No Indies In The Indie Competition?
I guess The Behemoth has now withdrawn Castle Crashers from the Slamdance "Guerilla Game Developers" competition (which begins today) - right on the heels of DigiPen forcing its students to re-enter the competition.

The DigiPen thing is interesting to me. Based on my understanding, the school owns full rights to everything that its students create. As DigiPen is not a major publisher, I guess the game is still technically an independent game, just as Saga is technically independent (but from my standpoint, it was still contract work for my studio). But it really stretches and makes me reconsider my definition of "indie."

Undoubtably DigiPen provided valuable training and resources to its students. But why should the school, and not the game creators, own the result of the students' labors? We can see that the developers themselves are not in control of their end product. Is it still "indie?" It seems very strange to me, as unlike a traditional publisher / developer arrangement, it is the students themselves who are ultimately funding the product, through their tuition, "lab fees," and everything else. Maybe that's common in film schools and music academies, too, but it seems really screwed up to me.

I think it is interesting that two of their remaining seven competitors are "DigiPen Owned" games. Obviously, they are shooting for getting some awards for their school, and feel its more important than the desires of their students. With only half the original number of finalists, they have excellent odds this year.

As to the competition itself, the official statement from Slamdance concerning the pulling of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! has changed in the last couple of days. Rather than citing moral grounds as they did previously, they are now stating their concerns about possible lawsuits that they couldn't afford to defend themselves against.

This is a legitimate excuse - the game has a bunch of copyright violations (unlicensed content grabbed from Doom, Marilyn Manson, and Nirvana) that could have possibly gotten the competition in legal trouble for supporting. It's a safer explanation than the alternatives. It doesn't paint the sponsors or Slamdance as the villains. But it sounds to me like rationalization after the fact.

Which is kind of how Danny Ledonne's explaination for the purpose behind SCMRPG's creation sounds to me, too. But once again, others differ strongly from my position. In fact, Wired Online just published a very good article about the game, critiquing it as a work of art. Once again, I don't deny that it's art... I just don't think it happens to be particularly good or worthy art. Regardless of its original purpose or stated purpose, one thing the game has managed to do is generate discussion about games as a medium of art and expression. And that is a good thing.

This whole controversy is certainly causing me to ask a lot of questions. Here are a few:

Will Slamdance organizers decide that games are more trouble than they are worth, and cancel the Guerrilla Gamemaker competition in the future?

Will they try to stay the course and act as if nothing happened, and rely upon people's short memories (and the willingness of schools like DigiPen to force submission of student projects to garner prestige for the school)?

Or will Slamdance renew their commitment to games as an art form and take advantage of the "controversy surrounding the controversy" (and the press it has generated) to make indie games a more significant aspect of the festival?

Will DigiPen actually lose more potential students than it gains by not only making it clear that they own all rights to their students' creations, but are willing to use said ownership against the wishes of the artists?

And should we start referring to game developers as "artists" (as I just did) in acknowledgement of the the validity of games as a medium of art and expression? We do that in other media (particularly music), why not games?

Should the term "indie" only apply to those games which remain in the control of their original creators (ahem, "artists")? That would disqualify a bunch of indie developers who are willing to sell their IP rights to publishers after self-funding a title.

What do you think?

Labels: Indie Evangelism, Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:56 AM (Permalink)