Nobody referred to anything as an Indie RPG until Ron Edwards and co started doing so. (2000 I think)

Then those games started to become popular and make money.

All of a sudden a load of people come out of the woodwork demanding that they be recognized as Indie, how they've always been Indie and ranting about how they're Indie in spite of the Forge definition.

Which I find fascinating, both in terms of revisionist bullshit and the nature of the web. People forget really fast.

-Matt

Realms Publishing

[Well, if we are being contraversial...]

Why this need to label? What purpose does it serve?

Being an 'indie' game is no guarantee of quality or orgasmic play experience. Being an 'indie' game is no longer even a small club of exclusive small press releases - after all, everyone and their aunty seems to be 'working on a game'. Being 'indie' doesn't even mean 'cheap' anymore looking at the prices of some of the more well-produced games recently.

Or does it?

Are we living in a nepotistic, cannibalistic world of self-fulfilling designer communities where everyone buys everyone elses game regardless because it is 'indie'? Has some cache been created where a game has to be 'indie' to be cool and cutting edge rather than the moaning leviathans of the traditional game groups? Do we try to extrapolate out from what is essentially a business grouping or division some added value that can be attached to our games?

All things 'Indie' have always been a matter of scale - Indie record labels, Indie comics, Indie Wrestling - the same essential product with lower production values and smaller distribution and none of the necessity to bow to the pressures of mass market sales.

Indeed, that end bit is the winner I think - whatever type of games these are they are games that can AFFORD to be about post-holocaust 1960s South London or Girl friends having issues or wacky conspirators or Peninsular War soldiers. They don't have to be generic, they don't have to be market-place competitive. They just have to have a niche that can garner some interest.

Tsk! Next you'll be asking for a definition of 'story game' and THEN we'll be in trouble?!

(all above with tongue firmly in cheek, if you hadn't guessed)

Neil

Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/

Indie means creator-owned. Though there certainly were indie games before the Forge, that's where the term got its life. And yes, term is not very useful any more I suppose. I tend to look for what kind of play a game facilitates these days, and not whether it's creator-owned.

Ron published his "Indie Manifesto" as an appendix in Sorcerer & Sword (p 97).

It's basically this: Go create your own games, play the hell out of them and tell us about it. Sell them or give them away and engage in theory discussions about them. System does matter: rules text DOES affect substance and quality of play. Encourage others to do the same.

Per
http://darkplaces.squarespace.com

I think of Indie Games as being where the creator is there, doing the game. The creator has the creative control over it too, i.e. can say "pulp the books", "change this", "print it on animal hide", whatever they like without being trumped by anyone else, or having to seek the permission of bosses/partners/investors.

Grey areas?

Where you have investors who don't actually do the game but have ponied up money to start up your company that's tricky. That moves it away from really being Indie and towards Small Press, or whatever. Hey, you're a small publisher that's fine, but it's not an imprint of the creator. Games like SLA and Tales of Gargentihr had investors, even though they seemed quite Indie back in the day. (Venture Press, a contemporary to those games, only got investment from the Princes' Trust I think, so that is more towards Indie but they also bought out the creators so it wasn't Indie.)

Licenses are a grey area too. The Dresden Files, etc. will have some creative restraint and monetary terms attached to its licence, I would imagine. So a company like Evil Hat is again small press to me but less Indie on The Dresden Files. On the other hand, Don't Rest Your Head and Spirit of the Century are totally Indie. (And with their FATE RPG project growing out of Fudge back in the day they have always been about sharing their systems and so on. Tres Indie.)

Collaboration can be fine, though. I think of musicians agreeing to play on each other's albums for the fun of it (and not as Work for Hire) or in return for reciprocal help. There's a lot of tradition in music of that. So a couple of designers doing a game together and splitting the gravy equitably works for me.

A grey area could be publishing it through someone else. I tried, for instance, to get David Donachie to have his own imprint for Solipsist but (admirably) he is rather stubborn about not doing so. So, I'm publishing it on his behalf. He pays for the books and makes all the decisions. Hey, I'll advise him on what he should do, but it's his call (on everything, which is where I feel it's different from, say, Mob United Media). What do I get? $2 a book sold for laying it out and publishing it, which is really to cover my costs. At the end of the day, the stock is his and he could burn them all if he wanted. And maybe he'll then take it to his own imprint at some point... (hey, he did the website on his own good enough...)

I don't think big print runs lessens your Indie-ness (if you can afford it and you sell them then it actually makes sense, it's an economic decision by the creator. PTA's most recent print run was a thousand I think, SOTC has recently had a big run I think moving away from LULU. Burning Wheel was the same I think.).

Paying artists for art doesn't lessen Indie-ness. In fact, I'd hope that we would strive to have great production values and pay artists promptly and fairly.

Types of rules don't lessen your Indie-ness. Dark Realms that I posted about in the other thread is the very essence of a traditional fantasy game (badly done). But, hell, Guild of Blades has been shunned by the mainstream and is pretty much as Indie as they get. And some really innovative games were done by the most mainstream of companies. Perception is a problem here, as Jon Hodgson points out about Dragon Warriors it was a mass paperbakc by Corgi Books!

SPQR might very well be Indie but RuneQuest published by Chaosium wasn't. Issaries Inc.'s Hero Wars is debatable, and depends on what mood I'm in.

And yet we still have this concept of "wacky indie games" floating around. Not "Wacky story games" or "Wacky alternative games" but "Wacky Indie games"

It makes me wonder if I could publish a totally traditional gamist, simulationist, crunchy, combat driven, one-GM, game (in a large format) and get away with calling it Indie. I mean I know I would be right to do so, but would it be accepted as such?

http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/

...People want to be under the umbrella...as it's worth moolah.

If it allows your game to be differentiated in the market and get sales then people are going to want to have it attached to them and their game (hell, Mongoose started an Indie Imprint). There's also posturing about being "Indie" (and somehow smugly superior to other games), which is just BS. It's like "real games writers" being on the "inside" and superior.

Yes, yes, it would.

Well on the Forge, anyway. And I hope here too. Story Games might have a cow, though.

I guess this was at the source of my little gabbling before. See, I have a dream and that dream is that someone somewhere will pony up the $5k for the 4e SRD and then sit in shocked silence as they see chapters devoted to things like collaborative world building, shared narration of scenes, dynamic editing mechanics and some form of Aspect-style shennanagins in place of feats. I dream about the shockwaves of horror spreading across the gaming world as the traditionalists realise that their games have forever changed and the 'indie-gamers' realise that they have, without their consent, been sold out and now ... they are mainstream!

Luckily none of my dreams ever come true. Not even that one with the old style phonebox, the Pussycat Dolls and the galllon of baby oil.............

Neil

I resisted having another imprint for two reasons, one totally reasonable and one unashamedly mercenary :) The reasonable one, and the first one, is why have yet another imprint? What value is added to the product, or to the industry, by the proliferation of imprints, especially where imprint = author. You might as well just have the author on the cover.

The mercenary one, of course, is that my tradeoff for cutting in Gregor is that I get to share in the marketability of his brand, which is well established and popular and has a considerably better profile than any imprint I could create from scratch. (Of course part of the cut is the risk Gregor assumes in having his imprint associated with a bad game).

Plus when Gregor takes over the world I'll be right beside him :P

http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/

...the lead designer on 4e worked on Feng Shui with RDL.

The lead designer of 3e, Jonathan Tweet, did Ars Magica and Over The Edge. Real innovative all the way, more than most Indie Games, except the very exceptional ones.

I remember the argument for GURPS being Indie. It was based on the fact that Steve Jackson wrote and published it. And at that point, who can say, maybe it was technically indie. However as soon as they published support material written by somebody else, it stopped being Indie.

I think that it IS possible to be Indie and employ people full-time, provided that the owner of the IP retains complete creative control over the text of the game. It doesn't make you non-indie if you employ full-time layout people, artists,, marketing, distribution, whatever, but as soon as it's not entirely the publisher or one of his business partners writing the material it stops being Indie. That applies to first-party resource material too, but not third party material where the game is published under some kind of license. This allows Indie products to be based on non-indie games like the D20 system, and non-indie products to be based on indie games though I can't think of any examples of that ever happening.

Oh, hold on... Godlike? Or was that directly commissioned? I think it was commissioned.

Anyway, there isn't even a solid definition of the term Indie in the Indie Music industry, and that's been going on for quite a while, so I think it's probably best to despair at finding a definitive answer and just go with instinct after all. A shame, but unless you can get a good percentage of people to agree to a definition it's not going to stand.

Ash

By this reckoning, does that mean that the first set of D&D - Blackmoor or whatever it was called - could have been classified as an indy game? I'm totally unsure of the methodology back then but I reckon at some point in time Arneson/Gygax et al must have been self-publishers?

Neil

Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/

[Edit: moved it to this "What is Indie" thread rather than the "What was your first Indie Game thread" - Gregor]

In the 70s there were vibrant games coming out of hobbyists eager to enjoy themsleves in this new method of expression. Now I'm not certain at what point TSR became a company and how it was owned (I have a feeling they got investors early). At that point they wouldn't have been following a creator-owned model. Before that, when they were making the rules themselves, playtesting them and amending as necessary, then publishing it themselves and selling locally. If they were doing that then indeed that is an Indie model. And if it were creator owned you can bet that Dave Arneson wouldn't have been boned for all those years before Peter Adkison came to a settlement between the parties.

[Edit: moved it to this "What is Indie" thread rather than the "What was your first Indie Game thread" - Gregor]

The hobby is full of terms than no one can agree on, see Role-Playing Game, Freeform, Role-playing, System, etc.

I'll leave the refutation of GURPS to Rich...

I think that threads like this prove a couple of things. Or maybe they don't, I dunno. But this one has re-affirmed some stuff for me.

First, "Indie" is an even more fucking pointless and useless term than it was when it was used back in the year 19whatever by whoever used it first. It means fuck all because nobody agrees on what it means. Therefore it's fucking useless. Just like having a term for when a dog stops being black and becomes brown, exactly what pantone shade is that?

Secondly, there's no "Indie Cred". That's just as much wank. There's "Forgie Cred" which has largely been replaced by "Storygamer Cred" in the last couple of years. Let's get something straight: The people on The Forge or Story Games aren't smarter or a better judge of a good game than anyone else, but they do have time (between them) to talk about games a lot and play a lot of stuff. So their opinions are worth listening to if you like that kind of thing, and some games get "tagged" with what's wrongly called "indie cred" because they're talked about on those sites. Good games get talked about because they're good, but also remember that some bad ones also get talked about because the people who wrote them are popular and once wrote a game which Ron Edwards liked. Because the people who post on those sites (including me, you and anyone else) are just like everyone else in the fucking world, and have tastes, interpersonal relationships and personal preferences.

Thirdly, Jesus fucking Christ, will this bullshit "Gurps is indie" meme just fucking die. SJGames was a fairly large going concern. Steve Jackson might have designed the game and owned the company, but there were people employed there at the time. Full time employees = not indie.

And besides, it was written before 1988, and all games created prior to the 4th of August of that year have been scientifically proven to be shit.

Fourth, licensed games pass (or don't) their indieness. That is, if you use a system which is published/owned by another indie publisher, you can call what you publish indie if you want. So basing it on FATE or Solar System could produce an indie game. Basing it on D20 or MRQ makes you The Man, and means you deserve to get punched by a Mexican midget in clown make-up.

Fifth, Hero Wars was written by RDL as work-for-hire. It's not Indie. It can be a dirty hippie game, but the way it came into existence is pretty much the definition of "not indie".

Greg Stafford: I want to release a game based on my Glorantha setting, but last I did that it was Runequest, which is shit. Maybe I should have waited until after the 4th of August, 1988? Ah well, lets have another go! Lets see: stat plus skill plus 2d6... Oh, this is too hard, I'll just pay someone else to do all this stuff while I write about ducks.

*Looks through Yellow Pages under Game Design*

RDL: I've written your game for you. That'll be $X please Greg!

Greg: Cheers! Now piss off!

NOT FUCKING CREATOR OWNED!

In short, trying to pin the tail on this donkey is, apparently, futile. Which is why you shouldn't start threads asking what people's first indie game was unless you first establish what you mean.

Rahhh!!!! RICH SMASH!!!!

I think I'm going to use the term DSG or "Digest Sized Game" from now on and ignore any games larger or smaller than that (yes, this does mean I'm ignoring the 6x9 games too, and even Bliss Stage, Covenant and Dead of Night).

At last a concrete and safe definition.

So look for a new thread about your first Digest Sized Game.

:*)

It means independantly released. Preacher was creator owned by Ennis & Dillon but it was hardly an indie comic.

People have a tendency to confuse an adjective with a genre. 'Pop music' doesn't mean any music which is popular, 'superhero' doesn't refer to any hero with superpowers, 'sci-fi' doesn't refer to any fiction with science in it and 'soap opera' doesn't refer to an opera with soap in it. They're just short-hand labels that allow a common frame of reference when grouping things.

Indie rpg's will originally have referred to handmade games published independantly but sooner or later, as with every 'indie' label, the games published begin to share common traits and the term switches from adjective to genre. At which point a company like White Wolf can produce an 'indie' game despite it not being independantly produced and some guy can knock out an old-school dungeon crawl game which no-one thinks of as being 'indie' despite being handmade and distributed by himself.

Sorry, I was only talking about games, not anything else "indie". And I think that was the point of the thread as well. Let's not open it up to comics, music, films or whatever else there is of indie out there. It probably doesn't mean the same thing across these examples anyway.

The indie term for RPGs as we know it today derives from the Forge (www.indie-rpgs.com - gettit?), and that's why I quote the original indie manifesto.

Yes, it has since become almost obsolete as a term for rpgs, but that doesn't change where it came from.

So let me re-phrase: Indie originally meant creator-owned.

Per
http://darkplaces.squarespace.com

In all fairness, the Forge will try and slap a definition on any term regardless of how people use it. Sometimes they get something right, sometimes they come up with a definition that many people disagree with. Language however is most correctly defined by how people use a term, not by how individual organisations label it. Now, 'Indie' had prior usage in the music industry long before it was applied to role-playing games, so I think it is important that we do at least take note of what that prior definition means. This is the primary reason why I don't disqualify games studios that employ full-time staff, provided that those staff aren't writers.

Out of interest, I'm digging out the dictionary. I don't expect this to be terribly accurate with reference to the gaming industry, but it could be a useful point of interest.

Indie: a small independent film or record company, especially one that produces films or music considered more avant-garde than those of the main commercial companies. (there are other definitions too, but they were only relevant to the music industry.)

So there's your dictionary-defined answer. An indie game is one that is designed by a small independent company (note that 'small' doesn't mean 'no employees' - it's more likely to do with market share) particularly one that strays away from mainstream subjects. To be honest I think it's probably the closest to accurate you'll get, but it still leaves a huge amount of space for interpretation, meaning a vast number of companies could be indie if they wanted to be. In fact I'd guess that there can't be more than ten or fifteen companies that are disallowed Indie status on account of their size and profitability.

And Greg, Digest Sized Games? Damnit! I hardly ever use digest size! :( Hehe

Ash

This has been moved to its own thread as inevitably talking about other sites is going to spawn back-and-forth chatter. No problem. Let's keep this thread on topic. -Gregor

I've always found that Creator Owned Publisher (COP) is a more precise term for games written and published by the creator.

I think those who want to use "indie" to mean solely this have lost the fight, in the same way that I've begrudgingly abandoned my attempts to persuade people to use "fulsome" correctly.

Simon Rogers
http://www.profantasy.com
Blog - http://sjrlj.notlong.com