#its not like AAA studios would have less problems if they made weird indie games lol

[devsgames]

Me: "hey game developers, especially AAA ones, are getting laid off en-mass and it's awful for our industry" Gamer: "well I only play INDIE games and the problem with AAA games is they are creatively bankrupt"

Me, slamming my fists on the table like a baby: "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT THIS IS ABOUT A BUSINESS PROBLEM PERPETUATED BY CAPITALISM NOT A STATEMENT ON CREATIVE DECISION MAKING"

[myfriendpokey]

mystery market

most of my imagination of game culture comes from memories of video rental stores (which rented games, too), with hundreds of different packets of various levels of opacity, blurred alluring pictures, unaccountable gaps (why was there always a copy of The Fly II but never of The Fly?), an enormous immediate level of variation coupled with a strange sense of equivalence, of anonymity. 500 videocassettes which each cost the same to rent / are packaged in the same format / come from the same store are all essentially the same videotape, regardless of what any particular one contains, or how good or bad it might be - everything united through the levelling effect of exchange value. it was a place of great mystery to me but it was also a kind of market, and consequently the way i thought about videogames was also kind of like a market.

this is obviously a framework with sharp, sometimes gross, limitations, even if i'm not sure how fully avoidable it is - i get the joke when small developers invent "companies" called Bob Corp or Susan Industries but it's also sort of close to home when considering just how mediated our images of these things are through the formats most amenable to business and capital. but that being said i don't think this means they're necessarily tainted right through from the start, having an alienated or aestheticised image of these things can help to identify tensions within them, particularly when compared to later and more accurate impressions. i think in retrospect the appeal of the video store to me was as a perverse image of egalitarianism, one of a community where membership would not be given on the basis of some particular quality (being good, being smart, being worthwhile) but in a structural sense which ignored the existence of such qualities altogether. the fact that all the individual cassettes seemed lost in their own worlds, that there was no communication between one video and the other, also had a specific appeal if you were shy or aloof - it was a community which didn't necessitate talking to anyone. and i wonder in general re. the famous affinity of white nerds with market capitalism if, on an emotional if not economic level, it's in part driven less by individualism than a sense of the community of commodities, one which opens indiscriminately to anyone willing to pay, heedless of all invisible hierarchies of social communication - while of course sidestepping the question of who is able to pay, and why, and allowing for the continued pleasant ressentiment towards other, supposedly more sectarian communities (i.e. ones excluding the speaker)  such as blacks, gays, women, etc. so the video-store-as-utopia image doesn't hold up, not just in the most obvious sense of where and who it existed for but even as an experience in itself - where unless you're 8 years old it almost immediately becomes obvious that the videos on display are far less heterogenuous than they initially appear, overwhelmingly the same recent-ish studio productions, the same aspirations and assumed set of references and emotional priorities, same genre signifiers and same functions, like one of those 999 game-in-one cartridges where 994 of the games are just variations of tetris. and in fact this experience is magnified even more enormously in any kind of "open" online market, such as steam or the app store or netflix, where the particular unease comes from the coupling of almost infinite choice with an uncanny lack of actual variation, like bad procedural generation, every possible combination of zombies and match-3 repeating endlessly into the horizon, in fact like a sort of negative image of our earlier videotape fantasy: where instead of individuality existing in a fixed structure we have the coexistence of an open structure with blandly oversimilar, repetitive elements. this might not be especially less "egalitarian" than our previous examples, "you can watch anything if you have money" not that much less limiting than "you can play anything as long as it's match-3" but i think it does highlight one of the felt contradictions of the system - in the discrepancy between the cultural fantasy image of endless "choice", sensation, multiplicity and the real economic factors which ensure such multiplicity will only ever be a fleeting dream before the increasingly uniform accumulation of capital.

i don't know what such contradictions are worth, although the enormous amounts of money and energy spent trying to fix or elide them suggest they're at least worth something - for example every essay or news report in a financial magazine taking the time to point out either that videogames are healthy in some neurological way or else focusing on the bright creative young things who are even now moving this horrible medium away from shooter games and collectibles and closer to dare we say it "art", the frequency of which have risen as the amount of money both made and invested in the format continues to grow. surely nothing this profitable can be ALL bad, surely there isn't a totally irreconcileable break between profit and human value. the question of whether videogames are art is political in the sense that it touches on one of those deep ideological articles of faith which provide legitimacy to economic or political order, like free trade equals freedom or capitalism being a natural fit with democracy, in this case the idea that commercial culture can never depart too dramatically from accepted parameters of merit and taste, which is typically a fantasy both sides are invested in maintaining even as the restless desire for more profits and more markets ensures the line is always only moving one way. in the same way that many proponents of truly free trade would (presumably) still feel some distaste at the prospect of selling heroin to teenagers even hardened conservatives can become a little sickly at the prospect that the future of the film industry consists of 44 years of spiderman reboots and pornography.

which brings us back to indie games, and to a certain awkward argument within them; namely, are these things meant to be replacing the existing industry or just supplementing it? with the consensus, by now, firmly with the latter. it's a little eerie to imagine "indie games" on their own, out of the contrast with some AAA counterpart - they immediately begin to seem more diffuse, if not distracted, stylish but also curiously listless outside of the deep mulch of practice games, physics toys, and abandoned projects that make up the majority of development practice. how much more sense they make as kind of a vitamin tablet, as transient and local infusions of colour, inventiveness and thought helping to smooth over cracks in an otherwise regimented genre landscape - and acting the same way in a moral capacity, where playing a short cute, weird, empathic or political game sort of clears your conscience about going back to play another 50 hours of destiny in the same way that jogging to work "earns" you a packet of crisps later on. which isn't necessarily to dismiss these games, which i think might require another 10 years to see clearly, to understand what "indie" meant to people growing up online or playing videogames - but i do think that lending themselves so readily to a place in this moral economy, acting as the human, creative supplement which makes videogames seem bearable, being the GOOD games, plays maybe more readily into the ideological survival of a dismal market consensus than maybe anyone involved would like to think.

does this mean moving away from things which are cute, weird, empathic or political in favor of some kind of bleak accelerationist impulse (everyone just make spiderman games now. no future), i don't think so. in a weird way i think part of the reason that image of the video store has stuck with me is as counterpoint to this equation of interesting or weird work with values of individuality, creativity, moral seriousness, all the other virtues that small developers are asked to provide in proportion to their gradually vanishing from the scorched earth of consumer culture. the alienated video store image, for reasons discussed above, is untenable as an actual proposal, but it's worth considering what that image, or that desire, represents: the difference between the dream image and the reality is that one is a market without competition, and this discrepency i think strikes at something real, the tendency of competition to extinguish that "variety" held up as the friendly, carnivalesque face of the market, the tendency of capital to eat away at those very features habitually portrayed as its most acceptable. when i think of the most appealling prospects offered by homebrew videogames i invariably think of those which assume from the start that competition is what's holding them back, like the glorious trainwrecks pirate karts or david kanaga's unionization proposal, both of which imply that true variety is only compatible with the equitable structures that they set out to create - which in other words argue for a basic fault in capitalism from the start and a need to move apart from it rather than that of finding aesthetic solutions for economic problems. i think at this point if there's anything i'd "like to see" it's just acknowledging how shitty the existing system for making and distributing these things is, and how few people it actually works for, and trying to move away from the idea that a few "cool folkz" making a living is good enough, broader structures, colder structures. both videogames and video stores are compromised by capital; the value of both is in their insufficiency, in the sense of promises not kept, of unfinished business.