Indie appeal
I started playing video games when I was about five years old, cutting my teeth on MS-DOS and the Sega Master System. The first game I ever played was Alex Kidd in Miracle World.
By contrast, a gamer who is five years old today was born during the heyday of the PlayStation 2. His first Mario game might have been Super Mario Sunshine, and Halo 2 came out before he knew how to read.
What, I wonder, would today’s five-year-old gamer — or any new gamer, for that matter — think of the burgeoning indie scene?
It seems to me that many independent games rely on an appreciation of, or at least a familiarity with, video games of the 1980s and 1990s. Judith’s stark textures and sprites evoke early first-person shooters like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. Don’t Look Back counts on the player having internalized platformer conventions (such as timed jumping puzzles and Mega Man-style boss HP meters) so they can be subverted halfway through. Games like You Have to Burn the Rope and ROM Check Fail are probably unintelligible without context. And of course loads of indie games, from Passage to I Wish I Were the Moon, use low-fidelity graphics out of the NES era — which, whether by necessity or as an aesthetic choice, are nostalgic for some but potentially alienating for others.
Do these games resonate with an audience that is new to the medium? Perhaps. They certainly don’t suffer from a lack of availability; all the games mentioned above are free, and most of are even playable in a browser. If some of their effect depends on familiarity with older games, though, the appeal will be limited. We’re staring down the Long Tail of video games, and indies are at the far end of the curve.
What I assume will probably happen is those kids won’t know about “the classics” and will assume that these indie games sprung up out of the ground. I know that’s kind of what I did with films from my childhood.
As an example of what I mean, instead of seeing “Wall-E” as a progression of the animated film from Disney cartoons, to Toy Story, to Shrek which is what people our age would probably do, for 5 year old’s (at least until they discover those older films) they’ll probably just always assume Wall-E was the ‘template’ that other future films built off. Except that they’ll be thinking in terms of the “Halo’s” and the “World of Goo’s”. Heck, I didn’t even know Judith was a riff on the old Bluebeard tale until someone mentioned it to me. I’d just never heard the story before.
My first game was Final Fantasy VIII. My parents tried to hide video games from me all my life. Even now in the summer before I go to College My mother has hidden the xbox a friend of mine lent me to mod into a media center.
With this complete misunderstanding I ended up playing a lot of games via emulation and roms for me to try classics. I’ve played all of the indie games you mentioned too since the free aspect and pc aspect made things easier to hide. And even with my lack of background knowledge I still appreciate them. The only games I emulated on pre PSX hardware was mother 2 and Chrono Trigger and despite that news sites such as IGN and 1up are talking about it all the time why this was good and why that was bad and so if you look for it you can find the references.
Basically I feel like the people who would go and play indie games wouldn’t have the problem of not knowing and indie games caters to mainly hardcore gamers anyway.
I don’t think they’d like or care for them when they’re five. But they’re not games for five-year-olds.
I don’t think it’s that they appeal to “hardcore” sensibilities – You Have To Burn The Rope is practically the opposite of hardcore. I think it’s more that you need the deep knowledge, the sense of history, the understandings of genre that come with experience, to understand much of the Indie scene (or, at least, the parts you’re describing). Much of the exciting edges of the indie scene are, in fact, reactive games – games reacting to other titles, or trends, or pushing the envelope of what’s possible.
So I wouldn’t recommend many of them as first games to anyone. Braid isn’t as powerful if you’ve not played Super Mario Bros.
The question isn’t “will today’s five-year-olds like them?”. I think the more interesting question is: “how do we give today’s five-year-olds the understanding of gaming history required to understand the 2009 indie scene?”. So many people – gamers, developers, you name it – have a terrible sense of gaming’s history, let alone five-year-olds, and finding ways to communicate that is becoming ever-more important.
(Also: I wouldn’t ask people who’d just learned to read what they thought of Middlemarch, nor, frankly, what a sixteen-year-old thought of it; it’s a book for when you’re older. Whilst games cross boundaries in ways other media cannot, I think it’s OK to sometimes say: some games are for when you’re older, and I don’t mean in an M-FOR-MATURE kind of way).
Probably the same way people who get into music via Lady GaGa view the lifework of J.S Bach.
“what is this outdated bullshit?”
Much like modern literature gains depth through the context that was built over time, so will video games.
Tom: You’re right, of course. I should have framed the post better — I didn’t mean to posit that indie games are inaccessible to people who are very young, but rather that they are inaccessible to people with limited gaming experience (of any age).
Thanks for the comments, everyone. Interesting theories on where we’re headed.
(This post may be a little old but I couldn’t help but notice that I fit your profile of “the new gamer exposed to the burgeoning indie scene”, so I thought I’d chime in.)
I only started being interested in video games as a narrative medium since a couple months ago when a friend innocently coerced me into playing Earthbound. Essentially I jumped straight from Mario and Zelda 64 to Braid, Cave Story and Knytt Stories without touching Half Life, Halo, Resident Evil, or any title with the word “gear” in it (although I still play new Zeldas and Marios out of habit, and the rare Shadow of the Colossus or Portal).
Mainly it’s a money and time issue, but there you have it- Someone with a very limited mainstream gaming experience whose frame of reference consists (so far) mostly of freeware indie titles and text-based interactive fiction. Will I like Cave Story more for having played a Metroid game? Does the fact that I’ve never owned a console outside of the N64, Gamecube and Wii diminish my judgement of what makes Braid so challenging and fun? I do feel that I collect a lot of the retro joy of those older games secondhand, if you will, by playing so many games that draw from or refer to classic titles.
Recently I finished reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I enjoyed the book on one level, but it was clear to me that knowing more than I did about the Jazz Age (in which the novel was written) and the social and cultural factors Fitzgerald incorporated into the fabric of his story would probably greatly enhance my understanding of it. But I felt no greater need to plumb its depths- It was a good story, and I enjoyed reading it. I tried reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, and upon realizing that enjoying the novel depended on a greater level of commitment than I was prepared to give it, I stopped after the first five pages.
I like thinking about games. I like to read academic journals about games. The process by which the gaming culture of the past informs the present intrigues me. The trick might be finding those non-gamers who are willing to put in the effort of research- But inevitably you will have a generation of Gatsby and Ulysses players, who, lacking any cultural context, will reject or accept a game based on its own merits, regardless of what the more-informed population thinks. I believe they will, however, benefit from sites like this, where context is readily available to interested parties like myself.
So, speaking of Cave Story, one of the things I found most appealing about it was the music. Do you have any thoughts on it?