Of Minecraft, Awards, and the Meaning of Indie

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 3, 2011

Can’t say I’m terribly surprised…

Minecraft walked away with two IGF awards Wednesday night – the Audience award and the Seamus McNalley Grand Prize. In addition, they managed to score three Game Developer’s Choice awards – the Innovation Award, the Best Debut Game, and the Best Downloadable Game award. The Game Developer’s Choice awards include mainstream games – all games, really – but it shows that indies can still compete. Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson quipped, “Apparently we are a real game now.” Mojang managing director Carl Manneh snapped the picture to the right at the end of the ceremonies of their five awards for Minecraft. The whole team was there, though Persson was the sole developer of the game for most of its development.

Amnesia was another big winner in the indie awards, winning Technical Excellence, Excellence in Audio, and the Direct2Drive award.

Additional IGF winners included Nidhogg (Nuovo award), Desktop Dungeons (Excellence in Design), Bit.Trip Runner (Excellence in Visual Art), Fract (Best Student Game), and Helsing’s Fire (Best Mobile Award),

When Minecraft won the grand prize, the host joked about how they’ve had a tough year and could really use the money. Taken on it’s own, the comment was amusing. Unfortunately, however, it underscored some resentment I’ve caught a couple whiffs of concerning Minecraft’s participation at IGF, especially with its inclusion (and domination) in the more “mainstream” competition.

To such concerns I say: Bull!

You really don’t get more indie than Minecraft. Yeah, the dude has made millions and now has a “real” company with real employees and their working on a new game before Minecraft is even “done.” Yeah, the game is perhaps the most talked-about title in the PC games field. But success has no bearing on a game’s “indie-ness.” And I have no problem with an indie game being able to compete head-to-head with the big boys. That has a long and storied tradition, for those of us who remember the golden age of shareware games from the early to mid 90s.

Yes, there is a certain point at which a company is so successful – and so big – that it ceases to be an indie and has gone to join the “big boys.” Long before it sold itself to Zenimax, id Software was no longer really considered “indie.” This happened before anybody was even using the word “indie” to describe game developers, and were still depending on the increasingly obsolete term “shareware.”

Minecraft hasn’t been there. Mojang, having exploded to a whopping — what, seven employees? — isn’t even in the neighborhood. Yet. Maybe after they have a track record of raking in millions from another title or two, but not yet. But Minecraft – Minecraft is just the latest indie legend, joining the rock-star status of games like Bejeweled, Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D.

In my opinion, the grousing about its classification is from people who don’t want other indie games to have to compete against it. This has been a popular sport for years. The kid who makes a game on a budget of nothing doesn’t want to compete with the two guys making a game in their basements for $10,000. Those guys, in turn, don’t want to compete with the established professional team of three making a game for $75,000. Especially when there are competitions involved with real cash prizes and – more importantly – significant attention.

The extremely broad meaning of the “indie” label led Anna Anthropy (AKA “Auntie Pixelante”) to rant about its uselessness and a desire to drop the term altogether. I respectfully disagree, though I understand the sentiment. But in my perspective, it’s spawned from a viewpoint mired to heavily in the so-called “indie scene,” which has in recent years emphasized exclusion rather than inclusion. This has led to many “more indie than thou” arguments, which remain pretty much crap.

I do agree that the term “indie” has diminished value now that the indies have effectively won the war. The revolution is over, though the fighting continues. But as a mainstream refugee, I believe the label is still useful – it’s only the extremes of the attitude that need to be dropped.

I mean, yeah, ripping on the mainstream industry has been a popular sport since it really became an “industry” instead of a hobby (game journalism has been doing that since it first became a viable part-time endeavor). And there’s a whole collection of sins the industry remains guilty of – which it propagandizes at every opportunity – that substitute gloss and glitz for actual game quality and value. It’s been selling books based on gold-plated covers and page count instead of the actual words on the pages. I think the “indie” label helps push the reset button on audience expectation, reminding them to look past the marketing message they’ve been hearing since the days of Colecovision and look instead at the qualities that made games so great in the first place.

Indie doesn’t mean Flash, casual, pixellated, low-budget, trendy, amateur, experimental, downloadable, mobile, web-based, part of a “scene,” inexpensive, niche, free, or obscure. It naturally can include all of these things, and much more. It’s a broad term, will remain broad, and should remain broad. Maybe, as it grows, we may find ourselves with sub-categories of indie that may prove useful.

For me, the key part of “indie” is really about the freedom from the “industry” and its barriers to development of ideas. If a game was developed outside of that control, it’s probably indie.

Minecraft is definitely indie. Notch seems to be a guy who was honestly as overwhelmed and surprised by his success as anybody else. Shame on any indies who resent him and attack him for it.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Hamumu said,

The biggest point is that Minecraft became ENORMOUS not because of ads or press fawning over it and driving people to it, but 100% purely on the back of regular people really really liking it. That’s as indie as it is possible to be. It spread entirely by word of mouth to millions of players long before the press took notice. They noticed BECAUSE everybody was so nuts about it. It is the perfect (and only) example of a game so good that it had to make millions, despite being completely unknown. Everything about it is deserved.

I mean, they aren’t even published NOW, so you can’t even be a hipster who hates them for becoming popular and selling out. All they did is become popular. If that’s bad, then succes,s in and of itself, is bad.
Andy_Panthro said,

Nicely put.

Terminology like this always gets people in a muddle, much like people trying to define what constitutes an RPG (I’ve seen rather a few arguments on that subject!).

The success of games like Minecraft (which isn’t even finished yet!) just makes me think of how lucky I am to have such high quality games made that are either experimental or suited to a particular niche.

The expansion of digital distribution has done wonders for this. These days, rather than relying on shareware or postal ordering, you can have your website with a demo, downloads, community support and much more.
UDM said,

Putting aside the Minecraft argument, I’d like to rack up more praise for Amnesia. It was a shame the guys at Frictional didn’t win anything for the Penumbra games – I like Black Plague as much as Amnesia – so this is a late victory that nonetheless is still very much welcome. Good for the guys at Frictional!
Rampant Coyote said,

I haven’t played Amnesia yet (I haven’t finished the Penumbra games yet, but I bought the whole series), but from what I have seen it looks *incredible*.

I had a paragraph I edited out of the post above about how I’d love to not have Frayed Knights compared to Amnesia. But … that’s just the reality of how it works. Frayed Knights is going to be compared to Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim, and Dragon Age 2, as well. It’s just how it goes, “indie” or no…
Brian 'Psychochild' Green said,

To me, I think it’s good to look at why indie games deserve their own awards, and special attention. It’s because, in general, they are often overlooked for the bigger, better advertised, “mainstream” games. To me, the IGF should be about taking a game that might not have a big marketing budget and showcasing it so that people (mostly developers) take note that something besides the big, publisher-funded triple-A titles exist.

In that light, Minecraft winning the awards is a bit of an overkill. Not to say it’s not a great game that doesn’t deserve to win some big awards, but it’s already got a lot of attention. Winning the IGF is unlikely to make some game developer suddenly sit up and take notice of this game. Not to say Minecraft is a bad game or that Notch cheated and isn’t really indie or whatever, but they’ve already got their attention and are thriving for it. I mean, there’s someone making a movie about the studio already, even if it is still really new.

Yes, one can infinitely split the hair on “what is indie”. But, personally, I want to get the word out that there are a lot of indie games out there that are cool. Hopefully people will check out all the IGF nominees and try them out to find out that games don’t have to live or die based on their marketing budget.

So, yes, congrats for living the indie game and hitting it big! Enjoy the attention while it lasts, and save up so you can keep doing games you’re passionate about. But, there are other games that could obviously use the exposure to potentially demonstrate that indie can be more than blocky graphics.
Bad Sector said,

I disagree with any muddy definition of “indie” because it really doesn’t help anyone – except those who like flamewars of the “i’m more indie than you” kind.

The definition of “indie” that i really accept (and the definition i’ve heard used before the whole “indie” thing became so mainstream :-P) is that of financial independence: an indie game is a game that was developed without being financially dependent on any 3rd party, except it’s developers. And an indie game developer is a developer who is not financially dependent on any 3rd party (being it a publisher or some external investor).

Some people do not like this definition because it doesn’t exclude “big boys” like pre-zenimax id Software (which, btw, was never a big team – IIRC when they made Doom 3 they were about twenty people total). But i think this doesn’t make sense: id Software (and others) became “big” because they made good games and were successful. By wanting to exclude them (and others) from the “indie” definition, is like wanting to exclude success from the “indie” definition.

But i believe that this is what “indie” should mean: financial independence. What many people came to associate with “indie”, like creative independence, innovation, friendlier “more human” developers, or negative stuff like crap art 😛 are all possible byproducts of the financial independence. However they are not what makes indies being indies.

And being associated with such stuff is not necessarily good. If you overload the “indie” term with such things, people will come to expect from you all of that. They will expect from indies to be innovative (which is false and wrong, not everyone is innovative -in fact, most are not- and doesn’t need to be), more talkable/friendly (many can do it, but honestly a lot of people are not good with that or do not have time, yet they might create awesome games) and always use awful assets (which is a bad thing for indies who actually spent a fortune/time to have awesome assets be met with prejudices of not having good visuals – especially when it comes to trying to pitch their games to distributors and/or game reviewing sites).

Really, if there cannot be a “clear cut” definition of “indie” (which isn’t true, see above :-P) then there shouldn’t be a definition at all, because if you have to “feel” what “indie” means you cannot use the term in any meaningful discussion because everyone “feels” differently.
Bad Sector said,

Ah yeah, also: when you have such cloudy definitions, you get comparisons like “indie vs mainstream” which make no sense (one is about independence, the other is about what is most common) and should be more like “niche vs mainstream” (one is about something small/specific, the other is about what is most common – note that i’m probably slightly abusing “niche” here, but from what i’ve seen around the net, the most common use of the term is about a small/specific demographic).
Brian 'Psychochild' Green said,

Well, “indie” is a muddy concept, let alone definition. Financial independence is the “real” definition, but is it useful? I don’t think so if (at least on the games side) it includes everything from Flash games to Desktop Dungeons to Minecraft to Loop Raccord to DOOM 3.

In non-games, Joss Whedon claimed that Dr. Horrible was an “indie” production. Technically true since it was self-funded, but it was only really possible because Joss knew a bunch of professionals willing to work dirt cheap. Great, but not exactly a viable model that others can use to enjoy similar success. Not to malign the quality or entertainment value, but I don’t think it’s useful to call it “indie” even if it meets the technical definition.

So, I’d like the term to have some meaning. As I said above, I think that meaning is most useful when bringing attention to a work that might otherwise get overlooked.
WhineAboutGames said,

But, there are other games that could obviously use the exposure to potentially demonstrate that indie can be more than blocky graphics.

Any awards program is likely to end up giving a fair share of its awards to things that don’t need the exposure, though, and some awards programs are rigged to _only_ give prizes to things that are already famous. The IGF isn’t one of them, thankfully, but there’s always going to be that feeling that more could have been done and that too much adulation clusters on too few titles.

(Sadly, I seem to have been kicked out of IGF judging for saying that the IGF was not completely perfect but was trying hard and doing a decent job with what they had. Oh well.)