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[In this spirited opinion piece, GameSetWatch guest editor Jenn Frank takes a look at the latest cavalcade in the discussion of independent and alternative video games, concentrating -- interestingly enough -- on the response as much as the statement.]

I really like Jim Sterling's recent Destructoid column -- not necessarily because of any of the points it makes, mind, but more because of the ensuing, often aggressive responses from other gamers, developers, and reviewers.

There's a writers' resource called the 39 steps that I also like. Actually, it's just a list of helpful hints for good fiction writing, but it's a really, really good list. And a lot of its little kernels of advice, I think, can be applied to game design philosophies, too.

For instance, I've always really liked #23:

"Obscurity is not subtlety; intentional obscurity is pinheaded and unkind."

I do feel that way about games sometimes. I think you can be subtle without being deliberately mean to your player, or willfully alienating him. I think assigning ponderous meanings to mundane in-game actions is kind of a lazy way to work Big Existential Truths into your story. I think some games are disingenuous facsimiles of other, better games. I like 'indie gaming' on the whole, because I like creative underdogs, and because the games themselves tend to be shorter and easier to pencil into my calendar. Still, I've played some pretty terrible ones. Similarly, I don't think all puzzle games are great, even though I really like puzzle games.

So I'm pretty noncommittal. I think these opinions -- which are by no means the opinions of GameSetWatch, thank you -- are pretty low-key and moderate and not especially meaningful or groundbreaking or much of anything.

Now that I've fully shown my hand, let's gossip. I sure love gossip.

Currently, my Twitter feed is full of games journalists and artists whose dietary habits and foursquare updates I like to track. And today a lot of them were very apparently furious about something. Since bluster and ire tend to make me giggle (as long as those things are not actually directed at me), I did some backtracking and eavesdropping.

That is how I found all these little 140-character feuds and sparring matches with Destructoid writer Jim Sterling. I had trouble making real sense of those conversations, so I scouted out Sterling's February 7 Destructoid column, "Indie games don't have to act like indie games," which, OK, the title actually kind of made me grin in spite of myself, maybe because it made me think of this gem. (Also, when I first wrote this paragraph, I had not yet seen this.)

But now that I've read his piece, I'm a little confused about the commotion.

Jim Sterling's arguments themselves are inoffensive and moderate, but they're presented in a deliberately bombastic, even confusingly inflammatory way. But with all the brimstone stripped away, he basically says games can be artful and still fun to play, if they'd only try to be more fun and, sometimes, more playable. He says some games are hipster indie imitations, filching elements from genuinely good games, passing superficial, intentional obscurity off as real depth. And finally, he seems to think that some games get away with being bad because no reviewer will just come out and say they're bad, or why.

In fact, the brunt of Sterling's put-on umbrage seems to be with last year's game The Path. And probably his umbrage is fair, because not every player adored it, exactly.

In his review of that game, indie game critic Michael Rose takes great pains to explain that The Path is absolutely not a game, even as he goes on to repeatedly refer to it as a game (and "as a game," he says, "it's pretty boring"). Still later, Rose decrees that the 2009 un-game is "this year's weirdest game."

So even for the skilled reviewer, the critique itself involves some problematic conflation, and by review's end, Rose ultimately sighs that he isn't sure whether to recommend The Path at all.

Rose also writes,

"Unlike other recent attempts at arty gaming (see Flower), [developers] Tale of Tales have not drawn that line between and art and gaming well enough."

Apparently, though, neither can players: do we want to game, or do we want to be art patrons? Are we distressed when we're asked to do and be both at once? How fun should a game be? How fun should art be? Should art be painful to play? How, exactly, should we criticize painfully unfun non-game art?

But I am getting away from my real point, which isn't actually Jim Sterling's column at all, or my defense of it, or what I think about game design, or whether The Path is good or bad or fun or artful or even a real game.

The main point of interest, here, is all the responses Sterling's editorial has elicited. In Destructoid's own comments sections, there's quite a lot of "Finally! Tell off those pretentious indies!" There are also some better conceived comments that try to negotiate the 'game' and 'art' thing without conflation (though you'll find more meticulously careful conversation in here instead). There's some mudslinging, too, at mainstream games -- which, to hear it told by some, are apparently now bereft of artistic merit -- and at Jim himself, for being a blowhard.

I'd go so far to say that Sterling isn't really saying anything in particular, albeit in his trademark brassy way. So, as is always the way with the Internet, people hear what they would like to hear. And how people respond to the column says more about their own philosophies than it says about the column's.

So now, fascinatingly, you have all these mainstream game reviewers talking suddenly about how maybe mainstream games are creatively bankrupt, and they're championing the indie game scene and shaking their fists. And I like the noble, vocal intent there, but it's a little awkward to witness. Because Jim Sterling's final point -- that some games get away with being bad because no reviewer can bring himself to speak an ill word against them -- is basically proven all over again by the responses.

That's... kind of uncomfortable. Jim Sterling's epic troll ("indie games get away with being bad") has hoodwinked perfectly reasonable people into saying, essentially, that every indie game is great, which is just something of a literal impossibility. Oops.

Then, in the other corner, you have Jim Sterling's seemingly lone defender -- reputable, big-time game developer David Jaffe! -- who has taken the column's most salient points and run screaming in the opposite direction with them.

Jaffe even goes so far as to take "pretentious, full of shit 'journalists'" to task (and I do like the scare quotes around 'journalists'!) for "lauding and hyping these types of games."

Reading that, I reflexively wondered if this weren't some veiled insecurity, some sort of fearfulness about how the video game landscape -- how games are made, how they are bought and sold, or how we choose to talk about gaming -- is changing. But I think that would require Jaffe to take independently-made games seriously enough to be frightened of them, and I'm not entirely sure that he does.

Of these pretentious 'journalists,' Jaffe writes,

"Often times I think these writers go on and on about a lot of this arty farty stuff so it makes them feel like their own work is important (i.e. they are letting their readers in on something special and important versus simply writing about how many new weapons exist in modern shooter/alien invasion/football sim game #42)."

There might be some truth to that -- although, probably, my need to feel special and important is not all that keeps me from gushing about framerates and football sims -- but the real truth might be even more damning.

While good indie games are well worth championing, particularly for the benefit of those people who otherwise might not find them, perhaps game reviewers are reluctant to criticize badly made indie games because it feels too much like, say, crushing a house made of popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners.

The fact of the matter might be -- and this is very uncomfortable for me to type out -- a lot of reviewers don't take the indie 'genre' seriously enough to challenge or even criticize the bad games. It feels too cruel, too mean, in the same way it is cruel to kick a puppy or steal candy from a baby.

Maybe a lot of game reviewers really don't give indie games the professional and helpful criticism they really deserve, then, because they or we secretly deny indie games the status, the credibility, that we reserve for big-budget titles. Maybe, too, reviewers are prone to gush because those games consistently exceed their secretly low expectations.

Maybe.

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Home and The Graveyard.]

I hate the word "pretentious" in art criticism.

I understand why people use it. Often we call something pretentious when we think the artist might be concealing a lack of meaning or vision behind obscurity, jargon, or a set of conventions currently hallowed by the art establishment. It's a way of saying "I don't get this, and I don't know that there's anything to get" that shifts the blame (if blame even applies in so subjective an area as one's response to artwork) onto the artist rather than ourselves.

Two things I don't like about this approach. First, it operates from an instinct of contempt. Labeling an artist pretentious assumes the worst about someone whose motives aren't knowable.

Second, it says nothing, nothing at all, about the work itself. It's all about the artist.

Recently I've played two games about old age and the approach of death that have been tarred as "pretentious", as well as boring and ungamelike: Home, by Stephen Lavelle, and Tale of Tales' The Graveyard, from last year. ("Pretentious" citations for The Graveyard: 1, 2, 3; for Home, with some discussion, 1.)

I consider these two works edge cases when it comes to criticizing games. Home is very brief and lacks just about everything that might make it appealing on aesthetic grounds. The graphics are the retro-pixellated stuff that has become obligatory for certain kinds of Art Game these days. The dialogue, such as it is, is not especially riveting.

Nonetheless Home does have gameplay, and the meaning of the work arises procedurally from the rules rather than from any exterior framework. It uses its interactivity to express the helplessness of an elderly man as he tries to feed himself, use the toilet, and sleep when he needs to. The player is allowed to try to satisfy these needs, but the timing is such that he will not be able to, and instead will lose control over each function in turn. It's an intentionally frustrating play that spirals into failure and predictable death, with the interactivity giving the player just enough space to struggle against that frustration.

On an adjacent edge is The Graveyard, which has virtually no gameplay. The interaction consists of steering an old lady who walks very slowly towards a bench. Then she sits down (not thanks to anything you do, mind), and a song plays. You can perhaps make her stand up and walk out again, or not. The only real exercise of choice you have is to end the game prematurely without seeing all of the content. Even that option may be taken away in the event that the old woman dies, which she may do at random if you have the game's full version rather than the demo.

To the extent that interaction matters in this work, it is to emphasize constraint: the degree to which the woman is limited in speed and agility, the degree to which the player cannot even control the full range of her limited abilities. But even this matters very little. Tale of Tales has done its best to discourage the player from even thinking the game might be more interactive than it is. Pressing ESC during play will bring up a complete walkthrough that describes everything that is possible to do in the game, lest the player be tempted to try to explore or leave the prescribed path in any way.

On the other hand, The Graveyard is the product of great craft and care in the environment. Though it is in black and white, there is a kind of lushness about the visuals, and the soundscape of animal sounds and fading urban noise is meticulously constructed and evocative. Tale of Tales excels at atmospheric work.

Both Home and The Graveyard are exploring what can be done to express emotions and states not commonly found in games. The positive reviews they've received by and large applaud them for this. I share this admiration. (I've now written up two other works by Tale of Tales, both of which I found to some degree frustrating, so it's perhaps curious that I was excited when I saw the promotion for The Graveyard that allowed me to download the full version for free. Clearly there's a disconnect here between my enjoyment of these works while playing and their long-term value for me. Perhaps I will feel the same about The Graveyard, though of the three it is plainly the slightest in both duration and significance.)

At the same time, I found both pieces unsatisfying, in related ways. I would like to explore why, though with the word "pretentious" off the table.

Home is very simple. It takes only a couple of minutes to play, but that is much longer than it takes to grasp the game's message: that dying is slow, horrible, and undignified, and that our attempts to mediate the process for the elderly may make things even more undignified by stripping them of any agency.

It is challenging to create art around a direct message of this kind and have the result seem like anything but propaganda. And Home is not even very strong propaganda. The most effective procedural propaganda works by presenting the player with what at least appears to be a valid simulation, and allowing the player to discover the rules embedded inside that simulation and to draw his own conclusions. Home, by contrast, tips its hand from the start. The situation is obviously rigged; it is plain that we will never be able to save the old man; there is no point in struggling very hard with the game nor in replaying to try to achieve a better outcome.

By using the extremely basic graphics, Lavelle is presenting Home to be read in context with other entries in the same aesthetically minimal genre of art game -- most notably, Passage and The Marriage. Works in this genre tend to offer some universalized observation about human existence. The format of Home thus offers us a clue about what kind of content we may expect from it, but in practice it lacks the slow reveal of those other works.

The Graveyard does not have a message in the same way. It is more about presenting observations (here is what an old woman looks like; here are what her thoughts might be, presented as song). Instead of being blunt, it is vague, allusive, and obscure. We may hunt for a significance, but we have no way of being sure we've found one. There is not a story as such.

Nonetheless, the presentation of the game -- the black and white images, the deliberately sluggish controls, the fact that a complete walkthrough is built into the instructions -- all indicate that we should expect to read this game differently than we read other games. But it does not (in my opinion) succeed in leading the player toward an alternate mode of engagement. But, to my mind, Tale of Tales is saying to the player, "here, you figure out how to play this work in such a way that you get something out of it!" -- and in doing so, is abrogating one of the designer's responsibilities, which is to offer the player a way in. The most interesting part of the work is the song, which becomes, in the absence of interaction, a quirky music video starring a computer-generated 3D grandma.

So both games involve formal choices that encourage the player to read and understand them in some alternative, not-mainstream-gaming way, but yield deficient or ambiguous rewards when they are so approached. (In my opinion.)

A second point: both rely too heavily on the conceit of interaction denied. There is a tendency in some art games to derive the artistic impact from refusing to let the player change things, from the conflict between what the player wants to achieve (and thinks he might be able to achieve) and what the designer has chosen to allow. At its simplest, the gimmick is to get the player to try to do something impossible, and then wait for him to give up.

But the more art games do this, the less effective the technique is -- especially in works that identify themselves formally with an art game movement. I might feel much differently about Home had it been the first game I ever met in which the rules were deliberately stacked against me. I might even feel differently if it had been dressed as a casual game, with perky cartoonish graphics and a reasonable degree of polish: that's a game genre in which I still expect to be able to win. But with its graphical style, it didn't stand a chance of misleading me. Art games have their own conventional styles, just as commercial games do, and it is possible to be lazy or careless in choosing to share those conventions. Home falls into this trap.

The Graveyard is less derivative, but still suffers from the non-surprise of its constraints and limitations.

This is what happens when a medium ages. What used to be surprising loses its power. (Compare: "Pulp Fiction" viewed in 1994 vs. "Pulp Fiction" viewed today.) We either have to find some new audience expectations to subvert, or use interactivity to an aesthetic effect that doesn't require the audience to be surprised.

(Disclosure: I played free copies of these works. Home is free, and The Graveyard I downloaded when it was offered without charge as a Halloween special. I have had no commercial dealings with the authors of either.)

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's semi-regular link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

As we stumble into Thanksgiving week here in the States, time to rumble happily through a few more highlighted GameSetLinks, starting out with a note that Cory Doctorow's next book seems to stray into game-related areas in perhaps entertainingly meta ways - looking forward to the results.

Also in here - a chat with the Trials folks in Finland, an XBLIG game that sounds extremely intriguing, sleep challenges as games, the Pinball Hall of Fame moves to bigger digs in Vegas, and lots more besides.

So much closer:

Doctorow's Next Book is For the Win, Literally | Game Culture
Cool, Cory Doctorow's next book is set among Asian gold farmers, or similar.

Experience Points: Layton's Linearity and Halo's Heuristics
'Both Halo and Layton follow largely in the tradition of author-controlled narratives. However, Halo offers the opportunity to stray off that well-warn path, thereby opening up the possibilities for unique challenges and unexpected lessons.'

The Trials of Trials Article | Xbox 360 | Eurogamer
A nice look at the relatively obscure Finnish developer who hit it out of the park with Trials HD.

Xbox Indie Game: The Headsman - The Gameshelf
Hadn't heard of this, and it looks really interesting.

Pinball Hall of Fame’s new home. | driph.com/words
I've been to the old location, this looks even more expanded and a must-visit when in Las Vegas.

BriceMorrison.com » How to Defeat the Alarm: My 30 Day Sleep Challenge
Interesting to discuss games that involve... life.

Exoriare: Exploring the Darknet | ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network
Smoking Gun Interactive are trying something clever here for their big original IP console game, ARG and obscurity-wise - good luck to 'em.

I'm writing to you today a freed man. I am no longer working in a videogame studio. Now I can start making videogames!

I'll also resume bi-weekly postings to this excellent blog.

I'm skeptical of the corporate entity as a form of organization, I don't think true capitalism involves the majority of people being employees. Its becoming increasingly clear to me that professionalism is not sufficient in this business. I'd rather be talented than professional as a matter of preference, but its apparent that this is also a survival strategy. Notice the trend of the most talented people in game organizations fleeing them as soon as fiscally possible, this is a matter of the soul suriving and its also rational. In a company the tendency is to produce something that has a concave risk/reward profile, the median outcome is losing 20%, the mean outcome is making 20%, and the probability that you'll recoup none of the costs is as small as the probability that you'll have a hit. Demographics are profiled, genres are tweaked, egos are stroked, no secret is revealed.

Indie games, on the other hand, offers the possibility of a convex risk/reward profile. You take all your risk upfront, odds are extremely good that your work will wallow in obscurity and low sales, or sometimes one but not the other. Your upside potential is rather unlimited, what you are making is more likely to be a hit, by design, than everything produced by large organizations, but "more likely" means 1 out of 100 instead of 1 out of 1000. Personally, I like those odds.

How to get money in the meantime? I'm going to be following a sort of unusual approach, financial speculation.

The makers of World of Goo managed to get a hit, making them millions, and they did it on 100k in debt. I was having lunch with the CEO and marketing dude a few weeks back and we got to talking about that game, the marketing guy was like "yeah, but that's World of Goo, do you think we can do that?" and I was just stunned by the irony that a 60+ person organization with a couple million behind it (in a country where that translates into about seven million in local currency) would be scratching its head trying to emulate the performance of two guys with 100k in debt behind them.

Ok?

Considering the game industry offers problems so obvious and solutions so simple that, like considering fractional reserve banking, the mind is repelled.

In my time there I learned how to swim in the corporate fish tank, I improved my design documentation skills, my leadership skills, and I got experience working as lead designer on a major retail project for the Wii, a licensed IP!

I also got to fight the current in pushing an original project with a political subtext, even after adulterating the political thing with cartoony animals, it was still controversial. I hope that design gets put into production, if it does I'll let you know, it'll be gnarly. What's funny about that is I designed the game using a board game prototype, we took a map of Cuba, got heavy with some beer, weed and pizza, and designed a strategy game about guerilla warfare. We were reprimanded for not seeking official approval, but then a funny thing happened, they played the prototype. Instead of a stale document there was, for once, actual gameplay that could be judged more objectively. This was an exceptional instance and highly telling.

Another cool instance was being able to bring one of my indie amigos to the table and do a porting deal. Well, more than a port. I'll let you know when that's announced. I was managing that and its gone pretty dern well so I feel satisfied in completion.

Just because its so punk rock I'll tell you what happened. I came pretty close to quitting and had a sit-down with the jefes, we came to see eye to eye and I resolved that despite my misgivings about the environment, I would suck it up and try to achieve things that I couldn't on my own. My clothes had been stolen by some hookers the week before, so I only own one pair of shorts at the moment. I had some shake in the bottom of my cargo pocket and went to the bathroom to go clean it out, take stock, I wanted to have enough for a full J so I could smoke out a 30 year old mother who had never been high before. So I'm reaching my fingers to the corner, trying to separate lint and leaf, and someone comes in and sees me. I say, "trying to make sure I'm good to toast a mujer tonight" but apparently that didn't go over so well.

Getting let go for that stupid reason is, in retrospect, exactly the note that I want to close that chapter of my life with.

When I was brought in I didn't apologize, I didn't say "hey, I've got one pair of shorts motherfuckers, give me a break," or "you're going to fire me for this but you pay that asshole twice as much as the rest of us to show up at 2 everyday and pretend to do project management!" I don't believe in vengence or petty emotions, I have my dignity and I always try to project a good onda with everyone, even those who have wronged me. I'm kind of like Jesus that way. I instead offered to interview Ian Bogost and Chris Hecker who will be speaking at the EVA conference in December, and I said I look forward to working with them on a developer-publisher basis. I wasn't about to throw the baby out with the bath water, big companies might not be good at developing games, but they sure can do ports and provide a path to a console-donwloadable market.

My first project as an indie will be a social entreprenuer game, like Altruistic Tycoon if you will, though that's not my working title. You'll see it here first. As I learn GML better I'll hatch some other stuff, and I hope to hire Paul Eres to collaborate with me in Q2 2010. Then, I'd like to do a sort of mini-VC fund for indie games, a lot of them freeware, this is what I intended to do with True Vacuum when I first got out of college. To make my bread I'm going to be doing some part-time work designing strategies for the Hedge Fund industry and also speculating on my own account, I managed to make 500% in the last two weeks and I'm just getting warmed up. Its a good thing my talent for nailing entries in fast-moving financial markets was refined in time for my shake-out.

And you never know, maybe now that I'm unemployed Dan Benmergui will start hanging out with me again.

Paul Taylor of Mode 7 Games has posted an epic 4 page article explaining the ins and outs of generating excitement for your indie gaming projects.

Beginning with the basics ("Obscurity is literally the worst thing that can possibly happen to you and your game") he plows his way through the art of getting your game out there in the public eye, in handy stage form. It's pretty much all covered here - writing the press release, getting mentions on gaming sites and blogs, release hype, pre-orders - the works. It's then all followed up with a great bunch of links to people and places where developers can find even more help.

Definitely worth a read through for any budding developer, and for anyone else it's a great insight into 'the inner workings' of creating games. Check it out on Gamasutra. Continue reading