Polymath

Damn, Brandon, I thought for a minute there you were going to steal my idea for the first in a series of three games (vis-a-vis "TA"). Think of this: a trilogy called, in order, "BA", "MA", and "PhD". The first is an arena-style fighting game with a flexible ladder, er, curriculum, divided into semesters, each match awarding new combo moves in different tracks like "Deconstructionism," "Political Economy," "Continental Philosophy," etc, and each semester ending with finals-royale. To spice up the character-customization-by-cours-selection, there's a side-mechanic for socioacademic prestige, whereby, for instance, the prestige gained for kicking ass, er, staging a successful argument can be modded down by siding theoretically with someone unpopular, too frequently invoking those cheap McLuhan spiritualism combos, or tag-teaming with that awful, computer-gaming, geek who keeps saying shit about "Human Nature." The second game, "MA," takes on the form of a free-form RPG/RTS at the squad-level with an isometric P.O.V., picking your factions, running errands and doing research for them, all the while under-handedly recruiting your own legion of undergrad NPC followers, publishing papers that won't be snatched up by your advisor, and questing after the rare and coveted Black Turtle Neck of Hipness +5 to go with those Black Plastic Framed Glasses of Vocabulary. Finally, we round things off with "PhD," a management sim in which you have to petition for the aid of three Tenured Deities, uphold their values while defending them from their adversaries, deftly avoid (or successfully take on!) committee work, amass your own following of grad students, carefully develop a tech-tree, er, I mean, first book, and finally, if you're lucky and quick, achieve the status of Full Professor. They wouldn't sell for shit, but damn the idea tickles my soul.

An independent game is a game that was developed with a budget that is considerably less than what most AAA titles have. That budget cap is arbitrary and changes with time depending on what the average budget for a mainstream title is, but being a moving target doesn't make it illusory. The budget restriction directly impacts production values and often, indirectly, subject matter. The distinction seems pretty clear to me, and I'm sure it does to other indie developers as well.

"Here's a mainstream FPS, here's an independent FPS"

Really? Where? I've never seen an FPS that would be considered "indie".

"It's a young industry where the few successful genres are just barely removed from their poorly financed origins"

The FPS genre may have started with Wolfenstein but now we regularly see titles with 7 and 8-figure budgets. There are very obvious differences between such games and the zero-budget artsy FPS game I'm working on.

"many studios teeter on the edge of financial ruin on a regular basis"

If Paramount Pictures spends $100 million making a film, whether they are on death's door financially or swimming in profits has no bearing on said film's indie or non-indie status.

"Never mind the fact that far more people spend far more time using software than they do playing pointless computer games"

I honestly can't tell if you're being facetious or not here.

Quick comment: I really think that the controversy here is about the garage game ethos versus matter-of-fact independence(which I take to simply be: self-owned). Presumably, we want the IGF to be about garage games and not anything that can claim to be developed by an independently owned and operated company.

"there are both low budget games produced by established companies"

These are "budget" titles. They are sold at retail for a reduced price, and their budget still amounts to far, far more than almost every indie game budget.

"and high budget games produced by 'independent' companies"

A company's independently owned (ie not part of a publisher or some larger company) status has nothing to do with whether or not its games are indie.

"The industry's appeal for an independent games movement is quite suspect"

What's this monolithic industry you're referring to? I haven't heard anyone who works for a big company issue such an appeal. Greg Costikyan is a vocal proponent of indie game development, and I don't really think you could lump him in with someone who works for EA, or a nobody like myself with a bedroom coding project. The mainstream does what it does, usually with a lot of money flying this way and that, and we work on the outside in a comparatively money-less vacuum. Many indies do try to make money off what they do by selling via the net with alternative distribution channels.

"What about the modding community? What about Counterstrike?"

Mods are a borderline case, arguably their own class, because they are building, usually for free, onto a base that still cost millions of dollars to make. I would consider CS to be an indie game, until the point when the team was absorbed by Valve and began selling as a retail product (early 2000?).

"the subject matter and the audience is indistinguishable from the mainstream."

A) Unless you consider the subject matter and audiences of rRootage, Puzzle Pirates and Fashion Cents to be "indistinguishable from the mainstream" that is incorrect, and B) I never said that either were part of the definition. It's definitely to the advantage of an indie to eschew mainstream subject matter because it typically requires you to put that subject matter across with production values, but that doesn't stop a lot of them from trying. I can't help it if most indies are just wannabe professional devs.

The recent controversy within the indie community over Savage, a title with a budget of $1.5 million, emerges because there hasn't been much of a standard for what constitutes "indie" for the purposes of the competition. There is definitely a large schism within a competition which pits a game like Savage, which walks and talks like a normal mainstream retail product, up against games like Bontago, and the indie community is going to have to define their terms more clearly.

"There's just as much art and expressive power in a spreadsheet as there is in Doom 3."

That doesn't really answer my question, which is whether you were being facetious or not with the "playing pointless computer games" comment. Is that statement aimed at Doom3 or at spreadsheets?

JP: The implication was supposed to be that yes, indeed, people spend more productive time working with spreadsheets than they do playing games, i.e. they are engaged in serious activity. The fact that what they do -- work -- is somehow invisible next to the "cultural phenomenon" of computer games is something of an irony.

You seem stuck on the relationship between financial resources and the independent market. If being crippled by a lack of resources -- financial, talent, &c -- is what defines independent games, well then having an Independent Games Festival is pretty much a Special Olypmics for computer games, except that not everyone in the IGF is a $$winner$$. And yes, the IGF is supposed to be more than just wanna-be game developers, but at present, and for the forseeable future, that is in fact what it is.

I'm concerned with independent as alternative. Garage developers who want to be just like the big guys are not alternative.

A quick example of an indie FPS, http://www.urbanterror.net .

Currenty they mod the Q3A engine for their game, but on April second they released the final Q3A-mod version. With their next release they will be building on the open sourced Enemy Territory code rather than modding Q3A.

That count?