What counts as an "Indie" or "Small press" game?

[Travis Brown]

As proposed by Skull, this is split from another thread.


This is a question for an entirely different topic, if you feel like it, post one up about it I'm sure there is some interesting input to be had, for me my qualifiers are generally this:

-must have less than 5 people affiliated directly with the inception of it
-must be printing in less than 2000 copy runs of a single product (at any given time) Burning wheel is at the top notch of this qualifier.
-must outsource printing (not own a press, which pretty much only disqualified WotC)
-Generally is focused around story gaming
-should not (in my opinion) be a direct mod or hack or license of a mainstream system, (IE D20)

A year ago I would have said basically anyone who could not get Alliance to distribute them directly would count, but now with the market being so bad Alliance is willing to carry anyone in order to edge out the small press consolidation houses.

[Jake Richmond]

We (you and I) have had this conversation before. I'm not overly fond of the term "indie", but I use it for a few reasons.

1. It's a popular identifier used by much of the community that's come up around the Forge, Storygames and other sites. When I mention "indie", you know what I'm talking about in this context. So what it has going for it is ease of use and familiarity within the target community.

2. The term indie carries weight in the local media. When I tell a journalist or blogger that we play and make indie games, they can picture what that is. They know what inide films, music and comics are. Indie games slides right in next to that in their mind. For promoting what we do to outsiders, indie is a fantastic tag.

That being said, indie is otherwise pretty worthless. It doesn't tell you anything about the games, the people that play them or make them, or the art form.

The problem with the qualifiers you're mentioning above is that every single one of them is broken by at least a few, and in most cases several, indie games.

Small press is a better tag for what we do. If small press means a product distributed outside the mainstream markets or printed in small quantities, then that pretty much covers all of us. Small press covers everything from single sheet hand folded photo copies like Sea Dracula to deluxe full color books like Mouse Guard. It covers games made bya single creator and games made by a dozen work-for-hire employees. It covers games that sell 10 copies and games that sell 5000. It covers traditional games and innovative new games. It covers everything, and that's the problem.

While we're all certainly small press publishers, so are the guys that release D20 splat books. So is every publisher who crams the Alliance catalog and the RPGNOW site with unimaginative and generic crap. I'm proud to be a small press publisher. But that's not all I am. I try to create my games to do and be something different. I know we all do.

The tag "Story Games" doesn't cover everything either. neither does "roleplaying games" for that matter. So the problem we have is that we need a tag that covers everything our local community plays and publishes. The tag also has to be recognizable to the larger national and international communities taht many of us participate in, if only to facilitate communication. More importantly, it needs to make sense to the outsiders, new players and media members interested in what we're doing.

Here's what I do. I use indie games as the tag, small press as the qualifier and art as the goal. I actually prefer the term "art games". but I seem to be alone in this.

Jake

[elegua]

That being said, indie is otherwise pretty worthless. It doesn't tell you anything about the games, the people that play them or make them, or the art form.

The problem with the qualifiers you're mentioning above is that every single one of them is broken by at least a few, and in most cases several, indie games.

Small press is a better tag for what we do.

While we're all certainly small press publishers, so are the guys that release D20 splat books. So is every publisher who crams the Alliance catalog and the RPGNOW site with unimaginative and generic crap. I'm proud to be a small press publisher. But that's not all I am. I try to create my games to do and be something different. I know we all do.

Here's what I do. I use indie games as the tag, small press as the qualifier and art as the goal. I actually prefer the term "art games". but I seem to be alone in this.

I will make matters worse by saying that I hate the term "game". I think it evokes too many other products which focus on mechanical absolutes and thus misrepresents many games which are breaking away from that. I like the direction of the term "art games", but I'm not sure of the usefulness.

Perhaps the public face should be "indie" because as Jake points out it has a lot of weight in the lay community. Although, this does have the unfortunate consequence of continuing to associate with role-playing games, which may be limiting the growth potential due to public preconceptions.

Regardless, whatever single term is used to collect the increasing diversity of activities we are interested in will be insufficient, so it should just point in a direction for people who aren't already enculturated to understand. Perhaps it is time to start trying to define insider terms to be more specific when we communicate with each other.

[Jake Richmond]

I will make matters worse by saying that I hate the term "game". I think it evokes too many other products which focus on mechanical absolutes and thus misrepresents many games which are breaking away from that. I like the direction of the term "art games", but I'm not sure of the usefulness.

I was thinking about this earlier tonight, and I agree. So many of these things aren't really games. or they aren't anything close to what most people think of as games. The term is misleading. A lot of these are really collaborative story engines, world building guidelines or shared-narrative experiences. Game just isn't the right word.

[Travis Brown]

Yeah a game like "Death's door" barely qualifies as a game, it's more of a psychological experiment and a story telling exercise than anything.

I don't like the term "art game" for a number of reason, firstly it sounds pretentious like we're trying to make it seem more important on a cultural level, and also as an identifier for outsiders it makes the work seem like fluff rather than something with substance.

I should have stipulated in my first post that all indie games fall into at least a few of the qualifiers above but none of them fit the mold of all of them as you pointed out.

I think you hit upon something compelling when you mentioned "Role Playing games" don't even qualify as an accurate identifier. There is no major term that will work to identify us to the outside world as well as categorize all of what we do into one basket, as it is it seems that some people can't even figure out that "role playing" is actually the act of playing the role of a character in a situation and acting as that character would in the situation, a vast majority of people like to treat "role playing" as a license to do immoral and despicable things that they (and most characters for that matter) would never do, or just treat it as an engine for a text based hack n slash equivalent to a first person shooter.

I have always been a big supporter of the term "small press" mostly because I feel that "indie" can also have the same effect as "art games" in that it can come off overly "artsy-fartsy" and "we're so much more important than the mainstream" kind of attitudes. But admittedly small press is a harder identifier for some who don't understand what that means. On the flip side though, the "Indie" scene has become much less elitist since the early 90's and the Jeanine Gerafalo sect Indie supporters where it really was an inaccessible elitist art form in many ways, now it's much more open minded and broader.

[Skull]

I have always assumed that the term "game" implied as sense of fun, not a sense of rigid rule structure. The most earliest forms of games didn't have very many rules to them at all and even just had a basic goal. I have heard though that the word game is meant to imply that someone is to win while everyone else loses. i personally do not see this as being true. its an argument that ignores the minority over the majority. However, i do like the term "Story Engine"; unlike a normal rpg -this implies a sense of inter-personal conflict that the characters deal with together through the use of verbal communication (or at least that is the best way i can put it). You don't that sense that you get from hearing the name D&D, which invokes images of mindless dungeon crawls, not stop monster killing madness, and all the things that gamers hate or make fun of in the community.

I never liked the term indie either, to broad of a word for what we play. So if we are going to redefine what these games are we should work in the general direction of story engine and such. I'm not against the use of game though since these are still games, we still play them for the fun of it. But our games are more "socail games" than what you can get elsewhere.

[Joel P. Shempert]

I think we need to seriously consider the purpose of this discussion. If the purpose is working out "just what is it we do?" and/or "how do we describe what we do to others?" then we're fine. For that topic I'm with Jake in using different terms in different contexts, and holding terms lightly. Trying too hard to lock down definitions and anchoring our identity to them is counterproductive, and uninviting to others.

If, on the other hand, the purpose is "Draw borders around our activity so we can decide what to ban unequivocally from our events" (which is the origin of the topic in the parent thread), then that discussion is pure poison. Tread carefully, people.

Peace,
-Joel

[Skull]

Sorry, i keep doing that. if i need to move that part of the post i can and place it to the right place. I believe we are talking about "what is Indie games"  My mind wonders at times, i apologies.

[Willem]

I like "art games" a lot, at least as a descriptor for those games that need it. Obviously "games" kinda sucks, but then something more accurate like "art play" sounds a bit like the term I made of for bestiality: "farm play". Which just makes it sound weird to my ear.

I would call Death's Door, Shock:, Polaris, TYWAD, PTA, In A Wicked Age, Capes, all "art games". I wouldn't call Crossroads of Eternity, Red Box Hack, Artesia RPG "art games".

I would point to games like The Shadow of Yesterday, Spirit of the Century, Burning Wheel, as games that take advantage of blurring the boundaries between the two.

Labels come in handy when you use them to point to a central idea, but they have no real boundaries. And savvy creators will always blur the edges of genres, categories, and design ideas to make new things.

I'll probably continue to use "indie game" or "story game" to mean "art game" until someone gives me a really good reason to stop.

[Jake Richmond]

I think we need to seriously consider the purpose of this discussion. If the purpose is working out "just what is it we do?" and/or "how do we describe what we do to others?" then we're fine. For that topic I'm with Jake in using different terms in different contexts, and holding terms lightly. Trying too hard to lock down definitions and anchoring our identity to them is counterproductive, and uninviting to others.

If, on the other hand, the purpose is "Draw borders around our activity so we can decide what to ban unequivocally from our events" (which is the origin of the topic in the parent thread), then that discussion is pure poison. Tread carefully, people.

Peace,
-Joel

Agreed. my purpose in posting to this thread was only to provide my own definitions for terms I use, and to mention which terms I prefer and why I use them.

[Travis Brown]

Trying too hard to lock down definitions and anchoring our identity to them is counterproductive, and uninviting to others.

I actually feel entirely the opposite here, while I don't think we need to anchor our identity to anything, having some sort of uniformity makes things more accessible and able to be grasped by outside people, which is the whole point for even trying to come up with defining terms at all. I mean we all more or less know what we do and why we do it, but in order to get others who are more mainstream to learn and understand, we have to "dumb down" the label to it's lowest common denominator so to speak.

If, on the other hand, the purpose is "Draw borders around our activity so we can decide what to ban unequivocally from our events" (which is the origin of the topic in the parent thread), then that discussion is pure poison. Tread carefully, people.

I actually don't see how anything in the parent thread was about banning anything with the exception of mainstream titles, which it's still up to individuals what they want to play, but the official community "GoPlay" events I feel stem off the original gathers which are "indie" only. And while yes this topic did derive from another topic as you suggest, it is more a philosophical discussion on the meaning of what we do and how we choose to label it, at least from my perspective it is. I don't see that anything is a specific goal here, but should we discover a great term that brings understanding to "nonbelievers", encompasses most of what we do without pigeonholing us into one stereotype, then so much the better.

[Tyler Tisnley]

i'm tring to not step on any toes but...

I tend to think a list of qualifiers for what is and is not "Indie" is more like a sign outside of a tree fort that reads Boys club, NO GIRLS! Meaning it really just feels like a method to exclude rather then include.

I can understand the need for the branding and the actual need for a response to the question "what is an indie game" i think the response should be more about marketing then scientific qualifications.

If someone asked me what indie gaming was about I would respond "it's a whole new flavor of roleplaying, it's easy to learn so lets start a game."

Just as much as the indie branding can help, an exclusionary attitude will close far more doors then it opens.

[elegua]

I tend to think a list of qualifiers for what is and is not "Indie" is more like a sign outside of a tree fort that reads Boys club, NO GIRLS! Meaning it really just feels like a method to exclude rather then include.
...
Just as much as the indie branding can help, an exclusionary altitude will close far more doors then it opens.

I think drawing any sort of line is both inclusive and exclusive. Sometimes it is appropriate to exclude, but I agree it is easy to cross from excluding to deriding. I don't think it is bad to exclude certain activities or products from the definition of "indy", but I think we should continue to be respectful to the excluded.

[Travis Brown]

I agree with everything Tyler just said, I think he's right that putting a defining label on it can also establish clearly what's not allowed and gives an aire of exclusion. I also think that this is majorly a marketing concept, more than an organizational idea.

I think the purpose of this topic is really to aid us in talking to outside people so that we don't go "oh uhhh, well we play home made games that tell stories I guess" or something to that effect.

As far as what to include or prohibit I think things might crop up on a case by case basis where we as a group go, "oh wait, that seems like it's a weird fit" and opt to not include it. But ultimately I think that most people who gravitate to this community know what it's for and so people won't pose games that are clearly not in the norm of what we usually pursue, but that of course doesn't bar us from playing those games whenever we want outside of "official" events.

[Jake Richmond]

Just as an off note, the stuff we'll be displaying at the Indie Hurricane table this year is pretty diverse. It includes game books of all sizes of course, but also dolls, magnets, leather crafts, clothing, cookies and panties. Plus stuff I'm sure I'm forgetting. It's a diverse mix of stuff, but it also represents the talented designers that are part of this community and the games they are creating.