Introduction

The term "indie games," or independent games, refers to video games (see Digital Games) that, in one way or another, differ from the mainstream—often featuring "retro" aesthetics, small-scale development teams, digital-only distribution and alternative financing methods. This simple conceptualization belies the tension at the heart of this contested term. The difficulty in establishing what independent or indie media actually means is not unique to games—a point explicitly raised in scholarship on indie games. Lipkin (2013) and Juul (2019), for instance, point to similar complications in defining indie film or music. This complexity comes from a confluence of factors: the historical specificity of how developers, audiences and academics use "independence" or "mainstream," the use of "indie" and "independent" as references (simultaneously and contradictorily) to genre, aesthetics and production practices, and the evolving way the independent sector of the global digital games economy relates to other parts of the industry.

Early Conceptualizations of Independence in Scholarship

One difficulty in establishing the origins of indie games as a category of the industry relates to this underlying ambiguity of terminology. This complication appears in early discourse about the topic, in which the term "independent" is applied to entities that would never be considered independent or indie after the late 2000s. Kerr and Flynn (2003), for example, refer to Electronic Arts, a company with a then annual profit of $1.5 billion USD, as independent. Similarly, Kerr (2006) defines third-party developers, in this same way, as "independent development houses" (p. 64), thus defining independence not as a matter of aesthetics, culture or market size but rather explicitly by a company's separation from hardware manufacturers like Sony or Nintendo. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009) take a similar approach, conflating "independent" development studios with third-party studios, though, unlike the aforementioned scholarship, they explicitly position such studios in direct opposition to large third-party publishers like Electronic Arts (p. 41). While the independent sector eventually comes to be understood as separate from mainstream publishers (accurately or not), Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter describe these independent studios as being heavily controlled by them, deprived by publishers of "creative control and intellectual property rights" (p. 43). These examples describe independent game production as occupying the space roughly corresponding to mid-sized (or smaller) third-party development studios of the 2000s, which still use the same marketplaces and produce the same kinds of games as other firms in the industry.

The Emergence of an Indie Games Movement

By the mid-2000s, what comes to be understood as independent games that are not simply small-scale versions of mainstream titles emerged and began to gain popularity. The Independent Games Festival (IGF), now one of the main industry organizations showcasing and celebrating independent games, began in 1998. Before 2005, winners of the festival's grand prize (apart from Bad Milk (Dreaming Media, 2000) in 2002) resemble, as Juul (2019) states, "small versions of bigger-budget games, with 3-D graphics and presumably an intention of eventually acquiring publisher backing and distribution on physical media" (p. 39). The shift toward a new style and approach begins in 2004 when Microsoft launches Xbox Live Arcade, an online service for the Xbox and, the following year, the Xbox 360. At first limited to files no larger than 50 mb, the original launch titles for the service were mostly arcade classics like Ms. Pac-Man (Midway, 1982), Joust (Williams Electronics, 1982) and Gauntlet (Atari Games Corporation, 1985), as well as puzzle games like Zuma (PopCap Games, 2003) and Bejeweled (PopCap Games, 2001). By 2010, the platform had published what would become defining staples of the emergent independent style: Castle Crashers (The Behemoth, 2008), Braid (Number None Inc., 2008), Super Meat Boy (BlitWorks, 2010) and Limbo (Playdead, 2010). These, and other similar titles, drew massive popular attention in spite of making no effort to meet the graphical expectations of mainstream games at the time (as prior independent games often did).

As for PC, Valve's Steam platform emerged in 2003, though it would not be until 2005 that the company would partner with third parties to publish games and it would not be until 2012 when it would launch Steam Greenlight. At this point, the floodgates would open. Steam Greenlight's significant innovation was to dramatically reduce the barriers to publication, making it vastly easier to promote and distribute games without the involvement of a publisher. As a result, the number of games released on Steam in any given month of 2015 was approximately triple the number compared to 2013. In 2017, more games were released on Steam than the total number published on the platform between 2006 and 2014 combined (see Lipkin, 2019).

Independent games have gone on to proliferate widely across a number of platforms. Grabarczyk (2021) points out that 74% of all games on Steam are tagged as independent, as well as 67% of VR games available on Steam (p. 61). The Nintendo Switch likewise features a significant number of independent downloadable titles on its online storefront, contributing to what one news article calls a "deluge of content" (Wallace, 2020). A similar problem with massive amounts of competing independent titles exists on mobile in both the Google Play and the Apple App Store (Lipkin, 2019).

Defining Independence in the Indie Movement and Beyond

By the early 2010s, the scholarly definition of independence had evolved in response to the explosion of self-described indie and independent games, developers and studios. A seminal scholarly collection in this process is the special issue of Loading published in 2013, edited by Bart Simon, on the nature of indie games. Simon's introduction to the issue calls attention to the way that game studies as a field had been failing to attend to what was becoming a dominant force in the marketplace: "One might suggest that in game studies we have been blindsided" (p. 1). By this time, in addition to triple-A titles like World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) or Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar Games, 2008) drawing the most attention, "games like Braid [Number None Inc., 2008], World of Goo [2D Boy, 2008] and Minecraft [Mojang Studios, 2011] sit atop Metacritic all-time 'best-of' lists alongside the usual suspects and we have no excuse" (p. 2). The timing for this volume appropriately coincided with the release in 2012 of the widely lauded documentary, Indie Game: The Movie, which followed the creators of three of the most prominent independent games of this period: Jonathan Blow of Braid, Phil Fish of Fez (Playtron Corporation, 2012) and Edmund McMillan and Tommy Refenes of Super Meat Boy.

The articles in this volume of Loading account for some of the earliest attempts to define and explore this part of the industry. Lipkin (2013), rather than offering a precise definition, explores the discourse around independence through the cluster of values and practices associated with it by media and developers. At its core, he writes, "indie media is defined by what is not mainstream" (p. 9), though what is mainstream is likewise difficult to specify. Beyond this, he notes that indie games of this time share a number of qualities, especially nostalgia for earlier eras of gaming, especially the time of 8 and 16-bit consoles, exhibited in pixelated graphics, chiptunes and retro genres that had disappeared from the mainstream (like platformers, beat-em-ups or point-and-click adventure games). In addition, indie games often featured alternative distribution (especially digital distribution), smaller teams, a desire for creative autonomy and control over working conditions. Underlying these values, he notes, is an ideology similarly found in other independent media producers, such as in the music and film industries, that see mainstream production practices and the media they produce as being low-quality or immoral. In the same volume, Ruffino (2013) notes similar common features attached to independent games: production without a publisher, small teams and a sense of moral superiority to the mainstream; however, he notes that in spite of this, many independent games "tend to replicate the structures and aesthetic of mainstream titles" (p. 107).

Subsequent scholarship elaborates on these concepts and begins to offer more structured assessments of independent games. Garda and Grabarczyk (2016) draw a line separating "independent" games from "indie" games. They suggest that "indie" should be understood not as a synonym but as a subset of independent games—"a specific kind of independent game that has emerged around mid-2000s." They propose dividing independence into three different types: financial, creative and publishing independence. By financial independence, they refer to the degree of separation between developers and sources of funding. This includes not only private companies and venture capitalists but also government funding streams and nonprofits that finance creative projects. By creative independence, they mean that the "developer is the intended audience," since the work is not creatively driven by the interests or desires of others. Publishing independence relates to the developer's separation from an external publisher. This includes taking on the tasks typically associated with publishers, like testing, advertising and distribution. By dividing independence into different types which may overlap in some games, Garda and Grabarczyk formalize a complication identified in Lipkin and Ruffino previously: some games "look" independent without being made separately of the mainstream industry, and some games made outside of the system do not look like other "indie" games.

Juul (2019) offers his own division of "independence" that similarly serves to account for the variety of ways those in the industry use "independence" in discourse. Juul proposes three categories for such games: financially independent, aesthetically independent and culturally independent. Financial independence, he notes, ties directly to creative control and the embodiment of "authenticity" (p. 13) granted by being unbound by the demands of external financiers. By aesthetic independence, Juul refers to the aesthetic features that separate independent games stylistically from the mainstream, especially the use of modern tools to emulate earlier styles of games, such as pixilated graphics and 2-D platformers. Importantly, he notes that aesthetics and production practices are intertwined: these games look the way they do in large part because, given the limitations of production for independent developers, this type of style is easier to accomplish (p. 50). Looking to the future, he notes that "given enough time, even currently high-end graphics effects (such as bloom) of contemporary big-budget titles may eventually be used by a future independent game developer to signal a simpler, more honest time in video games" (p. 51).

Such deconstructions of "independence" may account for what is widely perceived within the broader gaming culture as indie games, but Ruberg (2021) notes that this perspective overlooks a constellation of games by and for LGBTQ people. These games—what they call the "queer games avant-garde" (see also Ruberg, 2020)—harken back to notions of independence not as a genre but as an ethos (2021, p. 44). These "digital and analog games, commonly scrappy and experimental, made by (and often about and for) queer and transgender people" (ibid.) are frequently excluded from being considered "indie" in popular and scholarly analyses of the independent games industry. Their inclusion in the "indie imaginary," as Ruberg puts it (p. 46), reveals a more diverse body of creators with practices, experiences and backgrounds that diverge from the standard narratives associated with straight cisgender male creators that have become the dominant narratives since (at least) 2012's Indie Game: The Movie. Such an attempt to question what is an indie game calls into consideration what other kinds of games may likewise deserve inclusion that may be ignored by focusing on the dominant portion of the field.

Branches of Independent Game Scholarship

Scholarship into independent or "indie" games has gone on to explore a wide variety of issues in this segment of the industry. A common focus is on the political-economy of production, with attention paid to issues like unionization (Woodcock, 2021), relationships to publishers (Parker, 2021; Vanderhoef, 2020), cultural intermediaries like festivals and academia (Browne & Whitson, 2021; Pearce, 2021; Perks et al., 2019) and working conditions (Kerr, 2017; Lipkin, 2021; Ruberg, 2019; Whitson et al., 2018). Scholarship also addresses issues of culture, race, sexuality and representation of independent developers in response to the demographic homogeneity of high-profile indie games and studios (Kerr, 2021; Ruberg, 2019; 2021).

Summary

The category of indie, or independent, games is a moving target whose parameters vary over time and often lack scholarly consensus. While most commonly referring to the types of small, retro, occasionally experimental games produced by relatively small teams and distributed digitally that began to gain attention in the late 2000s and early 2010s, independent games can include far more. So long as there has been a mainstream industry from which to operate separately, one might speak of independent games. Likewise, with the gradual calcification of "indie" into a genre in its own right, one may speak of games produced independently of these as well. Scholarship has responded to this complexity by exploring independence not as a unified concept but rather through different types of independence, allowing scholars to more clearly explore different ways of being independent that are inclusive of the wide variety of games made outside of the mainstream, however that mainstream is understood.

2D Boy (2008). World of Goo. 2D Boy/Tomorrow Corporation/Brighter Minds/Microsoft Studios. Xbox Live Arcade.

Atari Games Corporation (1985). Gauntlet. Atari Games Corporation. Xbox Live Arcade.

Blizzard Entertainment (2004). World of Warcraft. Blizzard Entertainment. PC.

Browne, P. and Whitson, J. R. (2021). Network or die? What social network analysis can tell us about indie game development. In P. Ruffino (ed.), Independent videogames: Cultures, networks, techniques and politics (pp. 77-94). New York, NY: Routledge.

Dreaming Media (2000). Bad Milk. Dreaming Media. PC/Mac.

Dyer-Witheford, N. and de Peuter, G. (2009). Games of empire. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Grabarczyk, P. (2021). Virtually indie: On the characteristics of independent game development for virtual reality headsets. In P. Ruffino (ed.), Independent videogames: Cultures, networks, techniques and politics (pp. 58-74). New York, NY: Routledge.

Juul, J. (2019). Handmade pixels: Independent video games and the quest for authenticity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Kerr, A. (2006). The business and culture of digital games: Gamework/gameplay. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Kerr, A. (2017). Global games: Production, circulation and policy in the networked era. New York, NY: Routledge.

Kerr, A. (2021). Decoding and recoding game jams and independent game-making spaces for diversity and inclusion. In P. Ruffino (ed.), Independent videogames: Cultures, networks, techniques and politics (pp. 29-42). New York, NY: Routledge.

Kerr, A. and Flynn, R. (2003). Revisiting globalization through the movie and digital games industries. Convergence, 9, 91-113.

Lindsay, J. Schachter, K. (Executive Producers), Pajot, L., Swirsky, J. (Producers), Pajot, L. and Swirsky, J. (Directors). (2012). Indie game: the movie [Motion picture]. USA: Blinkworks.

Lipkin, N. (2013). Examining indie's independence: The meaning of 'indie' games, the politics of production, and mainstream co-optation. Loading..., 7(11), 8-24.

Lipkin, N. (2019). The Indiepocalypse: The political-economy of independent game development labor in contemporary indie markets. Game Studies, 19(2).

Lipkin, N. (2021). Playing with risk: Political-economy, independent games, and the precarity of development in crowded commercial markets. In P. Ruffino (ed.), Independent videogames: Cultures, networks, techniques and politics (pp. 175-190). New York, NY: Routledge.

Midway (1982). Ms. Pac-Man. General Computer Corporation/Midway. Xbox Live Arcade.

Mojang Studios(2011). Minecraft. Mojang Studios. PC.

Number None Inc. (2008). Braid. Number None Inc./Microsoft Game Studios. Xbox Live Arcade.

Parker, F. (2021). Boutique indie: Annapurna Interactive and contemporary independent game development. In P. Ruffino (ed.), Independent videogames: Cultures, networks, techniques and politics (pp. 129-147). New York, NY: Routledge.

Pearce, C. (2021). Strange bedfellows: indie games and academia. In P. Ruffino (ed.), Independent videogames: Cultures, networks, techniques and politics (pp. 95-110). New York, NY: Routledge.

Perks, M. E., Parker, F., Whitson, J. R., Simon, B., Lavenir, G., Yolgörmez, C., Browne, P., and Schram, B. (2019). Autonomy, integration, and the work of cultural intermediation in indie games. Media Industries, 6(2), 18-38.

Playdead (2010). Limbo. Playdead/Microsoft Game Studios. Xbox Live Arcade.

Playtron Corporation (2012). Fez. Playtron Corporation/Microsoft Studios/Trapdoor. Xbox Live Arcade.

PopCap Games (2001). Bejeweled. PopCap Games/Electronic Arts. Xbox Live Arcade.

PopCap Games (2003). Zuma. PopCap Games/Sony Online Entertainment. Xbox Live Arcade.

Rockstar Toronto and Rockstar North (2008). Grand Theft Auto IV. Rockstar Games/Take-Two Interactive. Xbox 360.

Ruberg, B. (2019). The precarious labor of queer indie game-making: Who benefits from making video games "better"? Television & New Media, 20(8), 778-788.

Ruberg, B. (2020). The queer games avant-garde: How LGBTQ game makers are reimagining the medium of video games. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ruberg, B. (2021). Queering indie: How LGBTQ experiences challenge dominant narratives of independent games. In P. Ruffino (ed.), Independent videogames: Cultures, networks, techniques and politics (pp. 43-57). New York, NY: Routledge.

Ruffino, P. (2013). Narratives of independent production in video game culture*. Loading...,* 7(11), 106-121.

Team Meat (2010). Super Meat Boy. BlitWorks. Xbox Live Arcade.

The Behemoth (2008). Castle Crashers. The Behemoth. Xbox Live Arcade.

Vanderhoef, J. (2020). Brews, burgers, and indie bombast: The antiestablishment neoliberalism of Devolver Digital." In M. J. Clarke and C. Wang (eds.), Indie Games in the Digital Age (pp. 17-34). London: Bloomsbury.

Wallace, C. (2020, August 5). "I literally cannot sell units on Switch. It's heartbreaking, and it makes me really sad for the eShop." – Why indies are struggling to be seen on the Switch eShop. MVC/DEVELOP. https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/i-literally-cannot-sell-units-on-switch-its-heartbreaking-and-it-makes-me-really-sad-for-the-eshop-why-indies-are-struggling-to-be-seen-on-the-switch-eshop/

Whitson, J. R., Simon, B., and Parker, F. (2018). The missing producer: rethinking indie cultural production in terms of entrepreneurship, relational labour, and sustainability. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(2), 606-627.

Williams Electronics (1982). Joust. Williams Electronics. Xbox Live Arcade.

Woodcock, J. (2021). Game workers unite: Unionization among independent developers. In P. Ruffino (ed.), Independent videogames: Cultures, networks, techniques and politics (pp. 163-174). New York, NY: Routledge.

Author Information

Nadav Lipkin is Assistant Professor and chair of the Communication, Media & Technology department at La Roche University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His research focuses on independent video game production practices, culture, and political economy. His research has appeared in the journals Game Studies and Loading. His most recent publication, published in Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics (2021, Routledge), explores the precarious nature of work in the independent game sector, driven by technological advancement, cultural expectations and crowded marketplaces.

Citation Information

Lipkin, N. (2022). Indie Games. In Grabarczyk, P. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms (Spring 2022 Edition). URL: https://eolt.org/articles/indie-games

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