Innovation NOT Opposition: The Logic of Distinction of Independent Games

Abstract

We will create, through sheer force of will, an independent games revolution, an audience and market and body of work that will ultimately redound to the benefit of the whole field, providing a venue for creative work, as independent cinema does for film, as independent labels do for music. (“Designer X” 2000) In popular culture, the label ‘independent’ is commonly associated with music or movies but rarely with computer games. Since the proclamation of the Scratchware Manifesto in 2000 the development of an independent games movement has advanced - e.g. the institutionalisation of the San Francisco Independent Games Festival - however, the question game designer and theorist Eric Zimmermann raised in 2002 is still significant: “Do Independent Games Exist?” (Zimmermann 2002). In this article, the still substantially unexplored cultural sphere of independent games will be examined from a comparatistic perspective using the concept of the (US) independent film as an example. Starting point for the following reflections is that, with regard to economics and aesthetics, American independent film as an established alternative practice is said to be a role model for the characterisation of the emerging independent games movement. Neverthless, the question remains whether independent film can be a suitable example at all. Embedded in the issue what constitutes the independence of independent film is a relational logic inasmuch as the answer requires to not only analyse what is described as independent or claims to be independent. In fact, the very concept prompts the question from what the independent is independent, from what does it differ and distinguish itself and by which means. The main reference for the American independent film will, of course, be Hollywood mainstream cinema. It has yet to be sorted out on the basis of which features independent films can be distinguished from mainstream films. Geoff King points out three distinguishing level of criteria that can be transferred to the cultural practice of independent games: