New Rule

Much can be said about the indie scene in today’s industry: it’s hip, it’s sexy, it’s big business and getting bigger, it’s the guardian of innovation, it’s the future… I believe these are all true. The indie scene is certainly my pick for the right path both for individual developers and the industry as a whole. Conglomerated media is certainly not going anywhere, and behemoths like EA and Activision have a snug corner of the market and no reason to change their habits. But more and more “corporate” developers are eschewing the skyscrapers for quaint brownstones and sunroom studios, and with middleware tools and digital distribution taking off left and right, I’d say the future that is indie is bright indeed.

But you already know all this. What I’m interested in discussing is the oft-overlooked “little brother” of the indie scene: universities.

Game development programs are still extremely rare, and there are plenty of good reasons for that: lack of understanding by trustees and administrators about the games industry and it’s needs, lack of enthusiasm by said trustees to fund such programs, the difficulty in achieving accreditation in game design, and probably worst of all: the extreme scarcity of qualified design professors with that most elusive of combinations: industry experience and a terminal degree in their field. Where they do exist, game development programs are almost always folded into another department, usually computer science (After all, game are just software, right? Any old programmer can make a good game). Where they’re not, they tend might be asset creation oriented (aka SCAD) or part of experimental cross-disciplinary curricula. The course that diverted my academic career into game development two years ago was a so-called “Special Topics Directed Study” course, which means it didn’t belong in a specific department and the students were basically responsible for making up the material as they went along. It was cross-listed as Comp. Sci. and Communications, and I was one of two art majors out of twenty enrolled students. That’s still not uncommon; these classes are the exception, not the rule.

And then there is Carnegie Mellon’s Experimental Gameplay Project or USC’s Game Innovation Lab. There is the IGF Student Games Festival and Jenova Chen’s flOw. Universities have long been the proving ground for the new generation of boundary-breakers and envelope-pushers, and games are no exception. I find it interesting that the top-notch game programs are copying the medical and scientific research models that have dominated those professions for over a century. Universities get grant money and put together a lab of talented, driven, and completely unproven individuals and they let them tinker. The result is the kind of breakthroughs that can only exist in that kind of riskless, constraint-free environment. Personally I’m not too impressed with flOw, but there have been plenty of games to come out of student brains that just make me sit back and say, “Wow.” Take a look at the winners from this year’s IGF Student Showcase and you’ll see what I mean. My personal favorite is The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. It’s a temporal puzzle game, and it’s simply mind-boggling.

Students are notoriously lazy and unfocused, but when the real all-stars get going on something, the work they come up with is easily as good as anything the indie scene puts out, perhaps minus a few layers of production value (nature of the beast — students don’t have time or money to spend on that). And all these students are in this program to get jobs in the industry, naturally. But when the time comes to send out the resumes, imagine the though process of a student developer from Winterbottom or Synaesthete or Crayon Physics Deluxe: they’ve just finished a work of creative brilliance in which they were given the utmost freedom to express themselves and their ideas, and they now face a choice between two distinct career opportunities:

1. Join a corporate conglomerate working on the next Spiderman, title for which they will be an assistant (junior) tools engineer/technical artist, in which they are expected to put in unpaid overtime and endure numerous crunches as well as the stress and pressure associated with a multi-million dollar budget.
2. Join an indie studio of twelve guys working out of a house making an innovative small-budget title for download on XBLA, for which they will be a “game designer extraordinaire” in a company whose core values are based on maintaining a sane work schedule, balancing quality of life with good product, listening to their employees, and ensuring the greatest possible creative freedom.

Which would you choose?

I suspect we will start to witness a clear trend of new game college grads going straight into the indie scene; it more closely resembles the kind of lifestyle and business ethos that inspired them to take up game design in the first place. Here at SCAD, the only students I know who wouldn’t prefer the indie scene to being in the trenches at a big traditional studio are the uninspired and unremarkable. With a brain drain like that already taking place, the indie future looks very bright indeed.

Tags: Game Criticism, General, The Industry //