 The term indie game means different things to various people. Conventionally, it refers to games that are independently financed without the oversight of a publisher or corporation, whereas others think it is more about having a sense of creativity when designing games. Some say the spirit of indie expresses itself in how enthusiasts and hobbyists make games in their spare time. However, indie development has now become a professional vocation and we recognize that this creative freedom comes with the insecurity of financial and emotional self-reliance. The term indie was borrowed from film and music, used to refer to things as varied as an aesthetic to different distribution channels, and this ambiguity has seeped into games as well. Some companies explicitly reject the corporate context to make games free from creative constraints, whereas others accept corporate patronage to realize their dreams. Portal is a game that was published by Valve, but was designed by a student team that was hired for their independent spirit. We say indie games represent the periphery, but we often construe success through the lens of fame and money, not artistry and authenticity. Despite all this, if we look back at the history of independent game development, we see that the spirit of indie can exist in anyone and is built into the foundation of our medium. The term indie game came out of the so-called indie revolution of the mid to late 2000s. The term indie has gotten more and more confusing as time has passed though. What initially designated games that were not published by large corporations is now used to refer to games that are creative, emotional, or just developed by small teams. The mid 2000s had a series of converging things that enabled this. The growth of the internet allowed online distribution, and online digital stores allowed developers to sell directly to consumers, avoiding the need for a publisher. Also, middleware and game engines became more popular, the next generation of consoles were now online enabled, and new methods of crowdfunding were empowering small teams to stake a claim of their own. What's interesting about this story though is that it is a lie. Indie games far predate the renaissance of the 2000s, and this reveals the absurdity at the heart of the definition. In his keynote speech at Indicate, entitled State of the Union, Bennett Fadi claims that our understanding of what constitutes indie is mired in revisionism. Indie games didn't start with games like Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Cave Story, but can be traced right back to the origin of our medium. Games like Space War and Asteroids were all developed by individuals or small teams, and so fall within the purview of our present definition of indie. Everything was indie at this early stage, as there were no real publishers in the space. The story we tell ourselves is that Indies died in 1983 with the video game Crash. However, Bennett argues that this indie spirit simply transitioned to computers. Also, on any dimension we measure indie by today, our industry has a lineage that extends well before the mid-2000s. In terms of tools to make games, we have had level editors since Lord Runner in 1983, Gary Kitchen's Game Maker, various construction kit games, and then Game Maker itself in 1999. 1999 also saw the release of Counter-Strike and the internet modding community, as well as Flash games. Also, digital distribution did not start with Steam or XBLA. We had codes in magazines, public domain games, BBS systems, and Freeware too. There were also many success stories in Indies as well, with games like Wizardry and Elite being developed by two men teams that sold their properties later. Studios like Epic, Rockstar, Dice, and Id all used to be indie as well, before the size they grew to made them shift their ethos. We have had the spirit of alternative tools, creative vigor, digital distribution, and small teams from the very start. It's just that the mid-2000s made indie come into the spotlight with mainstream popularity. We appropriated indie from music and film and have revised history with a modern lens in mind, but the reality, at least according to Bennett, is that indie never really left us to begin with. It is the foundation of our medium. A designer who came to symbolize the indie moment of the mid-2000s is Jonathan Blow, the designer behind the puzzle games Braid and The Witness. In Braid, Blow built a game that resisted many of the trends of conventional game design at the time, and had to find alternative means of funding the game, including his own money. It became a critical darling, showing what was possible when someone took creative risks, and this was expressed in the gameplay. Featuring time-bending puzzles at the core of its design, Braid was cryptic, hard, and impenetrable, but also artistic, beautiful, and meaningful. It took the themes it was trying to communicate seriously, and married this to the gameplay. Regret, longing, fate, and reminiscence are all concepts that were layered into the narrative, by using the power of interactivity itself. Here we get another sense of what indie means. It is about exploring ideas that are more subtle, deep, and meaningful. In the mid-2000s, games like Rod Humble's The Marriage and Experimental Ventures like Passage started popping up in academia and art circles, movements driven by the idea of pursuing truth and beauty in game design. However, interactive art exhibits and movements far predate this. Play as an artform has a storied history that precedes the origin of video games, yet we seem surprised when so-called indie games rise up to use interactivity to communicate ideas. That game company's journey revived the game's art discussion, reading as an interactive version of the hero's journey that was crafted with the specific intent of resonating emotionally with players. Everything about the design of the game screams indie. It was developed by a small studio of former students, it is grounded in an unconventional approach to design, designing by emotions, and it didn't seem like a commercially viable product. However, that game company can't actually be construed as independent in the conventional sense, they had a deal with Sony who would publish three of their games. Like Portal, a group of former students was given corporate patronage and this afforded them the time and resources to fully realize their vision. I don't want to make it seem as if corporate sponsorship is unequivocally a good thing, and many indie studios have benefited precisely from rejecting that context. The two-man team behind Thumper, Mark Flurry and Brian Gibson, were former employees of a company that had them make mundane music games. They decided to reject the manufactured authenticity of this constraining context and make a game that genuinely explored the meaning of music, leaving a corporate setting fuel their creative instincts, generating one of the most original music games in recent memory. Interestingly, the music in the game rejects many of the assumptions of both modern music games and music itself, pushing us past the familiarity of 4-4 music and asking us to feel the physicality of musical creation. Another studio that features a two-man team that rejected a corporate context is Subset Games, which went on to make FTL and Into the Breach. They too rejected the corporate context to make innovative games with rogue-like elements, drawing continuity between older indie games like Rogue and Elite, which use procedural tools and their current work. Procedural tools are an extension of decentralized design, as it allows small teams to make massive amounts of content. This is what motivated another indie dev, Derek Yu, when he created Spelunky, and we now see a resurgence of the use of procedural tools in games. In any case, what all this shows is how the spirit of indie can exist irrespective of whether a company has corporate sponsorship or not. It's striking how many games of the past were built by small teams, or entirely conceived of by a single individual. The best-selling miss series sprung out of the mind of a two-brother team, Robin and Rand Miller, and SimCity came straight out of the mind of the designer Will Wright. However, a particular indie game that was designed by one individual has gone on to become one of the greatest-selling games of all time. Inspired by the procedural storytelling worlds of Dwarf Fortress and the mining gameplay of Infiniminer, Marcus Person created Minecraft, a game about survival, creativity, and dynamic storytelling in a procedurally generated block world. It is a Lego world writ large that enables the creative fantasies of players by giving them a suite of easy-to-use creative tools. When Marcus released the first version in 2009, he was still working a day job, but the success of its release afforded him the luxury of quitting. Person set up Mojang at this point and worked to continuously update the game over time. However, nothing could have prepared him for what his game would become. Minecraft has gone on to sell more copies than almost any other game in history, and has become an iconic global franchise. In 2014, he sold Minecraft to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, making him an overnight billionaire. What's interesting about this is how he classified this as a success story, but the idea of selling your craft for an extrinsic monetary reward seems antithetical to the indie spirit. As Fadi argues, indie development only became cool once there were rags-to-riches stories of people like Person, ascending from the doldrums of underground development into the limelight. Again, this is a bias we are imposing on the reading of our own history. There have been many success stories over the years, and it might only damage us to view success this way. One way this obfuscates is the sometimes horrible financial pressures and burdens that indie developers face. In the movie, indie game The Movie, Ed McMillan and Tommy Refens, the creators of Super Meat Boy, talk about how they signed a deal that required them to finish the game in a month, which imposed severe crunch on them. This strained McMillan's marriage and imposed an absurd workload on Tommy. The movie also documents how Fez remained in development hell for many years, and how this can take a toll on developers as they struggle to meet the weight of expectation placed upon them. However, perhaps the most enduring way the increasing scale, celebrity, and money in the indie sector may be affecting their production is in the loss of intimacy. In the movie, Jonathan Blow speaks about how he wanted Braid to reflect his deepest vulnerabilities, to capture his authentic voice and communicate it to others. He was also upset that many didn't seem to get the point of Braid, a narrative as cryptic as the game was difficult. Blow thinks what makes indies indies is how they revel in their flaws and reveal the authentic voice of a fallible creator within them. In a GDC talk on his game Getting Over It, called Putting Your Name On Your Game, Bennett Fadi echoes these claims by suggesting that his game was about letting the player get to know him through the design decisions he made in the game. There is an earnestness to getting over it, one that revels in its frailties and celebrates it in perfections, just like Bennett himself. Indie, as is conceptualized here, is about the transmission of a message from designer to player, an intimacy born of authentic communication. In some sense, the idea of vacuous celebrity breaks this connection between designer and author, and as studios get larger in scale, the creative vision of a singular voice gets diluted over time. This is perhaps why the ending of Getting Over It tries to explicitly tie the player to the designer in ways I won't spoil here. At the beginning of his talk, Fadi gives voice to a concern many in the Indies have about their craft. Is it in fact dying? He quotes McMillan who claims Indies are losing their way, getting mired in politics, bureaucracy, and corporate interference. His general sentiment is that there used to be unity, whereas now there is segregation. In a GDC rant session Greg Kostakian delivered, he laments how Indies are now subject to corporate takeover, are finding it more and more difficult to find sustainable avenues of revenue production, and are increasingly becoming lost in a space of infinite games. This is coupled with the fact that to work as an Indie is to accept a lifestyle that is far from glamorous, it is much more difficult than its allure of independent creativity seems to present. In any case, this squeezing out of Indie developers is something referred to as the Indie Pocalypse. Fadi has a much more optimistic tone to his sentiments though, claiming once again that we need to reconstitute our conception of what Indie is to begin with. If Indie refers to the spirit of creativity that transcends any particular configuration, the way Indie has and does present itself now isn't how it is destined to always be. It can be salvaged because it exists so long as gaming exists. However, what if the Indie space itself is no longer generating creativity? In a talk given at GDC in 2007, four independent developers gave their ideas for how Indies could be creative going forward. Kyle Gabler started by asking us to envision a future where there were no technical limitations to design, where the only thing constraining us is our imagination, and if our present sensibilities are in alignment with realizing that future should it come. Next, Jenova Chen, the lead designer of that game company, focused on telling us to switch the lens of design to that of emotions, rather than the mechanical fixation we have had as a medium. His games all start with a core emotion and reinforce it with mechanics afterwards. Next, Jonathan Mack argues that creativity should come from the authentic voice of a designer, their autobiographical voice, and so much like Fadi, he stresses the importance of games needing to reflect their author in some sense. His game, Everyday Shooter, was an exemplification of this ideal, reflecting many of his preferences for games, music and art. Finally, Jonathan blow cautions us to be wary of just being creative for the sake of being creative, and instead, to focus our energies on deepening our understanding of the games we presently have, and how they can communicate ideas. So Indies are imaginative, emotional, expressive, and deep. This is the manner in which creativity was conceptualized all those years ago, right at the cusp of the Indie Revolution. In some sense, both Blow and Jenova's games have inspired a new generation of designers who have taken their words to heart, creating experiences we could hardly have envisioned at the start of our medium. On the other hand, as Keith Bergen argues in his book on game design, Indies nowadays are stuck replicating the genres and ideas of the past, because we have no true understanding about the foundations of game design, a common vocabulary with which to be creative. There seems to be a finite suite of genres that are proliferating in the indie space, where there would be horror games, 2D platformers, or extremely difficult games, instead of genuinely creative divergences from prior forms. There might be a Cambrian explosion in the number of games being made, but are they really that different from one another? If we broaden our understanding for what it means to be indie, it seems self-evident that the creative desires of many more people are just waiting for an outlet to be expressed. Even if we take the cynical view that most games are very similar, it still stands that there are millions out there who are interested in making games, no matter how bad they may be. Also, if we broaden our understanding of design, we see a proliferation of new kinds of games. Interactive fiction is becoming more popular thanks to accessible tools like twine, and we even see versions of this in the mainstream with games like Detroit, as well as more experimental games like facade. Board games and board game conventions continue to go strong, with many arguing that board game design is what theater is to movies. It is a more robust and honest space for crafting mechanical creativity, and game designers have much to learn from this space. There are also visual novels that are rising in popularity, art games and art installations, and new genres like walking simulators, which are actually games that are built around their themes, whether it be loneliness and nostalgia in Gone Home, free will and determinism in the Stanley Parable, or hope in the face of despair in what remains of Edith Finch. We can even go broader and see how the Minecraft maps community, the modern communities of different games, and even social game designers, are all being creative, all expressing something of the indie spirit in their design. It has never been easier to find an outlet for your creative voice, and in some sense, that can be viewed as a triumph of the indie spirit. In her book Rise of the Video Game Xenesters, Anna Anthropy argues that the central problem with games is that new experiences, aesthetics, and design sensibilities are being ignored. She says, What I want from games is a plurality of voices, in which digital games are not made by publishers for the same audiences, but are made by you and me for our peers. What Anna envisions is a future where anyone can make games, and are expressive of a wider range of ideas, emotions, and people. This kind of design ethos is at the heart of indie game design, and as Anna further argues, giving people alternative avenues of creation might pressure the mainstream industry to treat their developers better, given the indie space now provides a viable alternative. Other games that have done this are Papers Pleased by Lucas Pope, which puts you in the role of a border agent trying to feed his family, Cartlife, a game that thrusts you into the mundanity of day-to-day living, and That Dragon Cancer, a game that was crafted as an autobiographical account to a child dying of cancer. This is what she means by authentic communication, the idea that we can explore ideas that are seldom voiced in games. The game Never Alone is a game that was conceived of to communicate the experiences of the Inupiat tribe, and it used mechanics to communicate their views. To ensure its authenticity though, the game was made in collaboration with the members of the tribe, and aimed to preserve their stories and traditions for a new generation. In a similar vein, Hellblade was a game that was conceived of to represent the experiences of someone struggling with psychosis, and it too used mechanics to reinforce this. However, what was interesting about the game was that it was funded by the company themselves. It was a side project by a core group of the main studio at Ninja Theory that worked on the game as an independent project. It was a strange model that lived somewhere between AAA and indie, but the themes that it expressed and the creativity enabled by this was decidedly indie. Having lived with a misappropriation of the title indie from music and film, it is incumbent on us to define what we mean by it going forward. We've seen how games have been indie from their inception, using alternative distribution models, creative tools, and small teams to realize their visions, but we also see how it expresses itself in emotional games. Some indie studios violently reject the stifling context of corporate bureaucracy, whereas others accept corporate patronage to realize their dreams. In some sense, the word indie even refers to an aesthetic, something Jasper Yule argues for in his essay, High-Tech, Low-Tech Authenticity, where studios large and small employ a handmade pixel art or 2D aesthetic to seem more artistic. Regardless, what's clear to me at the very least is how the spirit of indie design is game design. It is built into the medium we all love. The best-selling game of all time is Tetris, a game made by Aleksei Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer who lived behind the Iron Curtain, but somehow, he created a game that managed to transcend cultures, ages, and creeds. He did this the same way Jonathan Blow made Braid, that game company made Journey, and Ninja Theory made Hellblade, by allowing his creative voice to shine without the imposition of outside forces. We still have a long way to go in providing more accessible tools, lower barriers to entry, and a more inclusive community for different voices to shine. But ultimately, indie games are just games made by people who are expressing their authentic voice. At the end of his talk, Bennett Fadi summarizes what it means to be indie, by paying homage to those voices that are all a part of the same spirit. So here's to the full range of people who are here, and the endless numbers of people who aren't making indie games. Here's to the ones whose faces that we all recognize, and to the ones that we don't. The freeware writers. The casual game designers. Sorry Naomi. The click-and-players. The art game or tours. The mobile developers. The esporters. The not-gamers. The visual novelists. The modders. The hackers. The five-year death marches. The old timers. The twiners. The gold miners. Indie games are dead. Long live indie games. And I use that capital I with intent. Thanks.