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[Derek]

Wanted to get people's thoughts on this.  Basically, it's obvious that the indie games scene, like any scene, has been fracturing more and more as time goes on (especially as it becomes more popular as a whole).  The way it seems to be running as I see it:

1. Original Indies - These are the pioneers of the game industry.  The bedroom coders of the 80's and early 90's that essentially invented the medium.  Examples: Alexey Pajitnov, William Crowther, John Romero/John Carmack

(EDIT: As mewse and others pointed out, there was no concept of "indie games" at this point, because the industry was so young and small.  So perhaps it's better to call this "Proto-Indie" or something. )

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2. Game-Creation Tools and Communities - The release of various free (or affordable) game-creation tools like ZZT, Klik n' Play, Game Maker, etc., empowered hobbyist game developers in the 90's.  The communities that sprung up around these tools were some of the earliest indie game development communities (as being actively different from the mainstream game industry).

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3. Game Tunnel, IndieGamer, DIYGames - The first time I ever heard the term "indie game" was around the end of college, which for me was 2004.  There was a strong focus on casual games and a lot of the motivation to me seemed to be based on the success of the casual games industry, which was making strides.  I couldn't tell you how long all of these sites had been around, but they were already fairly well-established when I became aware of them.

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4. Early TIGSource - I didn't have a strong agenda when I first took TIGSource over from Jordan Magnuson, but eventually I was motivated by how dull and thoughtless most casual games were, how much interest there was in turning a quick buck, and how much rampant cloning there was.  I was also very cynical about mainstream games, which seemed similarly thoughtless and also bloated.  Early TIGSource was very much defined as being the antithesis of those things, and I spent a lot of time from 2004-2006 trying to tear them a new one.  I felt empowered by the cool experimental games that were coming out of Click, Game Maker, and similar communities.

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5. Present-Day TIGSource - The success of indie games, the increase in developers, the proliferation of good tools/methods of distribution, and the strengthening of the TIGSource community has more or less made the agenda of Early TIGSource moot, in my mind.  The field has widened dramatically in every direction and it seems too narrow now to focus too much on one thing or the other.  Present-Day TIGSource is more interested in itself and its community (and expanding its community) than ever before.

Also, as far as I'm concerned, indie game developers have proven they can come up with experimental games... I'd like to continue to see that energy and creativity married with stronger craft and higher-quality production.  I'd also like to see indie games that provide a greater depth of experience.

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6. New Wave - Not surprisingly, the cycle must continue.  Just as Early TIGSource was defined by a malcontentedness, so is the New Wave (or whatever this group chooses to call itself in the end, if anything).  I think it's kind of typified by the IGF grumbling and grumbling about TIGSource in general.  The New Wave tends to see XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare as selling-out, and holds pixel art, freeware, and short, experimental games in high regard.  It has disdain for people (like myself) who want to extend indie games into the mainstream consciousness.  Auntie Pixelante has one of the strongest voices of this movement and might rightly be considered a leader, and even though it's not really an official group, I feel like it's possible it will become one soon.


This is my (shortened) interpretation of events based on my personal experience, and I'm curious how you guys see it.  It's kind of strange to be on the other side of the authority/anti-authority coin now, but that's how it goes!  I kind of consider it a sign that things are good, and as long as we remain open-minded it should continue to be good.

 

[undertech]

GH (Game History) 101, 4 CR. Meets 2:30-4:40 TR
Prerequisites:

[Zaphos]

I feel like it's perhaps overly reductive to squish a rather diverse community into this linear timeline ... there are tons of different groups and mindsets that I'd all consider under a similar umbrella of indie, and people who straddle those groups.  There are programming-focused hobbyists, ludum dare-type people, dedicated niche developers like spiderweb, demo scene stuff, experimental gameplay people, kotm, ex-'mainstream' industry people going for polished games, game 'academics', iphone devs, xblig devs, etc.  And there's been that diversity for a while now... for example, speedhack is older than game tunnel.   And there's overlap between all those groups ...

I think if it feels more fractured now it may just be because there seems like more of a center to fracture, with people arguing about the igf.  It seems unlikely it's ever been particularly unified.

[moshboy]

I'm a 'straddler' really. I still enjoy reading TIGSource even though, content-wise, it has changed over the years. I enjoy small, experimental games but also enjoy seeing some of the devs that used to do that stuff become much, much bigger.

As long as creativity is alive and well, I'm pretty happy.

[mewse]

My first shareware game was released for sale in April of 1994, and was entirely coded in my bedroom.

Does that make me an "Original Indie"? 

[Movius]

post...

It's a very good summary, but only for a certain subset of 'indie games' or whatever the relevant predecessor term was at the time for the freeware/shareware scene, etc.

My main criticisms would be that a) theres far too little mention of old freeware games, things like "1000 games on one cd" shareware compilations or similar.

b) There are lots of other 'scenes' running in parallel or that have branched off forever from the major indie scene that tend to be ignored when people talk about the 'indie movement'. I'm certain you've noticed this yourself, because from your front page postings it seems that your own tastes in games don't necessarily match 100% with the most popular indie game trends of the time. (This is a good thing)

[mewse]

Yeah, I kind of agree;  in the late 80s-early 90s, people didn't call themselves "indies".  That's really because there wasn't anything to be independent from.  The big publishers hadn't really formed yet, or at least, they weren't the huge juggernauts that they are now.  It was easy to think of yourself as really not so different from Spectrum Holobyte or Interplay, because they were pretty small operations too.

I kind of think of this as the "Ware" era, because people were trying all sorts of wild and crazy distribution models at that time.  "Shareware" originally meant "Freeware";  it was typically distributed with a message that said that if you liked the game, that you should pass it on to a friend.  In this same era, "Demoware" arose, which had some features or levels disabled until you registered them.  While game the makers called this "Demoware", end-users quickly began calling this type of distribution "Crippleware".  People hated "crippleware", because there were no online payment systems back then -- purchasing it would typically take three to four weeks, as checks and information was sent via postal mail.

You also saw weird variants such as "Beerware" (if you like this game, send me a six-pack), "Pizzaware" (if you like this game, order me a pizza delivery), etc.

It was in this period that you saw explosions of "1000 games on one CD", which were typically large number of shareware games (also "Beerware", "Pizzaware", and etc) packaged together onto a single  CD.  This got the games into the hands of consumers who didn't have access to the early online services.  Typically, game authors were not asked for permission before their game was packaged onto this type of CD.

Slowly over time, though, "Shareware" began to change from "If you like this game, share it with a friend", into "If you like this game, please send me a donation".  And then into an "honor system" approach, "If you like this game, please buy it for $15", with no registration or enforcement.

As the Internet began to appear, some shareware companies became big enough to be able to afford people to man phone lines to handle telephone purchases, and then the Internet began to allow online purchases, so more shareware companies switched from the honor system approach to a registration-required system.

Today's modern "Shareware" is the same as the "Crippleware" of the late 80s and early 90s.


I'd be arguing that the term "indie" didn't appear until big publishers started consolidating, in the late 1990s.  Before that time, pretty much everybody was indie, by any meaningful definition of the term.

[Craig Stern]

5. New Wave - Not surprisingly, the cycle must continue.  Just as Early TIGSource was defined by a malcontentedness, so is the New Wave (or whatever this group chooses to call itself in the end, if anything).  I think it's kind of typified by the IGF grumbling and grumbling about TIGSource in general.  The New Wave tends to see XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare as selling-out, and holds pixel art, freeware, and short, experimental games in high regard.  It has disdain for people (like myself) who want to extend indie games into the mainstream consciousness.  Auntie Pixelante has one of the strongest voices of this movement and might rightly be considered a leader, and even though it's not really an official group, I feel like it's possible it will become one soon.

Interesting take. I don't know that I've seen much of what you wrote past the phrase "grumbling about TIGSource in general," but otherwise that sounds about right. I think that's sort of inevitable when people belong to a group that they feel doesn't represent their interests: they grumble, then eventually, move on. (Unless, of course, we're talking about poor rural Americans and the Republican party.) It's pretty disheartening to belong to a community of creative underdogs, and yet be steadfastly ignored even there.

[nikki]

My first shareware game was released for sale in April of 1994, and was entirely coded in my bedroom.

i hope that coolness is on your website!

About the theory : when stuff is in a lineair timeline, its more about  evolving then the fracturing, i think, Otherwise i would like to know more of what group fractured into wich groups, and so on.

A good idea to make a history of indies though. Could become serious material for journalists.

[Derek]

Yeah, as you guys are rightly pointing out, this is a very incomplete history of indie games (EDIT: it's also a very personal one).  It'd just be a single branch along the full history - the branch that has TIGSource on it.  I'd love to see the full tree, though.  If that's what this thread turned into, I'd be pretty stoked!

Although I know there are people who dislike these kinds of classifications and prefer to think about everything in a more liquid way, I've always liked grouping things as a place to start.

[Movius]

I'd be arguing that the term "indie" didn't appear until big publishers started consolidating, in the late 1990s.  Before that time, pretty much everybody was indie, by any meaningful definition of the term.

Generally agree with the post but Strong disagree on that last sentence. Certainly the term 'indie' wasn't around, but big companies had been in games for decades before that point and there was a notable difference between the independent companies and the "mainstream". Granted it wasn't as big and the biggest teams weren't anywhere near as huge, but it as a real difference.

A point about 1000-in-1 discs. At the time it was very common for a game to be released with several parts, the first free, the rest available from mail order or game stores. In my experience these 1000-in-1 discs tended to be either freeware games or the first episodes of these series.

Further to the "parallel scenes" thing. There is a tendency to create false dichotomies between the social group you claim to be part of (The Indie game scene) and the antithesis (the ***MAINSTREAM***) and ignore everything else. Some examples:

* Adventure game fans, specifically those that make their own games with something like AGS, tend to be mostly ignored when people discuss 'histories of indie games'  or similar. Now a lot of adventure games do get covered here and elsewhere, but this count is dwarfed by the actual output of the adventure game scene and even moreso the colossal unfinished (mostly unstarted) projects list.

On a larger scale, this phenomenon is visible in the perception that adventure games are a dead art even though  more adventure game titles are published than any other genre (mostly by small, independent studios.)

and beyond this there is the world of interactive fiction, etc.

* One of my favourite games of late is Liberal Crime Squad, which is maintained in the Bay12 forums. As a result I tend to lurk in said forums a fair bit. One thing I've noticed in the 'other games' forum is that it is like stepping into a parallel world.

Superficially it is much like Tigsource or any other gaming forum. many people posting in huge threads about their favourite games. Yet the games they discuss are all games that get very little attention elsewhere, even in the alleged 'indie game scene.' Examples of 50+ page threads in the last few days include, "Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games", "Haven and Hearth, 2.0!!!" and "HellMOO: Go to heaven for the climate, and hell for the company."

* To cast an even wider net and talk about the whole view of 'gaming' in general. People often talk about the wii and DS or casual gaming bringing in all these new players that are totally different to the established 'hardcore' gamer stereotype, which had been 100% of the target market.

Yet people forget that the oldest continuously published Microsoft product is Flight simulator or that almost every other week a new DLC for Railworks appears on steam (and not a pissweak $1 alternate train skin either, these are $10-$20 add-ons. In fact to buy the full railworks would cost ~$US500 through steam.) Do you think when people talk about the mainstream hardcore gamer they think of trainset or model plane nerds sitting in front of their PC.

[nikki]

well the seed of the tree, could maybe be Tennis for Two (1958)  or maybe the missile simulator game (1947) can more righltly claim to be the seed that started it all.

Both these games are obviously not created by corporate electronic entertainment giants, so for todays(tig's) standards they might be called indie.

[increpare]

I see no mention of interactive fiction so far.  It has a very strange and unique place for itself, and has rather different values to the gaming community in general.  

I am interested in these sorts of archaeologies.  In particular, one strand of relationship between the indie scene and the industrial machine that interests me are the reactionary aesthetics that inhabit both the indie scene and the industry.  The scratchware manifesto is something that was constructed in opposition to industry values, and a lot of experimental triends can be seen in that light as well - in some sense they're both reacting to the same set of values, only the end values are somewhat different.  The indie scene seems to have enough momentum now that people are more and more constructing identities in sympathy and in opposition to trends and works within it more than before.  This could be read as both a self-sufficiency and as an incestuousness of the scene.

Auntie Pixelante has one of the strongest voices of this movement

And yet she is also had some involvement as a proponent of the scratchware manifesto.  There are many sides.

I like where things are right now - lots of people are doing lots of things, and (and this is important) the set of values across the scenes vary considerably.  I am comfortable with people having very distinct sets of values.

Also not mentioned, but important: I don't think the socially-conscious game-movement ever took off as a movement - though such games do exist now, and the ideas from it have permeated the games scene quite well.

There are also people who make games in isolation from any community of developers and/or any community of players - they might be worth inclusion, though I have trouble thinking of any off-hand.

The fan games and modding scenes certainly deserve their own mention, though there's a lot of overlap of the former with other scenes/cultures.

edit: just read Movius's post - quite liked its rather broader outlook.

[nikki]

There are also people who make games in isolation from any community

i'm thinking mdickie , although he stopped now i believe

[increpare]

There are also people who make games in isolation from any community

i'm thinking mdickie , although he stopped now i believe

He might have been separated from us, but presumably he had some involvement with the blitz community?  I don't know to what extent, though.

I'm not sure to what extent we view communities as constituted by players or as constituted by developers.  One would get a different outlook by looking at games sites than by looking at developers forums/boards/&c., I imagine.  I wonder to what extents they might differ (in particular, I have in mind various writers' roles in the construction of the modern 'indie' identity (I haven't looked too much into this, but it seems that Tim and Derek both bear a fair share of the responsibility in this regard), but no doubt it goes back further as mentioned ).

[mewse]

I'd be arguing that the term "indie" didn't appear until big publishers started consolidating, in the late 1990s.  Before that time, pretty much everybody was indie, by any meaningful definition of the term.

Generally agree with the post but Strong disagree on that last sentence. Certainly the term 'indie' wasn't around, but big companies had been in games for decades before that point and there was a notable difference between the independent companies and the "mainstream". Granted it wasn't as big and the biggest teams weren't anywhere near as huge, but it as a real difference.

I should clarify here..  in the time period we're talking about, I was in the Mac arena and was largely disconnected from the PC side of things.  All of my comments were really focused on the Mac side, since that was really all I had firsthand experience with.  The commercial Mac gaming scene really bloomed late, compared to the PC side.  That was partly because of the smaller user base, but mostly because the Mac was much more technically difficult to make games for (painfully slow access to VRAM, no backbuffer to draw into, and four times the resolution of the PC.. made it almost impossible to actually do fast action games!)

(Which is not to say that PCs weren't painfully difficult to make games for -- I understand that they were!  Back in those days before standardised video and sound interfaces, writing a game for a PC meant needing to support a half dozen different video formats and sound cards.  On those early Macs you didn't have to deal with that;  there was only one system to use.  The problem was that it was an almost unusable system for games.   )

Anyhow, it could well be that there were big game-producing companies who were stifling innovation in PC games in that era.  All I can say is that it wasn't happening for Mac coders yet, at that time.  

[moi]

I think the main difference nowadays is the emergence of so-called "indies" , i.e people who have so much disdain for mainstream game dev that they want to make everything in an alternative way, and generally not being business-savy (or business adverse).Also using the "indie" label for buzz and marketing.
Early shareware devellopers (like carmack or romero) didn't make any difference between themselves and mainstream devellopers.

In the last paragraph you forgot to mention the opposite group of people who are becoming more and more irritated by the attitude of self conscious indie "rebels" and who think artgames are bullshit. Also growing irritation against recent trend of using pixels that take half the screen and other examples of lazy minimalism.

[s0]

The New Wave tends to see XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare as selling-out, and holds pixel art, freeware, and short, experimental games in high regard.  It has disdain for people (like myself) who want to extend indie games into the mainstream consciousness.  Auntie Pixelante has one of the strongest voices of this movement and might rightly be considered a leader, and even though it's not really an official group, I feel like it's possible it will become one soon.

This is interesting, because I'm somtimes feeling a bit alone not having any aspirations to "go pro", work in the industry or, indeed, ever sell a game. In my subjective perception, there aren't that many people who share my views. 

[increpare]

Oh, the open source community haven't been mentioned yet on this thread.  While they historically tend to make quite derivative works, they have an important standpoint, and their development mode is significantly different from others' to set them apart.

Sure, you can say that Passage is open source, but it hasn't really been developed in an open-source manner - it was made by one dude and one dude only, and is regarded as such.  Compare this to nethack or freeciv, or various other open source games projects with lots of contributors, and you'll see a rather different development dynamic!

This is interesting, because I'm somtimes feeling a bit alone not having any aspirations to "go pro", work in the industry or, indeed, ever sell a game. In my subjective perception, there aren't that many people who share my views.

There are lots of people out there with your values (even some who have gone pro or who are in the industry or selling games).  But I guess 'that many' is rather a subjective quantity, so it's hard to respond meaningfully to your comment.

[s0]

But I guess 'that many' is rather a subjective quantity, so it's hard to respond meaningfully to your comment.

Well, yeah, it's all based on a somewhat vague feeling. I was kinda under the impression that most indies aspire to go commerical, and apparently, the number of people who don't isn't as low as I thought it was.

That said, I don't think there's anything wrong with selling your games or bringing indie games to mainstream attention. I certainly don't hate mainstream games (hell, I'm planning on buying Mass Effect 2) and I don't see XBLA/PSN/WiiWare as "selling out". I'm still more of a console gamer than a PC gamer and I'm glad to indie games making their way to consoles in a non-homebrew manner.