Hite on Indie Games

Ken Hite discusses indie games in his Ouf of the Box column.

Occasionally I'm taken to task by various peers and colleagues for "buying into the indie mystique," but I will say this. Leaving aside the issue that the "indie movement" has produced at least half of the true RPG masterpieces in the last five years, the various self-identifying "indie" game designers I meet at these shows are almost always folks whose first instinct is to talk about game design. That might have a lot of explanations -- I do most of my drinking with old-school designers, and so we have to decide where we're drinking before we can talk about anything else, for example. But the indie folks care, obsessively, about game design -- they have a lot in common with the War College types who, no doubt, will talk about pincer movements at Marengo at the drop of a hat. And this might help explain why the young Turks sell a whole lot of games at even the oldest-school of conventions like Origins.

I think indie games deserve to be judged on the basis of the actual games, not by the way some designers' bad attitude towards established games resembles everything that was bad about the late 70s punk movement in British music.

For the record, I still think "Tales from Topographic Oceans" is a better record than "London Calling". Unfortunately I don't think many people will agree with me.