Indie Ethos in Games
There’s a lot of lingo used in popular gaming that doesn’t really make a lot of sense outside of a marketing perspective. Many popular terms don’t survive close scrutiny because they were only ever used to sell games, either in their purported ethos or the term itself. Boomer shooter. Immersive sim. Probably some others I get unreasonably annoyed about, but you probably have a couple of your own.
The term video game is one I have a big gripe with simply because it doesn’t fully encapsulate the digital media it describes; quite often there are very viable, enjoyable digital interactive experiences that don’t really resemble any popular understanding of games. But everything gets sold under the term ‘video game’.
The truth is, video games (or any digital interactive experiences) are moving so fast as a medium, and the nomenclature hasn’t kept up.
Chris Crawford remarked in a book from the 1980s how what were once thought to be clearly defined contemporary genres (like adventure games and cRPGs) were borrowing conventions from one another. Was it really an adventure game if it had a visual interface? Nowadays, we’d probably give different names to a lot of those games than what they had back then, and similar things will probably happen to the genres we hold as fast and true conventions today. Point being, it’s hard to create useful language for a medium that changes form and keeps hopping out of the boxes we put games into.
But I think the most harmful and insidious term used in gaming discourse is ‘indie’. I’m sure there are parallel conversations with film and music as well, but few video game discussions annoy me more than the word ‘indie’ being thrown around in conversations about game development and appreciation.
And fair enough! There can’t really be a real definition or regulatory body for this sort of thing. But like the term ‘video game’, it’s proliferated for marketing purposes despite any intelligent rationale. Also, unlike ‘video game’, this isn’t a media issue, it’s a production issue. So many good projects struggle to get off the ground because their developers don’t have the money or time or publisher to help them. When these games finally release despite these material conditions, it’s an enormous achievement! When people make better games with fewer resources, we can appreciate the human craftsmanship of it all. That is what the indie ethos means to me. You could provide metrics and conditions for what constitutes ‘indie’, but to me, the spirit of indie-ness is that.
Now, if you make a point of specifically celebrating indie games (for example, in the Game Awards), I understand there can’t be hard criteria for it, but it’s so disheartening seeing titles like Dave The Diver get nominated. It feels like every year a title with an ‘indie’ coat of paint gets in because of vibes, and it’s revealed that the title had $5 trillion in its advertising budget.
And again, I get that I move goalposts. I dislike Dave The Diver’s nominationfor the Game Awards’ Best Independent Game because it’s made by an in-house studio of Nexon, but I don’t mind that even though Black Salt Games’s DREDGE had a big publisher, it’s team of four more closely embodied the indie ethos.
It’s so frustrating seeing good developers being deprived of oxygen in these sorts of things when industry plants can buy out an ad in the middle of the Game Awards and peddle a quirky aesthetic as proof of being indie. For Dave The Diver, they used low-fidelity graphics to sneak into that category. Claire Obscur felt like it got in on a technicality (Yes, Sandfall Interactive was technically independent, but its founders had many more connections in the AAA development and publishing space). There’s a huge gap in what institutions like the Game Awards considers indie, and at a certain point we have to ask what its Best Independent Game award actually represents.
And I know no amount of pointing at the discrepancy of what gets called indie won’t magically make it better. By my own admission, I know indie can only ever be a loose ethos. If we impose restrictions like ‘it can’t have a publisher’, then DREDGE, a game I consider to embody the indie ethos, would be excluded.
If a studio is independent on a technicality but otherwise had millions in funding and dozens of developers in its studio and a huge advertising campaign, it’s simply less impressive when it grabs up indie awards and recognition. Of course all the Claire Obscurs in the industry are going to win, just look at them! If a 27 year-old wins at a children’s karate tournament, it kind of takes some of the air out from the achievement.
Maybe I’m a little bitter and jealous because of the recent Mixtape discourse (a game that looks like it’s about expensive music licences), which will inevitably get nominated for some indie game awards. But if people actually want to celebrate indie games, they need to start celebrating what meaningfully makes them indie. It’s not just the product, but the drive behind the developers to achieve that product. What they had to create, and how much they had to sacrifice and risk.
Don’t get me wrong, lots of indies are regularly and rightfully celebrated. There’s no shortage of what gets recognition. And it would probably be healthier for me and a lot of people to start ignoring the Game Awards sometimes. But like a lot of terms in popular gaming, we should be weary of who’s trying to wear the indie badge.













