thecatamites

@thecatamites

harmonyzone.org

ANTHOLOGY OF THE KILLER out now!!! Welcome to the road of killing!!

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thecatamites
@thecatamites

brian dump

i wonder if it's ever been easier to make indie games without even feeling like you're engaging with a subculture.
and maybe that's fine since as a subculture it's never been exactly "good". i support anyone making art who doesn't see why that has to mean their being instantly conscripted into arcane forum wars. but it kind of connects to something else i've been feeling, that there's no longer even an idea of unconventional success, anywhere - there's conventional success, which occasionally happens to unconventional things, and nothing else.
stuff like the hauntii dev and that weird cardgame ripoff thing have been on my mind. it's not like indie games themselves have ever not been adjacent to fash shit and prosperity gospel scammers, it's more like, it's odd how naked that stuff is here - the people doing it don't need to be crafty about it to slip under the radar of their peers, as part of using the infrastructure of a shared space, bc their 'peers' are just the steamspy gurus and marketing grindset conference guys who don't give a shit and the infrastructure is a set of commercial platforms. anyone who might have other priorities gets gradually filtered away by a decade's worth of freemarket churn. friction between these spaces is not new - you used to see indie devs whose whole style was bitten from either pirated snes games or older hobbyist software complaining about how freeware devalued the market - but it feels like the balance has shifted even harder. and it's a general thing, it's not something an appeal to some set of (wholly imaginary) scene values can fix. but it still feels like it's worth marking the event somehow, this first glimpse of the sweaty, grimacing face of Indie Unchained from even the vague memory of any old obligations.

(incidentally i will say in passing: it's very funny to see a revulsed divestment from old hobbyist culture go hand in hand with the ever more fawning and indiscriminate reappraisal of a commercial games tradition it was once normal to regard as - dare i say it! - rather paltry)

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shadsy
@shadsy

I was just thinking recently about how the Indie Game Scene of the early '10s was a specific historical cultural moment we have passed now and how we're probably better for it. Like I get the appeal of belonging to a club, but as an outsider who went to one or two Indie Dev events, it felt really, really cliquish and based in some elder millennial sense of cool and didn't connect with what I actually liked about games. I feel like in 15 years we're gonna feel the same way about the cozy-cottagecore-solarpunk-sovereign-citizen-for-smol-beans game movement.

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thecatamites
@thecatamites

the only scene i liked was the hallucinated one where all the people at the edges of even more insular hobbyist groups suddenly got a glimpse of what the others were doing; i don't miss it, but i do feel a little worse for anyone trying to make similar connections now that paying $100 for valve to host your free demo has somehow become a standard practice

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thecatamites
@thecatamites

i think the very idea that something might be successful on its own terms and that those terms might just involve not making money seems to be increasingly difficult; to not make money is seen as an artistic and a moral failure, a ding that we need to chastise, and the task of the artist as that of making their own needs and the market's needs line up so well that we no longer have to fret about the distinction

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droqen
@droqen

ahh, i can relate! so . . . when i have felt this way, which is very often, it has been because of the spaces i inhabit, the people i spend time with, and my own internally held idea of what is valued and successful.

recently i spent two weeks playing videogames and making art for an event held by a stunningly large and active animal crossing fan community and i cannot really explain how that has shaken me loose from those bad feelings. this is the only experience that i can share, i don't suggest that it or something like it would necessarily help you, but to back up my belief that it is possible to find pockets of the world, even unimaginably vast places that are not very secret, where NOBODY feels the way that you don't want to feel. you are capable of feeling differently about success and i wish you nothing but the best.

also, i really enjoyed your anthology of the killer. it was an unexpected shining light for me while i was going through a particular personal process of thinking about games in a structurally different way. it hit me at the right time, i guess.

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thecatamites
@thecatamites

thank you, i'm really glad you liked it! and don't worry, i'm not venting too much private grievance - part of this post was just spurred by a recent headline celebrating "weird little games" which turned out to mean excitedly listing their sales figures and relation to steam trends and nothing else about them, haha. hitting up zine fairs is part of how i unwind the same way!

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droqen
@droqen

yes that makes perfect sense, the commercial-videogame-verse is very what it is, which is shit and bad! i am declaring war on them, they are my enemy, and this leaves me morally free to manipulate that entire sphere to my ends. remains to be seen whether i will make an effective warmonger however.

i am very happy to hear that you are not privately grieving!!!

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thewaether
@thewaether

I think the lack of reporting on indie games is a the main reason the bottom has fallen out of the public perception of "indie". it used to be you could make a game for "1 or 2 sickos" as the saying goes and one of the blogs might do a little piece on it. I think there's lots of indie games people would like but that they just won't hear about.

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