Braid, by Jonathan Blow
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.
--Mahatma Gandhi
Would
it be juvenile of us to point out that a signpost along the way to a
medium's maturization is the almost-but-not-entirely-silly battling
over issues like authenticity, selling out, pretentiousness and the
like? (The "are games art?" debate is part of this as well, but having
expended many pixels on that subject, we'll leave that alone for now.)
Think of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris' duels over auteur theory. The
Sundance-and-Miramax fueled mid-'80s to mid-90's boom of indie film
calcifying into Indiewood and the cinematic equivalent of the well-made
play. Nirvana and Pearl Jam, agonizing in their heyday over the
prospect of selling out; later, 50 Cent out-gangsta-ing his spiritual
progenitor, Ja Rule, into Billboard oblivion. And today, AAA games vs.
casual games; real games vs. non-games; and mainstream games vs. indie
games. These battles over definitions and canonology wax and wane, with
motivated audiences chiming in as they see fit. And while much of it is
merely sound and fury, we come to games in part from a comparative
media perspective, so we nevertheless find these exchanges interesting.
One such exchange took place last week on the blog Sexy Videogameland. In a post titled "Indie is the New Popular,"
blogger Leigh Alexander expressed both her affection for and her
confusion by certain independently created videogames, saying:
Indie games are great. Like in
our sister industries, film, music and literature, a selection
populated solely by mainstream blockbusters orchestrated by Death Star
companies is a dull one indeed. Fortunately, console developers are
acknowledging the tiny little art projects of independent developers
and realizing them, giving us a new wave of the future in terms of
selection and creativity on offer.
Perhaps predictably, there
is, as with those other industries, a hipster sort of culture emerging
around indie games--if you listen to bands no one's ever heard of,
why not play games no one's ever heard of, too? Then, when those games
finally get their booth at a big game show and the jaws of the media
and the culture alike hang open at the simplicity, the beauty, the
innovation on display, you can scoff, flip your hair, and proclaim you already played it,
and now you're just so glad this tiny team--or, even better, this
heroic one-man show -- is getting the recognition he or she deserves.
After all, some of these less heard-of games are damn good.
But, at risk of showing my unsophistication here, I must admit some of
them make me feel like the hayseed who wanders into MoMA and stares,
perplexed, at the often odd experiments on exhibit. Like, I know that
Jenova Chen's fl0w is great. But, you know, I didn't really get it.
Not everyone was amused.
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