Book Spotlight - Indie Games
Today I'm happy to be rounding out my first week of Blaugust (Woohoo! And wow, already?!) by writing about the last title in my batch of recent video game-related reads.
Indie Games (2016) by Mike Diver is an introductory overview of independent games, including across their varying genres, styles, scales, and origins. Given that the book was released the better part of a decade ago as of this writing, the landscape of indie gaming that it depicts is understandably very different than the one today, but it continues to inform the current foundations regardless. That's actually part of what I enjoyed about the book, though, as someone whose relationship to video game culture has certainly shifted with time. Thinking back to the early period when the growth of indie games was beginning to take off (roughly during the 2010s, one could might say), I think it felt easier to keep up with the majority of the big independent game releases. For one, the opportunities and resources for indie game development and publishing weren't necessarily as accessible as they are now, so the rate of full-fledged indie games successfully being made, released, and reaching an audience was probably lower than it is now. And of course, we can also probably chalk this up to generally just having less time to spare as you get older. For many of us, keeping up with absolutely every trend or hit game as soon as it releases is not always feasible. So it was pretty fun to return to this book as it revisited an era of gaming and game releases wherein I could still recognize and vividly recall many of the individual games it highlights. I liked how it explored different aspects of indie gaming and the development of the culture around them, with chapters focusing on their popularity as horror game spectacles, immersive emotional narratives, or uniquely abstract and offbeat gaming experiences. The book also includes direct insights from interviewed game developers and artwork from the relevant games being discussed, which beautifully helped to show off the sheer variety of what an indie game can be.
I'd be very curious to know what a book like this about indie games written today would turn out to be like now. For example, Steam comes up in discussion throughout the book as a major indie game storefront, but I think the growth of additional platforms like Itch.io have really shaped the indie game scene in new ways. With Itch.io and its (currently still highly-contested) intended status as a dedicated space for marginalized especially queer creators, I think there's a really interesting conversation to have about that as another potential wave in the development of the overall indie games scene.