putting my two cents in: that whole era of bullshit that led to “indie game: the movie” being conceptualized, let alone made, completely turned me off of the concept of indie games for years. i was so tired of seeing ea programmers and guys who had the marketing muscle of fucking microsoft behind them insulting my intelligence with their manufactured underdog stories. and i completely ignored it until 2014, when i was asked to join a project, and then that other thing that happened in 2014 which really caused me to want to be more involved. i mean, if you’re making nazis mad, you must be doing something right, right?
and that bias definitely played a role in why i was so willing to be antagonistic towards the scene when the whole “punk games” debacle went down a few years ago. it’s very difficult to see the good in something when all that’s presented to you are well-off dickheads pretending to be anti-establishment when it’s plainly obvious how many of them simply want a seat at the table.
“Because for every Phil Fish or Team Meat who have clout in the community and the interest of the press, there are hundreds of unknowns who are trying much less successfully to get their games out there. It’s also important not to undervalue the amount of promotion that went into the games in the film prior to release. It would be nice to say the indie game world is a meritocracy and the most interesting ideas inevitably rise to the top, but what’s more true is that the people who are making higher-budgeted fifteen dollar games within traditional genres (all of these games are 2D platformers) rise to the top. And maybe it’s something those who’ve praised the film don’t want to think about, because it’s nice if you’re a game developer to live in the fantasy that you’ll one day make a surprise smash hit, but the likelihood of it happening is pretty slim. It’s no secret that the filmmakers chose big name indie titles that had a high probability of success. If they hadn’t, I bet they would’ve tried to jump on another bandwagon and find another high-profile project with a good chance of success. That’s the story they wanted to tell, not the one of the losers. It’s a sort of fetishization of success and ‘breaking into the mainstream’ that would seem antithetical to what being an indie is all about, but is actually very prominent in the indie community.”
it’s quite remarkable how similar this is to my feelings about asian american activism
I always think of it as a multiple audiences problem.
That movie has truths for certain audiences (as Liz notes, to the developers it largely plays to) but not the outside edge indie devs; just like these games, which are geared towards different audiences – the mini-mainstream of Super Meat Boy to the designer-catnip of increpare to the art student audience of babycastles.
So what responsibility does it having for being false in a different context, to certain audiences?
I mean it doesn’t have a responsibility to be true to different audiences just like any movie doesn’t have a responsibility to be “true” to anyone
that doesn’t mean that there’s a vast gap between who it thinks it’s speaking for and who it’s actually speaking for
when it makes claims about who it speaks for and then manages to get wide distribution and becomes one of the biggest works representing what “indie games” are to the general populace, that’s when there’s a problem
the movie doesn’t abdicate responsibility, it just thinks it’s telling the whole story when it’s very clearly not
it just happens to also be basically the only film that was made about “indie games” outside of that other one about the japanese indie scene
it sure would be nice if there were an indie game the movie focusing on more fringe game makers with small audiences who are doing interesting and cool things
Ok, I guess I didn’t take it as attempting representing the whole scene, but the people and games specifically conversing with publishers, out of the Xbox Indies basement and into the full store, going to GDC, etc. It represented the portion of it that covers 90% of the indie games people know about and buy, so that made sense as a strategy to be a movie people might want to watch (as we’ve seen with the Indie Game: The Movie follow-on projects focusing on the smaller scale, those tended to be forgotten quickly)
sure. It’s a name that has value and is claimed by different subgroups, of course – the commercial indies were the visible face of it, while the flash indies have equally valid claim but are cognitively separated for most, the student and secluded scenes also have valid claims while being fairly different.
I’m glad people are mostly past arguing about what defines ‘indie’ though and seem to have settled on inclusive definitions.
I don’t think it’s necessary helpful to assume that most people aren’t more credulous or more determined to find representation than you are though
like I have a voice in my head that constantly warbles “this can’t possibly be for me; move on” so I’m not exactly likely to take “indie game the movie” at face value but that a lot of people might and others might face collateral damage from that isn’t too hard to see
I guess I’m trying to sift out the areas where this cause problems because of the film, problems because of the stratifications within the game-making scenes, or problems because of how it is interpreted by audiences.
it’s a medium budget sci-fi channel show of a game but i’m into that kinda shit because Space Lesbians. if you liked ME3’s combat, it’s that + jetpacks. the bad morality system is gone so you have more choices than “righteous bore” or “sociopathic racist”. the RPG character building stuff is totally freeform and largely an improvement over ME3. the multiplayer is fun, tho i doubt anyone really plays it anymore
i think Gamers are just bitter about 3’s ending and the facial animation bugs that were fixed like 2 weeks after launch. imo it’s baffling that anyone who enjoyed the series would hate it
in fairness they’d largely fixed this by 3, it’s one of several reasons I like it so much better than the prior two (in addition to “no nonstop pacing killing hacking puzzles”)
anyway I only tried like an hour of Andromeda but I found it very “do whatever, waste your own time, we don’t care” in the mold of inquisition where 3 was like a real tight JRPG
If you’re coming from an “I like Inquisition ok” perspective, a game I truly loathed, then yeah I think I made the right choice to skip it. Your post still does make it sound pretty good though…
