Indie Game Research Articles

Towards Democratisation of Games User Research: Exploring Playtesting Challenges of Indie Video Game Developers

Playtesting is a games user research (GUR) method used to evaluate design decisions based on feedback gathered from players with the goal to improve player experience. HCI games research has been actively working on and promoting best practices in GUR. However, these practices often require resources, knowledge and expertise, which are not readily available for indie video games developers. Thus, to better understand how GUR can support these developers, we conducted an interview study with 13 indie games professionals to learn about their practices and the challenges they face when doing playtesting. We report on the key findings from this study, including challenges with finding appropriate participants and handling the data from playtests. We provide a discussion of how existing GUR practices can be adapted and what HCI games research can do to help mitigate these challenges to make playtesting more accessible and impactful to indie video games developers.

"I'm a Solo Developer but AI is My New Ill-Informed Co-Worker": Envisioning and Designing Generative AI to Support Indie Game Development

Indie game developers are often defined as game developers who are typically not employed by or affiliated with tech giants or large gaming companies/publishers. Although people may decide to "go indie" for various purposes, indie game development has become a crucial part of the global gaming culture. However, this community is now facing unprecedented tensions as generative AI technologies are shifting how games can be designed, produced, and experienced. Through a qualitative analysis of 3,091 online posts and comments from subreddits and Facebook groups for indie game developers, we offer an in-depth investigation of how indie game developers perceive and envision the multifaceted role of generative AI in their creative practices. Our empirical investigation reveals that generative AI both promotes and harms indie game developers' endeavors to innovate the traditional game production model, which further influences the nature and workflow of creativity in game development. We also propose three principles for designing future generative AI technologies to improve indie developers' work while mitigating potential risks, harm, and negative impacts of AI. We hope that this study can help design and develop future generative AI technologies to foster and sustain more democratic and inclusive practices in game development rather than replacing human creators.

Indie Games for Ethical and Socioemotional Development in Secondary Education

Video games, particularly those developed in the independent scene, are a form of media with great educational possibilities. This work in progress will be completed in three years and it aims to improve teachers video game literacy and help them implementing activities for ethical and socioemotional development (European key competencies 5 and 6) through indie games. Therefore, through design-based research and mixed-method designs, it aims to achieve three goals: (O1) identify the perception and meaning-making processes that teachers and students have about videogames and learning through video games; (O2) design a measurable training program for teachers around the educational possibilities of indie games and help them implement activities for ethical and socioemotional development; and (O3) evaluate the programs impact based on the indicators of key competencies 5 and 6. The project is in its first phases and it will be developed in the next three years. First, representative samples of each agent will be accessed to analyze their beliefs, types of knowledge, and practical experience in the field. Subsequently, four independent video games that promote key competencies 5 and 6 will be selected, and classroom activities will be designed for each of them. Next, teachers from four high schools in Spain (Cantabria, Baleares, Andalucía and Catalonia) will be trained in the use of the educational resources, and they will be accompanied in its implementation with students. Finally, the programs impact on students will be evaluated based on various psychological variables associated with key competences 5 and 6 (e.g., empathy, emotional identification, civic skills, etc.) as well as the participants perceptions of the experience, enabling the generation of design principles for future iterations and for the programs scalability.

Price index for computer games: What is hidden from the naked eye?

This paper presents a study of the price dynamics of a wide range of video games in the time period from 2008 to 2020. During the research, a necessary database for analysis was created, video game prices were modeled using econometric methods, and price indices were constructed for various game genres: RPG (Role-Playing Game), strategy (Strategy), action (Action), adventure games (Adventure), causal games (Casual), indie games (Indie), simulators (Simulators) etc. Hypothetically, the price range of video games by genre and system requirements were due to the different amount of effort required to create them. During the construction of hedonistic price indices, prices were cleared from the characteristics of the quality of products (computer games). Video game system parameters were used as characteristics. The work also uses various approaches to modify hedonistic indices by considering genre heterogeneity. Thanks to the study, it is possible to track the dynamics of the behavior of the cost of video games over the considered period of time, with the representation of lagging and advancing trends. Genre diversification of the price elasticity of key variables used during the construction of models was provided.

회화작품과의 비교분석을 통한 인디 게임에 있어서의 착시 응용에 대한 연구

The combination of optical illusions and indie games has great potential for artistic expression. Based on optical illusions, this study examines the interaction between players and optical illusions in indie games, and focuses on optical illusions in contemporary indie games, which are compared and analyzed with paintings by artists such as Escher, Andrea Pozzo, Josef Alberts, and Luca Giordano to analyze the formative method that applies optical illusions in indie game art. Based on the development of indie games that use optical illusions formatively, four optical illusions are summarized: optical illusion of contradictory space, active viewpoint transformation of players, subjective visual perception of transformation, and reconstruction of light and shadow. Representative and influential indie games including “Monument Valley,” “Echochrome,” “Watch,” “Trick Art Dungeon,” “Shadowmatic,” “Superliminal,” and “Kubic” were selected and analyzed. As a result of comparing these independent games and artworks, it was concluded that modern optical independent video games should stimulate players' aesthetic cognitive function by properly fusing a simple screen, simple color use, and the complexity of optical space. If the 'circulation' and 'infinite' characteristics of optical illusions are dynamically applied through video games, it can be expected that a new formative art combined with interaction will be born.

Noita

In this article, we present a case study where we used timelines as a structuring method for understanding the creative process of game development spanning several years. In the case study, an indie game, Noita, with over ten years of development time, was analyzed through a multitude of sources such as devlogs, prototypes, builds, interviews and fan engagement. As a result, we came up with a timeline with over 150 entries in seven distinct phases to showcase the richness of the design journey, with multiple milestones and influences on the development process. In this article, we reflect on the research process and suggest the use of the timeline method as a part of the multidisciplinary toolset for studying game design.

Creative-Rational Tensions in Game Development

In this paper, we discuss an ethnographic field study conducted with a single 8-person development team operating within an established indie game company located in Copenhagen, Denmark, to explore how members of a development team – in this case mainly programmers and designers – coordinate their design ideas and development processes. In a view that accepts “the heterogeneity of production logics within the games industry” (Kerr 2017, 76), our study of a single company in Denmark contributes new insights on organized and managed team creativity by adding to this pool of varying forms of development. The paper inquires and develops a perspective to analyse collaborative game-making within a studio workplace. We explore two formats of game development team meetings, Sprint Reviews and Sprint Retrospectives, to understand the ways in which teams work together to balance ‘creative-rational tensions’ (Tschang 2007) between given expectations and deadlines as well as personal expressive interests.

Turnt, Trippy, and Tipsy: Video Games, Drugs, and Allo-Ludic Play

This article offers a flexible method for analyzing drug representations in video games as they map onto lived social realities outside the game with a particular focus on US cultures. While drugs have received ample attention in popular culture studies—especially in film and television studies—game studies has been slow to produce systematic analyses of these important cultural artefacts expressed through the video game medium. Drawing upon Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics and Steven Conway’s ludic framework (with the addition of allo-ludic play), this essay offers game studies scholars a flexible—perhaps even a “turnt”—taxonomy for analyzing the imbrication of virtual drugs inside the game and oppressive, discriminatory, and inequitable conditions of life in America outside the game. Through a brief analysis of stimulants, depressants, and psychedelics in Triple-A and indie games, the essay argues for the importance of studying drugs in video games to understand the complex, intersecting histories of the rise of the video game medium alongside the changeful histories of US drug policies, laws, and enforcement.

Building Your Dream Team: How Indie Teams Can Form, and Thrive Together.

The majority of indie game development teams are driven by the desire to produce a blockbuster game. But there are many obstacles on the way to realizing this desire, especially in the beginning. It is possible to create a game alone, but more often than not, something genuinely amazing involves a group of talented people working together toward a similar objective. Finding the correct stakeholders is one of the biggest problems with starting an independent game development team. People with the required technical talents, such as programmers and artists, as well as those with business acumen, like marketing and finance experts, are included in this. Success depends on being able to locate these people and manage them. But after the correct individuals have been identified, it is crucial to develop open lines of communication and a common comprehension of the project's objectives and expectations. Finding the perfect people to join their team is a problem that independent game development teams frequently encounter. Attracting talented individuals to a brand-new, unproven initiative might be difficult. The attention of skilled people interested in working on cutting-edge and intriguing initiatives might be attracted through networking. There are other things to consider as well since forming a team comes with the type of game one is making, finding skilled teammates, team chemistry, conflict resolution, communication, long-term relation maintenance and leadership aspects. In general, creating and leading an independent game team is a difficult process. There is no specific method for doing this, but with a little help from others' expertise, it is possible to assemble a team of creative people who can collaborate to produce a game that is genuinely enjoyable.

"Feels Like an Indie Game"-Evaluation of a Virtual Field Trip Prototype on Radioactive Waste Management Research for University Education.

This article describes the design and evaluation of a virtual field trip on the topic of radioactive waste management research for university education. We created an interactive virtual tour through the Mont Terri underground research laboratory by enhancing the virtual experiment information system, designed for domain experts, with background information, illustrations, tasks, tests, and an improved user interface. To put the tour's content into context, a conventional introductory presentation on the final disposal of radioactive waste was added. A user study with 22 participants proved a good perceived usability of the virtual tour and the virtual field trip's ability to transfer knowledge. These results suggest a benefit of employing virtual field trips in geoscientific university courses. In addition, it is conceivable to use the virtual field trip as a tool for science communication in the context of participatory processes during nuclear waste disposal site selection processes.

How does Text-to-image AI Affect Indie Game Designers and Artists?

This study delves into the impact of text-to-image artificial intelligence on independent game designers and artists. It underscores the paradigm shift in game design, exploring how AI tools facilitate the rapid production of unique game content and artwork, a particular advantage for indie creators. Employing qualitative methods such as interviews and case studies, the research gathers insights into the creative and practical applications of AI in game design. The findings emphasize the evolving role of game designers in an AI-integrated future, balancing artistic creativity with technical proficiency, while also acknowledging the ethical complexities introduced by AI. This research aims to provide an in-depth understanding of how indie game designers can leverage AI to foster innovation while navigating its challenges.

How time flows making games: An ethnographic analysis of experiences of temporality in an indie videogame studio

In research on videogame production, much attention has been given, justifiably, to ‘crunch’, whereby employees in large studios work extremely long hours for months at a time prior to a game’s launch, at the request of management. There has to date been limited research about how duration and urgency are experienced at other periods, and also in the economically and culturally significant ‘independent’ (or indie) sectors and companies. This article draws on a Deleuzian framework initially developed to analyse experience of temporality in academic research, and applies it to data generated by an ethnography of a UK-based indie game studio, which examined how games are produced as part of a more routine working life. The framework enables a re-examination of how ‘passionate’ work in the cultural industries is lived day-to-day, and aims to contribute to debates about the politics of time in the games sector, offering analytic resources which expand the vocabulary for expressing desired experiences of time in game work.

Visual Attention and Emotion Analysis Based on Qualitative Assessment and Eyetracking Metrics—The Perception of a Video Game Trailer

Video game trailers are very useful tools for attracting potential players. This research focuses on analyzing the emotions that arise while viewing video game trailers and the link between these emotions and storytelling and visual attention. The methodology consisted of a three-step task test with potential users: the first step was to identify the perception of indie games; the second step was to use the eyetracking device (gaze plot, heat map, and fixation points) and link them to fixation points (attention), viewing patterns, and non-visible areas; the third step was to interview users to understand impressions and questionnaires of emotions related to the trailer’s storytelling and expectations. The results show an effective assessment of visual attention together with visualization patterns, non-visible areas that may affect game expectations, fixation points linked to very specific emotions, and perceived narratives based on the gaze plot. The innovation in the mixed methodological approach has made it possible to obtain relevant data regarding the link between the emotions perceived by the user and the areas of attention collected with the device. The proposed methodology enables developers to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the information being conveyed so that they can tailor the trailer to the expectations of potential players.

Migration and interactive narrative in video games: scale, ethics, and experience

ABSTRACT A number of contemporary video games (and particularly independently developed or ‘indie’ games) explore migration in ways that are designed to elicit productive discomfort in Western audiences. In this article, I build on a combination of games research, narrative theory, and migration studies to examine how these games enrich and complicate the cultural representation of migration. My focus is on how different scales of migration converge in game experiences (and in the narratives bound up with those experiences), immersing the player in moral dilemmas that have no clear solution or ideal outcome. I study four indie games that deploy this conceptual and emotional dynamic within different genres: Papers, Please (2013), Bury Me, My Love (2017), Frostpunk (2018), and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (2018). By putting the player in touch with a variety of fictional migrants, these games walk a fine line between empathy for individual migrants and understanding of the large-scale factors that shape the lived experience of migration and the discourse surrounding it. Games thus mirror the real-world complexity of migration but also afford opportunities for more critical, or distanced, reflection than is possible in engaging with, for example, factual representation in the media.

한국 비디오게임의 문화신학적 해석 ‘원더포션’의‘산나비’를 중심으로

In order to discover Korean culture and identity in modern society, this paper tries to analyze the game ‘SANABI’ of ‘Wonder Portion’ which was awarded the Indie Game Award in 2022, borrowing many traditional Korean images among Korean video games using the cultural and artistic analysis method shown in Paul Tillich's ‘Theology of Culture.’
 ‘SANABI’ is a pixel-art type side-view flatformer action adventure game set in the Korean cyberpunk genre, which represents modern capitalism and traditional images of Korea. In the main work, the main character shows overcoming the alienation, where essence and existence are separated, and completing his identity by facing the end of sacrificing to save his daughter. It shows that the theme of Korean culture is inherent in the establishment of complexity and identity.
 This defines Korean culture and its identity as a union representing universality and specificity as a culture, and overcoming alienation that restores the essence of the union's actions. Therefore, the theology that Korean Christian theology should pursue is suggested to be a K-theology with ‘Consilience’ that combines Christian theology with various cultures to create a new culture by understanding the ‘complexity’ of K-content.

Status and Issue Analysis on Indie Game in China through CONCOR Analysis

Status and Issue Analysis on Indie Game in China through CONCOR Analysis

„If you want to be a butterfly, you have to be butterfly soup first“. „Coming of Age“-Erzählungen im Videospiel

For the longest time, literature has been widely known as the primary choice for portraying the trials and tribulations of growing up. While movies, music and series swiftly join in and adapt their own media-specific version of the coming-of-age genre, video games have hardly seemed to show any interest in depicting adolescent matters. Only recently journalistic publications have started to recognise the gradual rise of coming-of-age narrations in video games, especially in indie games. This rather late and sudden development appears to be quite ironic, as the medium has been commonly regarded to be particularly close to youth culture and young people. At the same time, this trend raises several questions regarding the driving factors of this development – e.g. historical, cultural, social or technical – as well as questions regarding the emerging possibilities of telling adolescent stories in an multimedia and interactive medium. Lastly, on a grander scale, it shines a light on the metaphorical adolescence of the so-called young medium, particularly in relation to its processors.

Indie Games in Wikipedia: analysis of the references used to frame games with educational possibilities

Resumen La diversidad en la industria de los videojuegos se manifiesta en una escena independiente que ha generado obras artísticas con grandes posibilidades educativas. El presente trabajo parte de una selección de 36 juegos independientes y analiza el contenido de sus artículos en Wikipedia. Se centra en las referencias que contienen dichos artículos para entender cómo son representados los juegos en este medio. Tras comprobar que 28 de estos juegos poseen artículos en Wikipedia, se obtuvieron las referencias bibliográficas ( \begin{equation}n = 2058\end{equation} n = 2058) identificado cada uno de los medios con los que se nutren estos artículos y clasificándolos en función de sus características. Los resultados muestran que los artículos varían en extensión, siendo Life is Strange el más amplio (120621 bytes) y el que contiene más referencias (185). Se observó también que el 61,5% de estas referencias corresponden a revistas y páginas sobre videojuegos y el 20,9% a otras de carácter más generalista. Los datos confirman que la mayoría de los artículos están construidos con fuentes de escaso rigor académico, lo que dificulta la exploración de las posibilidades educativas de estos juegos. Llama la atención la ausencia de libros, actas de congresos o revistas científicas, en particular del ámbito educativo, los games studies o el aprendizaje basado en juegos.

Joyce Weisbecker: The first indie game developer

Joyce Weisbecker was always interested in her father Joseph’s work. What child wouldn’t be? Joseph was the inventor of the Think-a-Dot and other games, a writer, and a magician who loved learning and teaching. But that’s not all. Joseph was also the engineer who led RCA into a new technological era with his 8-bit microprocessor architecture. Throughout the 1970s, he prototyped and developed a number of programmable video games, educational systems, and game consoles, all showcasing what a game changer the microprocessor was going to be to a nascent consumer electronics industry. These included the hobbyist’s build-it-yourself COSMAC Elf articles and the Studio II programmable video game console. Weisbecker followed along with her father’s inventions, spending time with him in his at-home workshop, and in the summer of 1976, before her freshman year in college, she sold her car race game <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Speedway</i> to RCA for its Studio II, making her the first indie game developer.

Playful Poetics: Metareferential Interfaces in Recent Indie Games

Abstract This article sets out to explore the playful poetics of recent indie games in terms of what could be described as metareferential interfaces. Drawing on a range of theories from literary studies, media studies, and game studies, we propose to conceptualize metareferential interfaces as interfaces that foreground and draw attention to their own mediality. They thus allow for videogame-specific forms of metareference and metalepsis to be employed as part of often quite experimental and aesthetically ambitious approaches to videogame design. Using the recent indie games Pony Island (2016) and OneShot (2016) as our core case studies, we offer an in-depth analysis of this metaization of videogames’ playful poetics, focusing primarily on three salient aspects: First, the multiplication of interfaces can lead to mise-en-abyme-like structures that highlight and reflect on the mediality of videogames while also establishing ontological boundaries between different levels of videogame storyworlds. Second, the disruption of interface functionality is a metareferential strategy that can be used to establish specific gameplay challenges and reflect on the design conventions of videogame interfaces. Third, the transgression of ontological boundaries affects not only the borders between subworlds within a videogame's storyworld but also the more fundamental distinction between what is “in the game” and what is “outside it.”