers veer up to eight-figure budgets, small game designers can beat them on gameplay. In the same way, games like the two big winners at the IGF, Gish, and Wik, trump some of the most-hyped games of the year not just on style and originality, but for basic entertainment value.
There's one more industry that game developers should study, and in some ways it's closer to home: comic books. Comics have always been a cheap but occasionally brilliant medium, and every once in a while the industry likes to shock us by producing a talent that genuinely makes comics "for adults"-- like R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, or Chris Ware. A book like Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen holds up to critical analysis, and it sets the bar so high that it attracts an audience beyond the usual comic geeks. You could argue whether gaming has reached that level of artistic merit-- the existential themes and wartime symbolism of Planescape Torment would get my vote-- but if a game publisher could make an analogue to Clowes' Ghost World, it would diversify the audience beyond the proverbial 13-year olds.
All of this tests the industry: Would creative game designers accept fewer but more devoted fans? Do the customers want exciting ideas, or just better graphics and louder explosions? Does anyone care about broadening the audience-- or at least creating a separate channel a la the indie cinema chains, a "slightly smarter" alternative to the twitch-and-kill games that the kids play? Would gamers go indie on principle, or will it take a hit-- a Nirvana, or a sex, lies and videotape-- to draw a real crowd? And even if gamers put in the work to pursue the independents would they forget the whole thing if the major publishers could turn out more games like Grim Fandango, Sim City, or Half-Life 2?
This debate matters to gamers, but it should also matter to the older indies. In film and media, "indie" products have grown stale and turned into just another budget-priced format. The excitement in the gaming space can take us back to first principals, and if I had to single out the most crucial, it's that pop culture should be fun. With independent work, the makers and the consumers have a stake in what happens: The people who create the work care less about a paycheck, and total strangers unite behind their obsessions instead of taking cues from the covers of a dozen identical glossy magazines. Everyone puts in the work and gets the rewards, and the freedoms-- and that's what makes it entertaining. Our grandparents used to tell us-- when they caught us blowing a summer afternoon indoors, with the Atari-- that you have to make your own fun; and who knows, maybe they were right.
I thought it was pretty interesting anyway. As a long-time gamer, I'm thoroughly bored at the prospect of more powerful hardware, because all it means is only the biggest developers will be able to make anything decent. What about all the little gems that pop up every now and then, and spread just because of word of mouth? I think the gaming industry sorely needs its own "indie scene", if you will.
Thoughts?
Then... The fate of our correspondence, the fight for a better future for all Humanity, rests upon the answer you provide to my next question! This is it, folks... Prepare yourself! Here it comes!