Indie Games in the Digital Age 9781501356452, 9781501356421, 9781501356438

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INDIE GAMES IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Approaches to Digital Game Studies Volume 8

Series Review Board

Mia Consalvo, Concordia University in Montreal James Paul Gee, Arizona State University Helen Kennedy, University of Brighton Frans Mayra, University of Tampere Toby Miller, University of California, Riverside Torill Mortensen, IT University Copenhagen Lisa Nakamura, University of Illinois Gareth Schott, University of Waikato Mark J. P. Wolf, Concordia University

Series Editors

Gerald Voorhees, University of Waterloo Josh Call, Grand View University

Previous Titles Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens, edited by Gerald Voorhees, Josh Call, and Katie Whitlock Guns, Grenades, and Grunts, edited by Gerald Voorhees, Josh Call, and Katie Whitlock Violent Games, by Gareth Schott Music Video Games, by Michael Austin The World of Scary Video Games, by Bernard Perron Alternate Reality Games and the Cusp of Digital Gameplay, edited by Antero Garcia and Greg Niemeyer Adventure Games, edited by Aaron Reed, John Murray, and Anastasia Salter

INDIE GAMES IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Edited by M. J. Clarke and Cynthia Wang

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Volume Editor’s Part of the Work © M. J. Clarke & Cynthia Wang Each chapter © of Contributors Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Chris Gorgio / iStock / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The authors and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data TK ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5645-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5643-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-5644-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Introduction  M. J. Clarke and Cynthia Wang 1

Part I  Indie Game Creators

15

1

Brews, Burgers, and Indie Bombast: The Antiestablishment Neoliberalism of Devolver Digital  John Vanderhoef 17

2

Queer Indie Game-Making: An Interview with Mo Cohen  Bonnie Ruberg 35

3

Postmortems and Indie Cultural Work  M. J. Clarke 48

4

Five Nights at Fan Games: Feminism, Fan Labor, and Five Nights at Freddy’s  Betsy Brey 73

Part II  Indie Game Tools

97

5

From Tool to Community to Style: The Influence of Software Tools on Game Development Communities and Aesthetics  Emilie Reed 99

6

This Is How a Garden Grows: Cultivating Emergent Networks in the Development of Stardew Valley  Kevin Rutherford 123

7

The Making of Escape Room in a Box  Cynthia Wang 142

Part III  Indie Games Texts 8

159

The Hunt for Queer Spaces: Mainstream Indie Games, Representation, and Limited Worlds  Cody Mejeur 161

Contents

  9 Indie in the Underground   Aaron Trammell 184 10 Paper Code and Digital Goods: The Economic Values of Type-In Market Games  Patrick Davison 199 List of Contributors 221 Index 224

vi

INTRODUCTION

M. J. Clarke and Cynthia Wang

The digital realm has reconfigured the ways in which production and consumption of games happen. Consider some prominent examples: ——

——

——

——

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In November 2010, a group of high school friends from Chicago presented a version of their game, Cards against Humanity, as a Kickstarter campaign. After surpassing its modest funding goal, the game sold over 500K units in the next three years and enabled its creators to generate a number of politically minded publicity stunts in the wake of Trump presidency. In May 2011, self-taught game developer Andrew Spinks released his own world-building game after only five months of production. The game, Terraria, now available on all major computing and gaming platforms, has sold over 20.5 million units, but is still only available through Spinks’s own publishing firm, Re-Logic. In June 2013, student video game developer Toby Fox pitched his own project, Undertale, on the financing platform Kickstarter using the free-to-use production tool, GameMaker. After raising over $50,000 for his game, Fox’s Undertale sold over 2 million units before being named 2015 Game of the Year by several video game trade journals, including IGN. In August 2012, the disillusioned pen-and-paper game developer Monte Cook left his job at the publisher of industry leader, Dungeons & Dragons, and pitched his own role-playing system, Numenera, directly to fans in a Kickstarter campaign that earned over $500K. Subsequently, the game has become a brand-franchise spawning a series of spin-offs, novels, and video games. In February 2016, two stay-at-home moms and escape room aficionados launched their Kickstarter campaign for a home-based, single-use escape room board game called Escape Room in a Box. After they hit their goal of $19,500 within fourteen hours, and were funded for over $135,000, they ultimately licensed the game with board game giant Mattel.

Indie Games in the Digital Age

In all these cases, creators have leveraged the ease and availability of online tools and platforms and, as a result, have forged paths to both creative and financial success previously unavailable. Traditional mass media and game publishing models have operated with high barriers to entry and high production costs, reinforcing capitalist power structures, wherein the richest, most privileged, most connected and the most culturally, socially, and artistically normative have had the best chance to have their creative works made and exposed to a wide audience. And because mainstream board game companies like Mattel and Hasbro, as well as traditional video game companies such as Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have presided over an oligarchical system, independent game-makers historically have had more limited chances to get their work in front of an audience without directly working with one of these gatekeepers. The concept of “indie” or independent creation outside of traditional channels of cultural production has been a predominant theme in academic and critical press as well as in creator investment around film, music, and other mass media in the last several decades, a tendency that has only expanded along with new digital affordances. Recently, media coverage is replete with celebratory examples. For example, in music, Chance the Rapper’s album, Coloring Book, was first self-released on the free digital platform Soundcloud before winning the 2016 Grammy for Best Rap Album of the Year. And in the previous year, Sean Baker produced the award-winning film Tangerine—a movie about transgender sex workers shot entirely on an iPhone. Digital tools have also encouraged the indie impulse in other fields of expression, such as the use of social media and blogging to establish and promote underground restaurants (Tran, 2017), as well as in the growth of podcasting as a new vehicle for independent critics, essayists, and historians (Markman and Sawyer, 2015). Among this new wave of independent cultural producers is a growing and vocal group of game-makers, critics, and users using the moniker of indie games. This collection of chapters explores useful inquiries into the motivations and functions of current indie cultural work, and specifically indie gaming. Indie gaming is not simply an experiment in artistic creation but also one of social and economic experimentation in which its participants actively interrogate their internal cultural and economic motivations, their relations to the larger community of makers and users, the sociocultural function of their texts, and their attitude toward the technological affordances available to them. Each chapter explores, in various contexts, how indie game producers have negotiated their processes of production and distribution of 2

Introduction

their creations in ways that challenge traditional models of game-making, while also forcing us to rethink our understanding of late capitalist cultural production and consumption processes. Investigating the products and practices of indie game-makers presents scholars with an opportunity to reconsider the debate over user-generated content and digital labor more broadly. How much does the dissolution of mainstream gaming’s production chokeholds on financing, marketing, distribution, and production empower indie game-makers to rethink cultural, economic, and political models? Conversely, how are indie game-makers potentially exploited by new media platforms that siphon off their biopolitical labor, reinforcing and reinterpellating them into traditional models of capitalism and power? Our understanding of indie games lies at the intersection of these debates, which allows us to posit the indie games not simply as a cause or consequence of economic or social forces but also as an active negotiation and balance between art, representation, theme, labor, and reputation. In other words, this book is less about playing indie games and more about “playing indie” in games work. Like all cultural industries, the business of games and video games is plagued by great risk and uncertainty, a problem only exacerbated by current trends among mainstream publishers. Although the latter’s field is immense and growing, tallying nearly $29 billion annual revenue, these spoils go to a relative few number of incumbent firms; in fact, well over half of this figure was commanded by just five firms (Sony, Microsoft, Activision, Nintendo, and Electronic Arts) in 2017 (Alvarez, 2017). This ballooning overall performance has inflated the importance and risk associated with individual projects as typical production budgets now hover between $20 and $50 million, and average production staffs push past one hundred personnel on AAA (major publisher, big budget) releases. In exemplary cases these costs and worker hours surge even higher; Bungie’s Destiny (2014) reportedly cost the developer $140 million to produce with a team of approximately 400 staff members and Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V (2013) costs almost just as much—$137 million according to contemporary press—and tasked as many as 1,000 creative workers (Pham, 2012; French, 2013; Lanxon, 2013; Sinclair, 2013). As these inputs increase, the overall success rate of games produced diminishes as, according to several estimates, only between 4 percent and 20 percent of video games manage to return a profit to their makers (Zakariasson and Wilson, 2012). In response, larger publishers have adapted several mechanisms of risk aversion in their work practice as well as in the choice and elaboration of their products. Both AAA publishers 3

Indie Games in the Digital Age

and the developers that supply their games increasingly rely on the licensing of presold intellectual properties from other media supply game concepts, the reiteration and sequelization of their own game franchises, and the narrowing of products in line with established game genres and gameplay mechanics. Moreover, these same pressures have equally encouraged the forces of so-called rationalization to appear in the industry through stricter fragmentation of labor, the establishment of clearer work hierarchies, and the use of timetables and deadlines, all hallmarks of classical bureaucracy (Tschang, 2007). In addition to the economic pressures of the gaming business, mainstream console video games, too, are notorious for labor problems and a high rate of creator burnout (Deuze, 2007). Specifically, video game production is typically understood as a dues paying job in which short-term job performance becomes the measure of a worker’s ability to be rehired to staff subsequent short-lived development teams and so-called self-organized projects (Grabher, 2002). It is also a profession that requires off-the-clock reskilling to keep abreast of technological changes in tools and programming languages. And it is a job that often requires long periods of extended work hours—colloquially known as “crunch time”—that may or may not be appropriately remunerated. These factors then are typically papered over with a corporate philosophy of “work as play” (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and De Peuter, 2003) that encourages workers to have “fun” on the job in an effort to keep them at the office if not on their terminals. While trend lines have slightly shifted in the short term, these work demands have tended to overdetermine the typical demographic profile of video game workers. According to the most recent International Game Developer Association survey, the average age of the video game creative is thirty-five (compared to the economy-wide average of forty-two) and that almost half of the game worker labor force have been in the industry for less than six years, evidencing a high degree of aging out (Legault, O’Meara, and Weststar, 2017). Moreover, the same study also demonstrated demographic biases overall as still 79 percent of the workforce is male. And, according to many reports, the gender imbalance has resulted in work environments often hostile or at least unfriendly to women across new media in general, echoing McRobbie’s (2016) claim that boundary-less creative careers have enhanced negative effects on already disadvantaged or marginalized workers who have less access to institutional support and often are compelled to “play along” in order to ensure re-hireability. In one recent report about work in Silicon Valley, 66 percent of female workers indicated that they had 4

Introduction

been excluded from work events on the basis of their gender (Kolhatkar, 2017). The countervailing presence, relative success, and rising critical legitimacy for indie games then acts as a counterweight attracting both old gaming professionals disaffected by work demands and young aspiring creative workers resistant to the work and life culture perpetuated by larger publishers and developers, bringing along with them stories, ideas, and representations outside the sometimes circumscribed experiences of the typical young, male AAA industry. Industrial concentration and the artistic conservatism associated with risk aversion in AAA publishers concomitantly have left fruitful gaps, niches, and agendas in the business of games and video games through what organizational theorists call resource partitioning, what economists call creative destruction, or what critical theorists call commoditization. In the first case, resource partitioning theory explains the mutual co-existence of consolidating, large generalist firms and small, emerging, specialist firms in single industries. Simply put, as the former grow, larger firms often seek out the largest market segments with the broadest serving products and texts to take advantage of their scope through economies of scale (Markman and Waldron, 2014). This strategy leaves neglected market segments and other value propositions open to be exploited by properly scaled firms; however, business thinkers have noted that the vitality that these smaller operations—whether they be microbreweries, luxury watches, or indie games—necessitates a cultivation and maintenance of a distinct authenticity or identity to avoid being reabsorbed into the generalist market (Carroll and Swaminathan, 2000).1 Resource partitioning theory suggests that industrial concentration can engender indie growth, while creative destruction suggest that any technological dependent industry harbors the dilemma of outside, upstart innovation. Economist Joseph Schumpeter elaborated the concept of creative destruction to suggest how actors in industries must repeatedly update their methods and products and that “such change, both great and small can be triggered by entrepreneurial effort which disrupts equilibrium, destroys established value, and creates new value” (Cunningham, Flew, and Swift, 2015, p. 104). Like all new media firms, major AAA publishers spend a large amount of time and effort on research and development and on purchasing innovative firms and technologies to stay abreast of the technological churn that has made more cautionary tales than durable successes in the gaming business. For example, current accounting documents for the publisher Electronic Arts mark the firm as spending an amount approximately equal to one quarter of their revenue 5

Indie Games in the Digital Age

on research and development (Electronic Arts, Inc., 2018). However, the incumbency of these firms and their relative success, attached to the current construction of the industry, leads to a countervailing conservative impulse notably absent in upstart firms. The unceasing nature of technological change may then equally engender an innovative, indie fringe that lacks a definitive investment in the industry and its market as it currently exists and is, thus, more eager for difference in both their production and their texts. Drawn from Marxist notions of the commodity, critical theory poses the rationalization characteristic of profit-seeking creative firms as diminishing and perverting the artistic impulse at their very core into mere ideological reproduction through rote, repetitious, and standardized formulas (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002 [1944]). In most versions of the theory, a text’s mode of production ultimately determines, albeit in the last instance and with relative autonomy, or at least delimits its mode of representation (Althusser, 2005 [1969]). Further, many applications of critical theory then suggest that perhaps alternate modes of production, not subject to the same economic and organizational pressures, may enjoy an enhanced leeway for both artistic and political expression. Despite their radically different evidentiary bases and their respective disciplinary divisions of all these theoretical strands, each suggest a macrological advantage of the relative smallness of actors on an indie field that structurally have either an opportunity, an edge, or even a mandate to innovate in their cultural production. The gaming business is traditionally organized around a publishing model typical of many cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). In this model, smaller, often disconnected firms or individuals—in games, usually termed developers—provide most of the creative or symbol-producing labor, while often larger, managerial firms—in games, typically termed publishers— handle the promotion and circulation of resultant texts. Publishers, through their control of either or all of the following—hardware, marketing, and distribution—hold a tremendous negotiational advantage over creative partners pulled from overpopulated pools of aspiring laborers as well as a gatekeeping function, resulting in high barriers of entry for developers, particularly in traditionally higher costs fields like console video games. In the past, publishers were often the only firms able to convert a set of computer directions and associated graphics or manuscripts of arcane rules along with a set of polyhedral dice into a package that could sell millions of units. The obvious result of this power imbalance was the creation of large pools of creative workers producing materials on speculation. In the case of 6

Introduction

video games, these aspiring developers often pursued so-called third-party deals in which they acted as freelanced labor for publishers in deals that inevitably were skewed in favor of the latter in terms of money, ownership, and scheduling, again reflecting the structural imbalance of the industry and developers’ reliance on publishers. Moreover, the high cost and expertise associated with technology-dependent creative fields, like video games, often only pushed the barriers of entry and the stakes of publisher deals even higher. However, the ubiquity of newer, low-cost digital technologies as well as Internet-enabled connectivity increasingly have disrupted the staid structural imbalance that characterized most of twentieth-century mass media. In turn, these innovations have enabled experimentation of new production logics, including the recasting of games as ongoing services and the bundling of games on online portals (Kerr, 2017). The latter has been particularly important for indie game-makers as portals offer cultural laborers access to financing, marketing, and distribution as well as more direct relationships with their end users. Indeed, the availability of these new digital affordances in many cases has complicated traditional barriers of entry and the division of labor in many de-massifying cultural industries. In game work specifically, these new tools and technologies have diminished the exclusivity of most of the linchpins of publishers’ control. Gaming systems like Steam for video games and Open Game License in pen-and-paper role-playing games have reduced the bottleneck of hardware and, in console video games, control through the dissemination of Software Development Kits (SDKs). In the same vein, Yochai Benkler (2006) argues that the ubiquity of the Internet eases both physical and economic constraints for individuals to produce and distribute media content. This celebration of the Internet as an equalizing platform for media content belies the long-held hope that decentralized production may increase diversity within society through the use of these new technologies. Meanwhile, the reach and costs of social media marketing have chipped away at the exclusive promotional power of publishers. These affordances, according to Nancy Baym (2010), include the ability for an individual to share messages (and, extendedly, media, creative works, projects, etc.) to a wide audience instantaneously, regardless of location. The ability to share messages and information also comes at a diminished cost, lowering the barriers to publication and distribution and allowing previously marginalized and/or disempowered voices to be more accessible and heard. Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have provided alternative avenues to generating the economic means for cultural production. The “long tail” 7

Indie Games in the Digital Age

(Anderson, 2006) effects of online game and app markets, along with the slow decline of brick-and-mortar retailing and its associated wholesaling, have decayed the importance of traditional publishers’ logistical and distributional acumen. And the spread of inexpensive and approachable digital authoring tools further have complicated the association of quality game work only with well-connected and funded developers. In short, a suite of effects connected with recent digital affordances have provided a new opportunity for creative work unavailable in stricter applications of the publisher model. Of course, the association of aesthetic value with perceived artistic independence is a familiar myth as well as a theme of social scientific research (Berger and Peterson, 1975). Romantic notions of struggling artists with singular, uncompromising, and sometimes misunderstood vision posit that the closer a text is to the hands of its creator, the more legitimate it is as a form of expression. And certainly, gaming history is filled with similarly wrought origin stories of monomaniacal, driven creators from Dungeons & Dragons’ Gary Gygax (Witwer, 2015) to Adventure’s Warren Robinett (2006). More recently, celebrations of more artisanal mode of production resonates in Anna Anthropy’s deeply influential Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (2012), a book-length manifesto call for more games to be produced from an individual sensibility. Despite the appeal of such narratives, most of our analyses of indie game production pose this evolving art world as a social and emergent one across texts, producers, and end users. In this manner, the development of indie games echoes not so much a hagiographic timeline but a complex, interactive system mirroring Pierre Bourdieu’s field of cultural production (1993). In Bourdieu’s elaboration of the concept, the sociologist examined the emergence of a distinct tradition of literary novels—a field shaped not simply by a book printer’s bottom line but equally determined by the relative reputation of authors, the attitudes of critics, and the formation of artistic tendencies and canons—or, in a word, cultural capital. Self-aware assessment, evaluation, and competition of a set of internal and unique values pushes cultural fields toward Bourdieu’s concept of autonomy, away from the lone concerns of economic and political power that had animated literary and visual arts, and culminating asymptotically with an attitude of l’art pour l’art. Arguably, games and the scenes growing around them are building a similar field. Gaming texts are both discussed and in subtextual conversation with one another in an effort to refine the budding field’s internal values.2 As a field grows in autonomy, so too should it grow in legitimacy as a space for 8

Introduction

artistic experimentation and critical introspection. This legitimacy, in turn, is vital to the growth and innovation of the field which is then able to attract producers, critics, and users dissatisfied or even alienated from traditional game production or other adjacent fields of cultural production. Regardless of whether it is informed more by structural changes in the gaming industry, the formation and elaboration of a meso-level cultural field, or the dissatisfaction and alienation of game workers, recent indie games have indeed emerged as a site of textual experimentation that provocatively have mutated and altered typical gaming formats in terms of mechanics, gameplay, visual style, and theme. In Firewatch (2016), a user spends a majority of the game moving through and observing nature, artfully subtracting the destructive mechanics typically associated with 3-D gameworlds. Similarly, in Journey (2012) gameplay is dominated by discovery and visual novelty. The aforementioned Undertale (2015) blends innovative storytelling with the nostalgic pixelated visual style, as does To the Moon (2011). And, in games like That Dragon, Cancer (2016), which takes the player through the highs and lows of cancer treatment, indie games have addressed thematic material largely absent from commercial game production. Similarly, Depression Quest (2013) brings socially stigmatized issues like mental health into the foreground. Previous academics typically have examined indie cultural work and its appellation with measured skepticism. Examining the phenomenon in music and film respectively, Ryan Hibbert (2005) and Michael Z. Newman (2009) cast these tendencies as built around the end users’ need to have and accumulate cultural capital that allows connoisseurs to distinguish themselves from consumers of less rarefied forms of popular culture. Alisa Perren (2012) similarly investigated the emergence of indie film, which savvy industry players used a marketing hook to control and corral dispersing consumer choice in an overflooded media landscape. And when video game scholars, Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford (2009) examined independent game work, they characterized it mostly as a site of extra surplus labor to be soaked up by industry-leading firms, creating, in Marxist terminology, an “expropriation of the commons.” While we are sympathetic to all these analyses—indeed so-called independence in cultural work can be understood as a manipulation of users’ vanity, a sly marketing tactic, or a just a ploy to get free labor—we do not believe that these critiques exhaust the subject matter. In our collection, we instead take a more cultural studies informed approach, examining this tendency from the inside out to plumb the fundamental uncertainty around the concept 9

Indie Games in the Digital Age

of indie. While indie games are certainly manipulatable by economic and social power, it is also an aware, self-monitoring social unit, informed by unique structural and technological conditions and creating self-conscious and identifiable creative projects. The political economic question of this new site of cultural work is a complex and unsettled one. Are developers taking advantage of these new opportunities the vanguard of an Internet-savvy neo-artisanal class prepping the world for a de-massified cultural space, or are they simply neoliberal dupes providing biopolitical labor to an increasingly precarious, platformbased gig economy? This debate can be traced back to intermittently optimistic and pessimistic prognoses of digital technology, the Internet and new media more broadly. Famously, Tzivana Terranova (2000) recategorized early Internet use as “free labor” in which user’s enthusiastic activity in producing websites, contributing to forums, and so on was just surplus value to be soaked up by others without remuneration. It is a diagnosis that has only become more convincing with the growth of surveillance economics online coordinated to store, sort, and package more and more of users’ actions and affects as usable and saleable “data.” In a recent example, Cynthia Wang (2012) notes how Apple originally blocked third-party developers from making apps for the iPhone, until hackers did it anyway, and Apple implemented the App Store and their SDK, allowing thirdparty developers to create and distribute their apps—but on Apple’s terms. Andrew Ross (2004), in his complimentary examination of professional digital cultural work, found new opportunities not for expression but for alienation as workers accommodating themselves to unstable work and the dismantlement of traditional work-life boundaries through the institution of playbor—work that’s fun! However, with the growth of so-called Web 2.0, digital labor was increasingly rebranded as user-generated content, citizen journalism, or convergence culture. And, more recently, McRobbie (2016) has interrogated the attempt by government and higher education to encourage its citizens and students to “be creative.” In this effort, the author found that creativity was accompanied less by the liberatory and expressive functions of art and culture but was transformed into a technique of labor reform, disciplining subjects in the realities of a neoliberal work regime that combines a distaste for routine and institutionalization with an individualized sense of precariousness, competition, risk, and consequent stress. Indie games and the workers associated with them, leveraging the availability of digital tools and Internet-enabled connectivity, are largely the beneficiaries of digital laborers and content creators of the past, yet our 10

Introduction

understanding of their work and its processes are equally haunted by the theoretical baggage of this previously unsettled debate. Ultimately, whether indie game work as an emerging site of digital labor looks more like the “full development of productive forces” fantasized by Marx (1971) wherein each would create to their means and desires, or whether the practice simply reproduces preexisting power and hierarchy through what Jodi Dean (2003) calls communicative capital, or whether, more drastically, these activities add up to a form of digital slavery that, Christian Fuchs (2018) argues, late capitalist ideology compels us to forget or ignore has largely do with the analyst’s critical and disciplinary perspective. In other words, the notion of indie games, the work that produces them and the structure that engenders them retains an analytic and theoretical uncertainty. Our current volume plumbs this uncertainty, investigating the production, production cultures, and texts of several indie game creators. This collection is divided into three sections. The first section will address indie game creators themselves and how they have sought alternate paths of production and distribution. First, John Vanderhoef contributes a critical deep dive into Devolver Digital—an indie game publisher—and how the ethos of the firm seeks to create an image of rupture of hegemonic masculinity, yet may also reinforce it at the same time. Bonnie Ruberg’s piece looks at how queer indie game-makers contribute to the changing cultural landscape of game-making through the trials and tribulations of queer gamemaker, Mo Cohen, and their game Queer Quest, highlighting the importance of video games in representing queer identities, communities, histories, and experiences. M. J. Clarke examines the self-reflexivity of indie game postmortems and uses these documents as practioner self-theorizations and representations in which game-makers consider what being “indie” means from the perspective of motivation, technology, and business practice. And Betsy Brey explores the shifting relationships between indie game producers and gaming fans through the horror-game franchise, Five Nights at Freddie’s, tracking the proliferation of fan-made games based on the original title as a site of negotiation around issues of authority, ownership, and meaning. The second section explores the various tools and communities that are at indie game-makers’ disposal, thanks to the affordances of digital platforms. Each of the articles in this section investigates the various ways that indie game-makers have deployed new and emerging methods of funding, of creating, of community-building to do their game work. Emilie Reed begins this section by elucidating, through three case studies, how accessible gamemaking tools influence the aesthetic styles of the games that are created 11

Indie Games in the Digital Age

as well as rise of communities around these toolkits. Kevin Rutherford’s chapter explores how the singular creator of Stardew Valley participated in gaming forums and communities, forging a community of fans who informed his narrative, style, and design. And Cynthia Wang follows the journey of the creators of the aforementioned Escape Room in a Box game as they leveraged digitally afforded resources, such as crowdsourced funding sites and indie game blogs, in the production, distribution, and publicity of their game. The last section examines the impact that indie production and creation has had on the texts of games themselves. Cody Mejeur takes up three mainstream queer indie games as sites to consider both the potential and the limitations of queer representation within the framework of normative gaming practices, and the implications of these representations as they are consumed by (mostly) heteronormative audiences. Aaron Trammell compels us to reconsider the term “indie” by thinking about the implication of subcultural fan communities in role-playing games and their interdependence with and influence on mainstream corporate gaming companies. Finally, Patrick Davison takes a historical look economic simulation games distributed in the newsletter, The People’s Computer Company, and the contradiction between the countercultural ethos of the newsletter and the themes of economic domination reinforced by the games.

Notes 1 Colloquially, this would be known as “selling out.” 2 In fact, this book is a reflexive part of this effort.

Works Cited Adorno T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (2002 [1944]). The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (E. Jephcott, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Althusser, L. (2005 [1969]). For Marx (B. Brewster, Trans.). London, England: Verso. Alvarez, A. (2017). IBISWorld Industry Report NN003: Video Games in the US. IBISWorld. Anderson, C. (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York, NY: Hachette Books. 12

Introduction Anthropy, A. (2012). Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Baym, N. (2010). Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Malden, MA: Polity. Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (R. Johnson, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Carroll, G. R., & Swaminathan, A. (2000). “Why the Microbrewery Movement? Organizational dynamics of resource partitioning in the US brewing industry.” American Journal of Sociology, 106(3), 715–62. Cunningham, S., Flew, T., & Swift, A. (2015). Media Economics. London, England: Palgrave. Dean, J. (2003). “Why the Net is not a Public Sphere.” Constellations, 10(1), 95–112. Deuze, M. (2007). Media Work. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Dyer-Witheford N., & De Peuter, G. (2009). Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Electronic Arts, Inc. (2018). Form 10-K [2017–2018]. Retrieved from http:​//inv​ estor​.ea.c​om/se​cfili​ng.cf​m?fil​ingID​=7125​15-18​-24&C​IK=71​2515. French. M. (2013). “Inside Rockstar North, part 2: The studio.” MCV. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.mcv​uk.co​m/dev​elopm​ent/i​nside​-rock​star-​north​-part​-2-th​ e-stu​dio. Fuchs, C. (2018). “Capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, and racism in the age of digital capitalism and digital labour.” Critical Sociology, 44(4–5), 677–702. Grabher, G. (2002). “Fragile sector, robust practice: Project ecologies in new media.” Environment and Planning A, 34(11), 1903–2092. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2013). The Cultural Industries, 3rd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Hibbert, R. (2005). “What is indie rock?” Popular Music and Society, 28(1), 55–77. Kerr, A. (2017). Global Games: Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked Era. London, England: Routledge. Kline, S., Dyer-Witheford, N., & De Peuter, G. (2003). Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Kolhatkar, S. (2017, November 20). “The disruptors.” The New Yorker, 52–63. Lanxon, N. (2013). “Destiny’s destiny: Bungie’s decade-long plan to succeed Halo.” Wired. Retrieved from http:​//www​.wire​d.co.​uk/ar​ticle​/dest​inys-​desti​ny. Legault, M., O’Meara, V., & Weststar, J. (2017). “IGDA developer satisfaction survey, 2017: Summary report.” Retrieved July 11, 2018 from https​://cd​n.yma​ ws.co​m/www​.igda​.org/​resou​rce/r​esmgr​/2017​_DSS_​/!IGD​A_DSS​_ 2017_ SummaryReport.pdf. Markman, G. D., & Waldron, T. L. (2014). “Small entrants and large incumbents: A framework of micro entry.” Academy of Management Perspectives, 28(2), 179–97. Markman, K. M., & Sawyer C. E. (2015). “Why pod? Further explorations of the motivations for independent podcasting.” Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 21(1), 20–25. 13

Indie Games in the Digital Age Marx, K. (1971). The Grundrisse (D. McClellan, Trans.). New York, NY: Harper & Row. McRobbie, A. (2016). Be Creative. Malden, MA: Polity. Newman, M. Z. (2009). “Indie culture: In pursuit of the authentic autonomous alternative.” Cinema Journal, 48(3), 16–34. Perren, A. (2012). Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Peterson, R., & Berger, D. (1975). “Cycles in symbol production: The case of popular music.” American Sociological Review, 40(2), 158–73. Pham, A. (2012). “Bungie-Activision contract.” Los Angeles Times. Retrieved July 11, 2018 from http:​//doc​ument​s.lat​imes.​com/b​ungie​-acti​visio​n-con​tract​/. Robinett, W. (2006). “Adventure as a video game: Adventure for Atari 2600.” In K. Salen and E. Zimmerman (Eds.), The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (pp. 690–713). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ross, A. (2004). No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Sinclair, B. (2013). “GTA V cost over $137 million, says analyst.” Gamesindustry.biz. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.gam​esind​ustry​.biz/​artic​les/2​013-0​2-01-​gta-v​-dev-​ costs-over-USD137-million-says-analyst. Terranova, T. (2000). “Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy.” Social Text 63, 18(2), 33–58. Tran, N. (2017). Adventures in the Starry Kitchen: 88 Asian-Inspired Recipes from America’s Most Famous Underground Kitchen. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Tschang, F. T. (2007). “Balancing the tensions between rationalization and creativity in the video games industry.” Organizational Science, 18(6), 989–1005. Wang, C. (2012). “Tinkering with the iPhone: Subversion and re-appropriation of power in Apple’s world.” Journal for International Digital Media Arts Association, 8(2), 31–41. Witwer, M. (2015). Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Zackariasson, P., & Wilson, T. L. (Eds.) (2012). The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future. London, England: Routledge.

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PART I INDIE GAME CREATORS

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CHAPTER 1 BREWS, BURGERS, AND INDIE BOMBAST: THE ANTIESTABLISHMENT NEOLIBERALISM OF DEVOLVER DIGITAL

John Vanderhoef

Introduction Indie game developers have contributed to profound transformations in the overall video game industry, repositioning indie game development from a niche, exploitable, and subservient part of the business to a central, constitutive pillar in the global industry that actively shapes the structures and strategies of the industry’s largest companies. The emergence of ubiquitous indie game development and the ascendency of digital distribution for video games occurred in tandem in the twenty-first century. With the means to digitally distribute their cultural work across the globe, indie developers no longer depend entirely on platform holders and corporate publishers, while the sheer volume of diverse content they produce makes them attractive to these same large companies. In the wake of the critical and commercial success of indie games in recent years, publishers interested in partnering with indie developers have emerged in several forms. Console platform holders like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have all implemented dedicated indie development outreach teams in order to attract indies to their respective consoles. Meanwhile, a group of small, indie-focused game publishers have emerged to reinvent the relationship between indie developer and digital game publisher. These companies include Devolver Digital, Good Shepherd, Curve Digital, Raw Fury, Serenity Forge, and Playism, among many others. Traditional corporate game publishers sometimes influence design decisions through benchmark choke points where developers have to reach certain milestones in order to maintain publisher support for the project, sacrificing creative freedom in favor of timely delivery of content (Strebeck, 2017). Corporate

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game publishers often also retain ownership of intellectual property and claim the majority of sales profits. For examples, THQ retained ownership of the Homefront intellectual property after Kaos Studios developed the original. When THQ went bankrupt, Deep Silver acquired the rights to the IP and hired developer Dambuster Studios to develop the sequel. In contrast, smaller boutique publishers purportedly share the same values as indie developers, offering financial and marketing support while allowing indies to remain creatively autonomous. These specialist publishers have yet to receive much critical attention from media industry and video game scholars. This is particularly troubling given that, despite many adopting the antiestablishment aesthetics and devil-may-care attitude of the punk rock counterculture, or indeed perhaps because of this adoption, these publishers tend to perpetuate the cultural myths of neoliberal romanticism—the idea of the independent artist or genius succeeding within the meritocracy of the free market and in opposition to stifling societal etiquette (Harvey, 2005; Streeter, 2010). The overlapping tenants of neoliberalism and romantic individualism have animated the tech industry since at least the 1970s with the promise of individual self-sufficiency, a rebuke of centralized power in the form of corporations or governments, and the allure of a meritocracy that rewards innovative and risky ideas which challenge the status quo. In the tech and video game industries, these underlying ideas have influenced a culture of risk and celebratory entrepreneurialism that often conflate the concepts of self-sacrifice, financial precarity, a sense of self-determination, and the idea of the “cool” (Neff, 2012; O’Donnell, 2014; Liu, 2004). In the indie context, entrepreneurial language is often obscured and replaced with the language of rebellion, authenticity, and alternative cultural production. Devolver famously enacts its rebellion in many ways, not least of which is the creation of a fictional chief financial officer character named Fork Parker, a purposefully crass salesman that presents a transparent critique of unscrupulous corporate executives. Like the commercial ascendency of alternative music labels, indie cinema, and indie comic books before them, indie video game publishers obscure their market goals with a performance as countercultural outsiders. This chapter explores the transformation of the indie moniker into an incorporated marketing brand, used not only by corporate platform partners and commercial indie developers themselves but also by an emergent group of boutique game publishers focused on small titles. By commercial indie games and developers, I mean those games and studios that exist to explicitly sell games in the marketplace with the goal of making 18

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a profit. These contrast, for example, with more informal game development practices, such as noncommercial, DIY, and craft game-making (Keogh, 2019). These boutique indie publishers seek to engage with the dominant industry while sustaining themselves in a liminal space. Through an analysis of the changing relationship between publishers and indie developers, this chapter suggests commercial indie games have been successfully incorporated into the machinations of the dominant video game industry, but in the process their alternative status or potential for resistance has been largely reduced to a brand or marketing scheme more interested in the performance of outsider status than in challenging dominant industry structures or ideological constructs. In particular, this chapter offers a critical perspective on one of the most prominent and prolific indie-focused publishers, Devolver Digital, a company formed in 2009 which positions itself as a “punk rock” indie game label that favors small, offbeat, retro, and hyper-violent game experiences such as Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games, 2011) and Broforce (Vlambeer, 2015). Using the discourse surrounding the publisher within the gaming culture and industry, and complimented by first-hand observations gained from attending Devolver’s media events at E3 2015 and 2017 in Los Angeles, this chapter argues that despite providing indie-friendly publishing services and an implied critique of the commercial practices of corporate video game publishers, Devolver Digital nonetheless conflates countercultural and antiestablishment punk aesthetics with the same neoliberal romanticism that has motivated the tech industry since the earliest days of Silicon Valley. Devolver Digital’s performance of romantic individualism conceals its collusion with neoliberal capitalism, particularly as a publisher that operates a global commercial enterprise disguised as a grassroots basement operation. Moreover, like the musical indie rock scene (Bannister, 2006), Devolver ultimately privileges an overwhelmingly white masculine identity heavily invested in ironic postfeminist ideology, a self-conscious but retrograde ideology which reflects the problematic identity politics of the commercial indie game sector more broadly.

The Emergence of the Boutique Indie Publisher A group of boutique, indie-focused publishers emerged since 2010 to take advantage of the exponential growth of the indie sector. These boutique publishers, including successful firms like Devolver Digital and Curve 19

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Digital, and less successful enterprises like the now-defunct Majesco’s Midnight City, focus on publishing indie titles across an array of digital distribution platforms. Unlike traditional publishers who exercise control of content through development benchmarks and who often retain ownership of intellectual property, smaller publishers purport to understand the proper support and distance to offer indies, who value their autonomy while still requiring financial and marketing assistance. For instance, when discussing what it took to convince Majesco to establish its ill-fated indie label, former vice president of business development at Midnight City Doug Kennedy explains, “We got into a conversation about what it would take to offer up the right type of support, the right type of funding, and the right type of vehicle so independent developers didn’t feel managed by the traditional publisher but felt supported by the traditional publisher” (Sinclair, 2014). Here “managed” and “supported” are juxtaposed verbs. While management, in this case, implies a degree of unwanted control and influence, support stands in as a welcome set of affordances in line with an indie developer ethos that they feel comfortable accepting. While Majesco formerly had experience funding independent games like Double Fine’s Psychonauts (2005), the company still needed to develop a particular identity for its indie-focused offshoot and a specific strategy to deal with the emerging expectations of indie developers in a marketplace that does not entirely necessitate a publishing partner. A set of best practices emerged for boutique publishers over the last ten years based on the mistakes corporate publishers like Electronic Arts (EA) had perpetuated in the past through creative interference or poor marketing. For instance, after EA acquired developers Bullfrog and Westwood, employees at these studios felt “buried and stifled” creatively—an accusation which former EA CEO John Riccitiello has admitted to publicly (Robinson, 2008). Moreover, Oddworld Inhabitants founder Lorne Lanning has pointed to EA’s poor marketing of his game, Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, as one reason the game failed to perform on the market when released in 2005, leading to the franchise going dormant for many years (Yin-Poole, 2011). In sharp contrast to these practices, most indie-focused publishers allow developers to maintain ownership of their intellectual property, something that rarely occurred in the past. Additionally, like similar digitalonly publishers, Midnight City never forced developers into first-look contracts for future games. As Kennedy indicates: “If we’re doing a good job, [developers] will want to stay. If we’re doing a bad job, why have them handcuffed to us . . . because we have the rights to their next round of titles? 20

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So, it really puts the onus on us to perform based on our relationship with the developers” (Yin-Poole, 2011). Rather than an operating ethos based on control that treats indie developers like widgets in need of managing, boutique publishers build relationships with developers based on mutual respect for the particular talents each possesses: game design and creative development on the one hand, and public relations, marketing, and business on the other. To be a good partner to indies, in other words, many publishers had to start thinking like indie developers. Many prominent indie developers that had already launched commercially successful games recognized the potentially robust business model of these boutique publishers and realized they were increasingly equipped, culturally and financially, to expand into publishing operations using the same strategies. Alongside boutique publishers like Devolver Digital, a collection of successful indie developers has expanded into publishing operations, partnering with unproven but promising indie developers. Indie developers-turned-publishers promote themselves as publishing units that understand the concerns, experiences, and mentality of indie game studios. For instance, in a blog post announcing their new QA and funding services in 2014, indie studio The Behemoth stressed that “since we’re developers, we understand that quality of service and communication are paramount” (Lam, 2014). After releasing one or two significant financial hits, many indies see a business opportunity in helping other upstart developers enter the market. For example, after releasing the award-winning and financially successful Fez (2012), Polytron moved into the publishing space. Similarly, successful games like the Democracy series (2005–2016) and Castle Crashers (2008) led to Positech and The Behemoth expanding to publishing, respectively. The impetus to expand into publishing allows successful indies to diversify their investments and improve their potential for sustainability, provided they choose the right external titles to support. As a business predicated on the risk of hit-or-miss game titles complicated by unpredictable production cycles, having multiple games in production across studios that handle their own overhead allows developers-turned-publishers to mitigate their risks while also building and retaining marketing expertise. This trend reflects a grassroots ethos where scrappy upstarts use their success as a foundation to help other small, struggling indies while also highlighting the communal nature discursively linked to indie development communities. However, these developers-turned-publishers also tend to follow traditional investment and incubator models used in the tech industry in order to transform intuition for potentially successful games into a profitable return 21

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on their investments. The Indie Fund essentially uses this incubation model. Composed of a number of high-profile indie developers, the Indie Fund’s board carefully invests in game projects they believe will do well in the marketplace and result in profits for the fund’s investors. Rather than traditional publishers, indie publishers act more like highly selective incubators, choosing projects carefully and providing development support, operating funds, marketing advice, and media outreach. In this way, indie publishers reflect the same growth trajectory of technology start-ups in places like Silicon Valley. Successful small firms graduate from being part of another company’s incubator to opening and operating their own.

The Antiestablishment Performance of Devolver Digital Devolver Digital epitomizes the latest generation of born-digital, indiefocused game publishers. While established in 2009, Devolver’s founders have a long history of advocating for indie games as previous self-styled rebellious, outsider publishers. Before Devolver, company founders, including Mike Wilson, started two previous indie-focused publishers, Gathering of Developers in 1998 and Gamecock in 2007 (Webster, 2014). Infamously in 2007, in an act meant to disrupt the status quo of the highly commercialized Spike Video Game Awards, Gamecock representatives stormed the stage at the event, wearing red capes and dressed in rooster hats, just as BioShock won the Game of the Year prize. This stunt was widely reported on and criticized by gaming blogs, not unlike the response to Kanye West interrupting Tailor Swift during the 2009 Video Music Awards. Unfortunately, Gathering of Developers and Gamecock went out of business after they could not exploit the business models that allowed current boutique publishers to find success in the marketplace. This is likely because Gamecock lacked the mature digital distribution platforms and audience awareness of indie titles we see today. Nonetheless, the indie ethos and radical antics of these earlier companies continues through Devolver Digital, which operates with a limited number of employees who work out of their respective houses in Austin and London. Owing to its anti-corporate origins, Devolver enacts many of the same cultural myths of the outsider artist or visionary, influenced by neoliberal romanticism, that have fueled small game companies since the earliest days of the formalized industry. While Devolver imagine themselves in opposition to the streamlined corporate structures and showmanship of the 22

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dominant games industry, such as Sony, Nintendo, or Ubisoft, the publisher nonetheless embraces the same neoliberal logics that disguise labor in the creative economy as a perpetual playground for antiestablishment creative and technology workers. While predominantly a publishing label for offbeat indie games, Devolver Digital owes much of its cultural ethos and aesthetic to alternative and punk rock record labels. Kevin Dunn (2012) suggests that, in their circulation of alternative and critical cultural work across the globe, punk record labels exist at the nexus between politics, cultural production, and the global political economy. Yet while Dunn argues that DIY record labels function as sites of social engagement and embrace anticapitalist business models, Devolver Digital occupies a decidedly commercial enterprise, despite its alternative bravado. Devolver leans into its role as purveyor of quirky, if not challenging, indie game experiences and performs a highly polished outsider status in the video game industry. In its aesthetics and attitude, Devolver resembles a music label like Epitaph, which started with a DIY ethos in the 1970s but became a much larger, recognizable, and powerful label by the late 1990s. Devolver has yet to be accused of being profit-driven by the indie games community, but it shares Epitaph’s contradictions of promoting alternative cultural production, on the one hand, and on the other operating in a globalized consumer economy that requires a return on investment to maintain sustainability (O’Connor, 2008). This duality defines much of the commercial indie game sector and has become a central problem of creating work in the space for some invested in the political potential of indie games to challenge dominant tropes and even economic systems. In their comportment, Devolver Digital present themselves as being in opposition to corporate publishers through sarcastic language, casual cursing, drinking during press events, and the performance of an outsider authenticity. Here, following scholars like Richard A. Peterson (2005), authenticity is treated as a social and performative construct deployed to give people and companies credibility in their respective fields. Of significance here is the development of a specific outsider authenticity performance as market brand. Following Adam Arvidsson (2007) and others, brands act as constitutive pillars within our current era of information capitalism that provide additional value to companies and consumers beyond the actual products being sold—in this case, the suite of games that Devolver chooses to publish. Cultivating and exploiting its brand as industry rebels has been central to Devolver’s cultural and business strategies. For instance, Devolver is careful never to take themselves too seriously. In a 2014 interview, when 23

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talking about what he sees as the company’s purpose with the ironic phrasing that children of the 1990s might recognize, co-founder Mike Wilson remarks, “We’re a publisher for people who don’t need one” (Wilson, 2014). With language like this, Devolver acknowledges and distances itself from the problematic and predatory history between developers and publishers, while also complimenting the latest generation of indie developers for being self-sufficient. Devolver’s owners and operators maintain a laidback, cheerful, and reckless demeanor, going out of their way to make the publisher-developer relationship tantamount to hanging out with friends. In self-conscious fashion, Devolver’s website invites potential players, like a bartender might, to pick their poison when it comes to what they call “magnificently handcrafted games” and “farm fresh indie films,” the latter of which the company started publishing in 2013 (Devolver Digital Homepage). On its “About” website the publisher suggests, “Let’s get a beer sometime!,” inviting potential indie partners to contact the company while ensuring them that their interaction will be informal and low-key. From its website to its press events, the publisher attempts to position itself as down-to-earth and selfaware, cultivating an easygoing atmosphere where beer flows and small quirky games from small, quirky developers are supported and valued. Although Devolver attends most large industry trade shows and conventions, they strategically position themselves geographically and figuratively on the margins of these events. For example, one year at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the largest annual gathering of the industry’s developers, Devolver rented out a bus and drove past the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco to invite listless indie developers to take a ride, drink a beer, and discuss their latest projects. Devolver called this stunt the “indie bang bus,” riffing on a pornographic video series filmed with amateur aesthetics inside a bus. In fact, in several interviews, the publisher references porn, using it as a point of humor—juxtaposing the discussion of sex with the standards expected in a professional setting—to associate itself with the taboo nature of pornography in culture and society. Of course, realizing that they were breaking the law by offering open alcoholic beverages in their “indie bang bus,” Devolver moved its operations to a “basement bunker” at GDC 2014, being sure to remind journalists during interviews, in between tequila shots, that they were not officially part of GDC. Devolver has since moved their GDC presence yet again to the Galvanize speakeasy room in San Francisco and rebranded this space Devolver Underground. This move perpetuates Devolver’s connection to alcohol and illicit locations 24

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linked to illegal bars during prohibition while also providing those who visit Devolver during these events with a certain subcultural capital gleaned from “being in the know.” John T. Caldwell (2008) has identified two common practices within the milieu of entertainment industry tradeshow events that facilitate networking between people and companies. Caldwell calls these rituals “solicitation” and “cultivation,” and each acts to forge and maintain industry identities and connections. Solicitation occurs when companies strategically identify partners that can be useful in advancing the individual or company’s goals, while cultivation activities include manufacturing a sometimes paradoxical or antithetical view of the industry itself, such as the use of parties and informal get-togethers overs drinks that mask the precarity, risk, and suffering that occurs across the entertainment industry more generally. Devolver’s language across media interviews reflects a deliberate effort to remind people that they are not the traditionally stilted, obsequious PR representative simply repeating the talking points they have memorized. Instead, Devolver cultivates their brand of rebellious authenticity by not being well-spoken or well-practiced, by cursing and drinking, and by maintaining a constant irreverence about everything while simultaneously communicating a passion for their development partners. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), a yearly industry marketing event where developers showcase their upcoming games to the press, retailers, and other industry parties. For many years, Devolver has rented out a parking lot across from the LA Convention Center where the rest of E3 is held. In this parking lot, Devolver sets up a barbecue with tents, picnic tables, and mobile homes to shelter their indie partners and their games from the grueling LA sun. They are also quick to remind people that a Hooter’s—the restaurant chain famous for barbeque wings and scantily clad waitresses—is right next door, a detail that contributes to the masculinized, ironic, trash aesthetic the publisher cultivates at such events. While attending E3 in 2015, Devolver representatives offered me something hot off the grill and a cold drink as I checked in for my meetings with several indie developers in Devolver’s makeshift trailer park. In between appointments, journalists, publisher reps, industry folk, and developers chatted in the shade of trailer overhangs or in the designated picnic area under tents. Indie developers invited me into their (sometimes) airconditioned trailers to discuss and exhibit their games to me personally, not through the traditional public relations intermediaries. Inside the trailers, I 25

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sat alongside developers shoulder-to-shoulder on small couches and played their in-progress games. The enthusiast press has repeatedly embraced this yearly publicity stunt and covered the event using headlines like, “Cold Beer, BBQ, and Indie Brilliance: How Devolver Digital Won E3, Again,” and “A Tour of Devolver’s E3 Anti-Booth” (Murphy, 2015). The use of “Anti-Booth” here positions Devolver’s manufactured indie trailer park in stark contrast to the neon lights, loud music, and massive crowds emblematic of the booths in the official E3 convention center. Devolver approaches its role as a game publisher with the sneer of a court jester, treating each promotional opportunity with a duality of sardonic infiltration and business acumen. In addition to its trailer park across the street from E3, starting in 2017, Devolver began holding its own digitally streamed E3 press conferences, not only mocking the established format embraced by large platforms like Sony and publishers like Ubisoft but also benefiting from the exposure of being named alongside the other, much larger press conferences. Even while considered one of the least important press conferences, Devolver embraces this position with a winking pride. Devolver has self-consciously called its short, fifteen-minute events “The Devolver Digital Big Fancy Press Conference: Tomorrow’s Unethical Business Practices Today!” leaning into the irony that defines much of its marketing persona. Leading into its inaugural 2017 conference, Devolver partnered with What’s Good Games and other streamers to introduce the publisher’s presentation. After announcing the upcoming conference, the What’s Good Games hosts knowingly and mockingly remark, “Isn’t Devolver just fucking indie games?” and “What a fucking waste of time!” (Devolver Digital, 2017). These scripted jokes inform viewers that Devolver is aware of the discourse surrounding indie games and that some in the gaming community do not hold them in high regard. Devolver leans into this criticism and wears it like a badge of pride. Devolver’s first fifteen-minute conference, recorded ahead of time with no audience, includes a barrage of self-conscious jokes and absurdities. These gags include fictional Devolver “Chief Synergy Officer” Nina Struthers firing a fake gun on stage to quiet the audience, which is created through b-roll inserts that repeat the same faces over and over again. Additionally, Nina points out the obvious commercial goals of the conference before being followed by trailers for upcoming Devolverpublished games and several gags meant to satirize common complaints from players, including the price of games, culminating in a spastically edited, avant-garde, blood-soaked finale that turns the presentation from 26

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marketing video to experimental art piece. The 2018 Devolver video conference begins with a screed against the critics of the 2017 conference, who complained about its unprofessional feel and satiric focus, but the rest of the 2018 event doubles down on Devolver’s brand as self-aware industry mavericks. It again deconstructs industry tropes in a ploy to perform its own superiority and reinforce its distance from traditional corporate practices. To this end, in a stunt before its 2018 presser, Devolver announced it was starting an initial coin offering (ICO), creating a coin called Lootboxcoin, modeled after cyptocurrency, to sell to its fans. Here Devolver derides the simultaneous ongoing cryptocurrency craze and the emergence of lootbox subscriptions—small packages full of branded items such as pins and coffee cups sent monthly to subscribers, aimed at the geek demographic. On its website, Devolver confidently writes, “This coin is 2.5 [inches] in diameter and has no actual value and by no means is to be considered cryptocurrency or a currency of any kind. You can’t buy anything with it. In fact, it’s insane for you to really buy it unless you want to prove your loyalty to Fork Parker, Nina Struthers, and the Devolver Digital executive board” (Devolver Digital, 2018). Despite charging the inflated price of $155 for a fake coin, at the time, Devolver easily sold out of Lootboxcoin within 24 hours. To watch a Devolver Digital E3 press conference is to be inundated with a relentless stream of self-referential, ironic jokes meant to deride industry trends while positioning the company as simply above it all. “We are like you. We get it,” Devolver seems to say to the gaming audience—a strategy meant to cultivate fan affinity for the boutique publisher. As part of its branding practices and performativity, Devolver defines itself against traditional publishers and platform holders by constructing a company image built on accessibility and informality rather than corporate hoops and bureaucratic paperwork. In interviews, Devolver representatives remind media how they prefer informal meetings with potential partners in person on the periphery of events like GDC or via email or Twitter. In their coverage of these media stunts, gaming journalists help propagate Devolver’s carefully manicured company persona. For instance, after being reminded by a Destructoid journalist of the publisher’s “casual, laidback” milieu during an interview at GDC 2014, Devolver’s Nigel Lowrie quickly agrees, stating: Yeah, I mean, coming in and saying what’s up, whether in real life or online is fine. We just get emails. Tweets. Whatever. People will subtweet us and say, “I really wish I could show something to Devolver 27

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Digital.” And I’m obnoxious and search Devolver Digital on Twitter all the time. And I see that and I go, why don’t you just email us? That’s literally how it works. (Destructoid, 2014) Unpacking this emblematic quotation, we see again Devolver’s self-conscious effort to craft a company image built around a casual, unpretentious atmosphere—an openness to the gaming community, and, in the case of subtweeting, an obsession with controlling public perception of their meticulously constructed outsider, rebellious status. Ironically, in trying so hard to push back against corporate game publishers, Devolver ends up embracing the same underlying logics that conflate work, play, passion, and what Alan Liu (2004) has identified as the postindustrial corporate sense of “cool” among knowledge workers. In this way, Devolver actually mimics the same ethos present in the dominant games industry they try so hard to distance themselves from, an ethos that results in otherwise corporate offices full of bean bag chairs, foosball tables and pinball machines, and the drive to make work feel like home in an effort to extract more and more hours of labor from staff. Nobody wants to be perceived as stiff and boring in an industry predicated on the very concept of play, yet operating a forprofit business in a cutthroat industry necessitates smart business acumen and strategy. Romantic neoliberalism propels the dominant video game industry by concealing the drive to successfully launch a digital product in a global marketplace, especially from the biggest publishers and largest studios, behind the veneer of romantic artistry and creative passion. These same romantic ideals are cultivated by boutique indie publishers to differentiate their games and developer partners from corporately published, triple-A games and studios while diminishing, or mocking, the desire to excel in the same global marketplaces. This dissonance, between outsider critique and carefully manicured business strategy, is also reflected in the company’s satirical approach to—but also remarkable reproduction of— hypermasculinity in the games it publishes. Within the gaming industry and culture, masculinity has been studied largely in relation to how games express patriarchal ideologies and reproduce and mediate various masculinities. While masculinity should be understood as “multiple, malleable, contingent, and, crucially, reconstituted and reconfigured through games, including their play, spectatorship, and production,” hegemonic masculinity in games is typically defined by the qualities of strength, competition, aggression, and stoicism (Taylor and Voorhees, 2018). Within gaming culture, hegemonic masculinity is often 28

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augmented by toxic forms of masculinity, linked to misogyny, that seek to devalue and degrade qualities traditionally associated with femininity, often through violent rhetoric. As evidenced previously, Devolver’s ironic enthusiasm for redneck trailer parks, self-styled indie bang buses, and casual drinking imply a particular performance of outsider masculinity, described as alternative forms of masculinity that seek to subvert, often by way of parody, hegemonic ideals while still maintaining a place of power and legitimacy in culture (Atencio, 2011). Devolver’s catalog of published games reinforce the company’s investment in subverting masculinized aesthetics, particularly those of the 1980s and 1990s, through parodic reproductions of hypermasculine iconography and performance. Now over a decade old, Devolver has a large library of published games across diverse genres such as strategy, role-playing, puzzle, adventure, and action games. Its popular action games, in particular, are characteristic of the aesthetic Devolver promotes and cultivates in its brand management. These include Mother Russia Bleeds (Le Cartel, 2016), Broforce (Free (Lives, 2015)), Hotline Miami (Dennaton, 2012), Not a Hero (Roll7, 2015), and Genital Jousting (Free (Lives, 2016)). These games feature characters and scenarios that exaggerate the performance of masculinity to the point of camp, suggesting that Devolver, and their development partners, encourage players to laugh along with them at the hypermasculine performances represented most prominently by the action heroes of the 1980s, like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the level of textuality, the camp expressed in these games offers a critique of the construction of hypermasculinity; yet at the level of brand, involving iconography and image, Devolver’s games in some ways reproduce, rather than repudiate, toxic forms of masculinity and patriarchal ideology. Collectively, the games mentioned earlier simultaneously encourage players to revel in the absurdity of what is being represented but also find pleasure in the unbridled power and destruction on display. Mother Russia Bleeds mimics beat-em-up games like Streets of Rage (Sega, 1991), but intensifies the brutal violence and sexual content. The violence and sexual excess, particularly when players must face an army of enemies dressed in S&M gear and pig masks, illustrates the confluence of hypermasculine and camp aesthetics not unlike the infamous basement scene in the film Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994), which borrows the aesthetics of S&M but situates them squarely in the violence and patriarchal ideology of hypermasculinity. Similarly, Devolver’s Hotline Miami relies on its Twitch-based gameplay that asks players to use firearms and melee 29

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weapons to massacre entire apartment buildings full of disposable goons. Hotline similarly conflates the camp associated with wearing various animal masks that offer the player unique abilities with the constant barrage of ultra-violence that players perform in order to advance. Finally, the game Broforce enables players to take on the role of actual 1980s action heroes, including Rambo, the Terminator, and Chuck Norris, or under the game’s specific naming scheme, Rambro, the Brominator, and Colonel James Broddock, named after Norris’s character in the Missing in Action film series. Susan Jeffords (1993) has offered a critique of 1980s, Reagan-era action films by linking the muscular male bodies of these filmic action heroes to the idea of the “hard body,” one that stands in for “the normative body that enveloped strength, labor, determination, loyalty, and courage,” which also became sutured to the national body of the United States under Reaganera neoliberal philosophy (25). Broforce reproduces the ideologically laden “hard bodies” of 1980’s action heroes in its playable characters, but attempts to subvert their performance of hypermasculinity by leaning into and highlighting the violent excess on display. Although Broforce features three playable women, the majority of the roster of characters is devoted to men ripped from popular 1980s action movies. Like the retrograde action films they emulate, these games privilege hypermasculine heroes, with Hotline Miami in particular largely marginalizing women to the role of sexualized victims. That these games all share a nostalgic, pixelated aesthetic native to the 1980s and early 1990s also suggests a yearning to return to a time, in the post-Vietnam era of Reagan and patriarchal feminist backlash, when such hypermasculine representations were rarely critiqued in popular discourse—a problematic that mirrors all too closely the nostalgic narrative espoused by Gamergate advocates which claims video games were once unmolested by progressive politics and have since been infiltrated and sullied by the social justice concerns of the left. In this way, a majority of the games in Devolver’s catalog exhibit a postfeminist ethos, one that conceals a celebration of the excesses of (hyper)masculinity beneath a veneer of ironic self-reflection, a gesture which seems to invite players to experience its games, at best, as a guilty pleasure with critical undertones, and at worst as a rejection of progressive and feminist politics in video games. While it may be difficult to imagine a non-ironic player of a game like Broforce, which seems too excessive to be taken seriously, that the latter reading above is even possible suggests the failed project of a postfeminist, ironic, outsider masculinity. 30

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In the same way that Devolver’s suite of games fail to offer a robust and sincere critique of hypermasculinity, the company itself fails to offer a significant challenge to a dominant industry it repeatedly satirizes. With an investment in ironic self-reflection unable to evoke sincerity and a need to continue to grow its business interests, it is not entirely surprising that Devolver Digital invested in the Dutch-based indie publisher Gamebitious Digital Entertainment in 2012, which in 2017 rebranded as indie publisher Good Shepherd. While its name and company branding imply a kind, paternal guide for a flock of indie developers, the business structure of Good Shepherd is even more enmeshed in the venture capitalism and entrepreneurial discourses within which the indie gaming sector operates. This is because unlike Devolver, which uses its own funds to finance and publish games, Good Shepherd cultivates a global network of private investors and acts as an intermediary between this continually growing body of investors and its developer partners. This means that while Devolver will likely sustain its performance as a scrappy upstart outsider, Good Shepherd has ambitions to continue to grow and expand its operations on a global scale, increasing the pool of available indie investors while growing in scale and influence. Mike Wilson, who moved to Good Shepherd as its chief creative officer, indicates the company shares Devolver’s “edgy chic,” but he also emphasizes Good Shepherd’s commitment to being “artist friendly” in both business deals and creative autonomy (Tucker, 2018). Wilson justifies the decision to embrace a private investment model with Good Shepherd by framing it as an opportunity to help more indie developers. Devolver, he claims, is forced to turn away twenty-five indie games a week because of resource limitations. By balancing a commitment to its investor partners with an emphasis on treating developers with kindness and respect and promoting a healthy work-life balance for its developer partners, Good Shepherd is trying to find a sustainable model for indie game support in an ambiguous place between passion and profit. These goals are laudable, if we consider indie games to offer alternative narratives, mechanics, and aesthetics that potentially represent a more diverse population and worldview, but when enmeshed in the politics of neoliberal romanticism, the entire project loses much of its critical strength. Boutique publishers like Devolver Digital and Good Shepherd cultivate brands around “edgy chic” and promote themselves as industry outsiders and rebels. Such an enterprise needs to be denuded and demythologized or we risk embracing the aesthetics of a finely cultivated brand rather than recognizing the material conditions of a growing sector of game publishers that involve global networks of labor and investment capital. 31

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Conclusion At a time when indie games do not necessarily need publishing partners, indie developers now have more choices then ever when it comes to promoting and distributing their games. They can handle these operations internally, broker deals with platform holders like Sony for special promotion and placement within their respective digital stores, or partner with indie-specific boutique publishers. As a result, indie developers no longer have to rely on exploitative partnerships with major game publishers nor fear that their studio will be purchased and repurposed to maximize shareholder value. Furthermore, any publisher that does try to take advantage of vulnerable indies is often identified and blacklisted by the indie community, which reduces the chance that other indies will work with them in the future. This is not to say that current conditions make surviving as an indie developer any easier. Despite rhetoric from Devolver Digital that attempts to position the company as akin to a punk rock record label, or from platform holders like Sony, which continually emphasize their love for indie innovation, all of these partnerships are still predicated on the business opportunities indie studios offer their investors. For all their supposed autonomy, indie developers still operate in a decidedly uneven playing field, one where the largest pools of capital and influence still come with caveats and conditions whereby the power hierarchies of the games industry, in which the small and successful grow to become the next generation of gatekeepers, reproduce themselves. This is perhaps an inescapable standard in the current global climate defined by neoliberal markets and global exchanges of capital and labor. Yet companies that contend to be industry outsiders and rebels need to seriously grapple with their role in industries undergirded by such logics. Otherwise, they are merely a clever brand looking to find their niche in a highly competitive industry they claim to critique. In many ways, Devolver, Good Shepherd, and other indie publishers have created a necessary alternative publishing option for indie developers in need of assistance with funding, marketing, public relations, and distribution. In contrast to corporate publishers, Devolver does not claim IP rights or interfere in game design matters through arbitrary benchmarks, and every indie partner gets to sign off on all marketing decisions for their respective games—an opportunity larger developers owned and operated by major publishers rarely receive. However, the company’s investment in notions of romantic individualism, by way of their outsider rebel branding strategies, and its enactment of an ironic retrograde masculinity, suggest 32

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that not only does the company not oppose the logics of neoliberalism that undergird the dominant video game industry but they also reproduce, rather than repudiate, toxic forms of masculinity present in dominant circles of gaming cultures—albeit this reproduction manifests as an alternative, ironic masculinity. As scholars and critics, we should celebrate companies and organizations that support alternative, small, and marginal game development work, yet we should also be suspicious and critical of companies that co-opt alternative and outsider spaces for the purposes of brand identity and cultural capital, particularly when they end up reproducing the same dominant structures and power dynamics already present in the mainstream games industry.

Works Cited Arvidsson, A. (2007). “The logic of the brand.” European Journal of Economic and Social Systems, 20(1), 99–115. Atencio, M. (2011). “Beautiful losers: The symbolic exhibition and legitimization of outsider masculinity.” Sports in Society, 14(1), 1–16. Bannister, M. (2006). White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock. New York, NY: Routledge. Caldwell, J. T. (2008). Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (pp. 88–104). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Destructoid. (2014, March 23). “Real talk With Devolver Digital’s Nigel Lowrie: Hotline Miami 2 and more [Video file].” Retrieved from https​://ww​w.you​tube.​ com/w​atch?​v=jWR​KCrZW​coI. Devolver Digital. (2017, June 12). Devolver Digital—Big Fancy Press Conference 2017 [Video file]. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=WqP​ T9hyP​ANs. Devolver Digital Homepage. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.devolverdigital. com/. Devolver Digital. (2018). Retrieved from http:​//dev​olver​digit​al.li​mited​run.c​om/pr​ oduct​s/619​738/. Dunn, K. (2012). “If it ain’t cheap, it ain’t punk’: Walter Benjamin’s progressive cultural production and DIY punk record labels.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 24(2), 217–37. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Jeffords, S. (1993). Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Keogh, B. (2019). “From aggressively formalised to intensely in/formalised: Accounting for a wider range of videogame development practices.” Creative Industries Journal, 12(1), 14–33. 33

Indie Games in the Digital Age Lam, M. (2014, April 2). “The Research Centaur & New Gold Egg Project recipient.” Retrieved from https​://bl​og.th​ebehe​moth.​com/2​014/0​4/02/​the-r​esear​ ch-ce​ntaur​-new-​gold-​egg-p​rojec​t-rec​ipien​t/. Liu, A. (2004). The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Murphy, G. (2015, June 22). “Cold beer, BBQ, and indie brilliance: How Devolver Digital won E3, again.” Retrieved from https​://ww​w.vic​e.com​/en_u​s/art​icle/​ 4wbw4​p/col​d- beer-​bbq-a​nd-in​die-b​rilli​ance-​how-d​evolv​er-di​gital​-won-​e3ag​ain-2​15. Neff, G. (2012). Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. O’Connor, A. (2008). Punk Rock Labels and the Struggle for Autonomy: The Emergence of DIY. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. O’Donnell, C. (2014). Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Peterson, R. A. (2005). “In search of authenticity.” Journal of Management Studies, 42(5), 1083–98. Robinson, A. (2008, February 11). “EA: ‘we blew it’ with Bullfrog, Westwood.” Games Radar. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.gam​esrad​ar.co​m/ea-​we-bl​ew-it​-with​ -bull​frog-​westw​ood/. Sinclair, B. (2014, January 28). “Making an indie label in the era of self-publishing.” Games Industry. Retrieved from http:​//www​.game​sindu​stry.​biz/a​rticl​es/20​1401​-28-m​aking​-an-i​ndie-​label​-in-t​he-er​a-of-​self-​publi​shing.​ Strebeck, Z. (2017, September 11). “How to avoid getting screwed in a game publishing deal.” Gamesindustry.biz. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.gam​esind​ustry​. biz/​artic​les/2​017-0​9-07-​how-t​o-avo​id-ge​tting​-scre​wed-i​n-a-g​ame-p​ublis​hing-​ deal. Streeter, T. (2010). The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet. New York, NY: NYU Press. Taylor, N., & Voorhees, G. (2018). “Introduction: Masculinity and gaming: Mediated masculinities in play.” In N. Taylor & G. Voorhees (Eds.), Masculinities in Play (pp. 1–20). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tucker, J. (2018, August). “Killing it with kindness.” MCV. Retrieved from https​://is​ suu.c​om/ne​wbaye​urope​/docs​/mcv9​38_au​gust_​2018?​e=135​05450​/6347​ 8938. Webster, A. (2014, March 20). “Meet gaming’s punk rock label.” The Verge. Retrieved from http:​//www​.thev​erge.​com/2​014/3​/20/5​53039​8/dev​olver​-digi​talg​aming​s- punk-rock-label. Wilson, M. (2014, April 11). “Devolver Digital just wants to help [podcast].” Giant Bomb. Retrieved from http:​//www​.gian​tbomb​.com/​podca​sts/d​evolv​er-di​gital​just​-want​s- to-help/1600-829/. Yin-Poole, W. (2011, May 12). “Lanning: EA ‘sabotaged’ Stranger’s Wrath.” Eurogamer. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.eur​ogame​r.net​/arti​cles/​2011-​0512​-lann​ing-e​a-sab​otage​d-str​anger​s-wra​th.

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CHAPTER 2 QUEER INDIE GAME-MAKING: AN INTERVIEW WITH MO COHEN

Bonnie Ruberg

A decade ago, when independent video game development first gained prominence in the games industry and games culture, the discussions that surrounded indie games often focused on a select few “auteurs,” primarily cisgender, heterosexual, white men. However, as game development tools and distribution platforms have shifted, and as the cultural landscape of video games itself has begun to change, indie game-making has become the terrain of many more creative voices. As Anna Anthropy rightly predicted in her 2012 book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, a new generation of indies is bringing diverse perspectives to the medium of video games by creating games inspired by experiences of identity, marginalization, and difference. At the same time, these “zinesters” are challenging and fundamentally changing how video games are conceptualized, produced, and experienced. Leading this sea change are queer indie game-makers. Starting in roughly 2012, video games have been shifting in part because of the rise of the “queer games avant-garde,” a movement (loosely termed) of independent developers whose games are shaped by queer experiences or who themselves identify as queer—or, most often, both (Ruberg, 2019). Some of these indies, such as Anthropy, Mattie Brice, Christine Love, Merritt Kopas, Porpentine, and Robert Yang, are well known among players interested in “diverse” video games. However, there are dozens of indie game-makers who have contributed to the queer games avant-garde, and new artists are embarking on this work regularly. The independent game distribution platform itch.io alone lists nearly a thousand games under its LGBT tag. With its experimental ethos and its investment in intersectionality, queer game-making is leading the new generation of independent games (Ruberg, 2018). Those who are committed to social justice in video games should recognize and indeed celebrate the contributions of the queer game avantgarde, which is pushing indie game-making and video games as a broader medium in important new directions. At the same time, it is crucial to remain wary of the narratives that surround indie game-making, which

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are often framed as empowering without consideration for complications. Indie game-making is financially precarious work, made more so for queer folks and others who are often already in positions of social and economic disadvantage (Boluk and Lemieux, 2017, p. 33). Even for the most successful queer indies, making games often means scraping together an unreliable living through crowdfunding or donation-based game sales. The exciting artistic, cultural, and political power of these games must be considered alongside the lived realities of the people—and especially the queer and otherwise marginalized people—who create them. Each of these realities, and the individual relationship between a game-maker and their art, is complex, unique, and telling in its own ways. This chapter presents an interview with one such queer game-maker, Mo Cohen, the creator behind the independent studio QueerMo Games. Cohen lives in Portland, Oregon. Originally from New Jersey, they spent parts of their life in California and New York City before settling in the Pacific Northwest. Cohen is the designer of Queer Quest (QueerMo Games, in development), a point-and-click adventure game about queer women of color—or, as Cohen refers to the game in promotional material, a “pointand-clit adventure game”—which is due out in 2020 (http://queermogames. com/). Queer Quest is about two queer women of color, Lupe and Alexis, and what it means for their queer community when Alexis goes mysteriously missing. Like Dietrich Squinkifer’s 2013 game Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings!,” Queer Quest is inspired by the genre of classic point-and-click adventure games from the 1990s and subverts that genre, reimagining the kinds of stories such games can tell and the ways that meaning might be made through their mechanics. Queer community is a recurring theme in Cohen’s work. Strikingly, in this interview, Cohen points to the 2016 Pulse shootings in Orlando as a major influence on Queer Quest. Though the game has an upbeat tone and a colorful look, grief and loss are key themes in the work. Cohen even has plans to make grief an “object” in the game—reconsidering the notion of the collectible object, a standard mechanical element of the point-andclick genre, as a metaphor for the feelings that a person carries with them. In addition to Queer Quest, Cohen is also the designer of Bottoms Up: A Historic Gay Bar Tycoon, the first chapter of which was published in 2018. Bottoms Up likewise tells stories that have rarely been seen in video games. Inspired by archival materials at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, Bottoms Up is a game about owning a queer bar in the 1920s and avoiding police surveillance while forming a queer community. 36

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Conducted in the spring of 2017, this interview with Mo Cohen is part of a larger oral history project that includes more than twenty original interviews with contributors to the queer games avant-garde. The goal of these interviews has been to foreground the stories that queer indies tell about their own work: their art practices, their politics, their accomplishments, and the challenges they have faced. In this way, the project offers an important alternative to the stories that are often told about queer indie video games in news reporting or mainstream games industry discourse, where such games are often referenced to serve a simplistic narrative about how video games are “getting better.” By telling the story of queer indie game-making through the words of queer indies themselves, this project also productively complicates the analysis of queer games by game studies scholars, such as myself. It values queer game-makers as artists who explain their own work in nuanced and powerful ways. In this interview, Cohen talks about the revolutionary potential of making games about and for marginalized people, Cohen’s own transition from poet to programmer, and the financial pitfalls of developing a queer indie game. Of the many game-makers interviewed for this project, Cohen speaks with notable frankness and poignancy about labor, self-care, and how even a well-intentioned designer can make mistakes when representing difference. As they discuss here, Cohen’s journey to indie game-making itself challenges many normative ideas about who makes video games and how games are made. Before working on their own games, Cohen did not have formal training in coding. In 2016, they attempted to raise the money to fund the development of Queer Guest through crowdfunding. Despite Cohen’s considerable efforts, the crowdfunding campaign did not reach its goal, and they received none of the pledged funding. This has proven to be a crucial moment in Cohen’s path as an indie game-maker. It both forced them to confront the challenges of queer game-making and inspired them to help others succeed. Despite this setback, Cohen continues their gamemaking practice, driven by a belief that video games can speak meaningfully to queer experiences, queer histories, and queer communities. Ruberg: You use the word “queer” in the title of your game, Queer Quest, and the name of your company, QueerMo Games. Do you identify as queer? What does queerness mean to you? Cohen: I definitely identify as queer. Other words I identify with are Jewish, dyke, nonbinary, and boi. Pick an identity and, at some point, it has probably resonated with me. That’s why I like the word “queer.” It’s a good catch-all. 37

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Queerness for me is like family. If I’m in a new city by myself, I will look for queer bars so that I don’t feel alone. I remember one night, I had to travel to Texas for work. A friend of mine had just passed away, and I couldn’t be there for their funeral. So, I went to a queer bar and befriended some drag queens. It helped. There’s just this comfort in queerness. I called the LLC that I registered in order to start making queer games QueerMo Games just to be as straightforward as I could about what I was doing. Ruberg: Queer Quest is your first, longer term game design project. How did you get involved in making queer indie video games? Cohen: Before I knew I wanted to make video games, I was really into nonfiction writing. My family is all writers. I was an English major in college, and I went to New York for my MFA in creative writing, but I dropped out almost right away. I was in a writing workshop, and this woman turned in an awful story. I thought, “She got into the same program as me. Screw it, I’m going to drop out.” The story had to do with the song “Don’t Stop Believing.” Whenever I hear that song now, I know I’m on the right path. After I dropped out of grad school, I was living in New York working as a barista. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I had a Tumblr where I posted video game latte art I made. One day, I thought, “Why am I making video game latte art when I could be making video games?” I read Anna Anthropy’s book about video games as zines and that was a huge influence. I knew I wanted to start with a point-and-click adventure game because that was what shaped me the most as a kid. I grew up playing games like Leisure Suit Larry and Monkey Island with my sister, and we bonded over playing them together. I got into video games as a more complete form of storytelling that people are more likely to interact with than a book. Video games have this sort of different accessibility to the story that books have. The first little game I made was called Queertastrophe. You’re at a dance party, trying to avoid your exes while bringing drinks to cuties. When I made Queertastrophe, I released the first version on [the indie game distribution platform] Game Jolt in 2013. One of the comments on it was, “This was the first and only game that popped up when I searched up queer on Game Jolt.” It was really cute. I am glad that I am not the only person that goes to video game websites and searches for the word “queer.”

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Now I’m working on Queer Quest. I basically learned programming for the sake of making the game. I’m about a third of the way through now. My plan is to release it in 2020. For a long time, I was really worried that someone would make Queer Quest before me. Other queer point-and-click adventure games have come out, like Read Only Memories (Midboss, 2015), but none of them are like Queer Quest. Ruberg: In addition to making queer indie games, you also work fulltime in the tech industry. Do you find that work fulfilling? Cohen: I have a day job as a programmer at a tech company. It’s one of those places where they ask questions like, “What is your experience as a woman in tech?” For all the feminism in the tech industry these days, there’s a lot of red tape when it comes to talking about gender. At my previous job, I surveyed women about their experiences in tech, and I got in trouble with HR. It’s frustrating, but it’s nice to work at a place that has benefits so I can make my dream game on the side. Working on Queer Quest balances me out. Ruberg: So many initiatives these days encourage women to learn to code because it is supposedly empowering. Has that been your experience? Cohen: I like programming as a tool to solve problems but it’s not actually that interesting. Sometimes I do feel like it gives me power—like when I’m at a male-centric game conference and all the men say, “What are you, an artist?” and I’m like, “No, I’m a programmer.” There’s a really steep emotional learning curve to programming though because it makes you feel like you know nothing. My friend just started a coding bootcamp. She’s maybe four weeks in and she’s having panic attacks. I get that. I never thought I would be a programmer. I’m not disappointed about it, but I’m also not excited. I’m just happy that I get to make this really fucking gay game. Ruberg: You’re involved with the Portland Indie Games Squad (PIGSquad). Would you say that you’re also part of a broader queer games community? Cohen: PIGSquad has had a huge impact on me. When I was first learning how to make games, I was living in New York. I tried to get involved with [the art games organization] Babycastles, but it was really intimidating.

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I volunteered but I never felt like I was a part of the community. When I moved back to Portland, I found PIGSquad. I was so scared the first time I went to one of their meetings that I took my girlfriend with me. Afterward, she was like, “I can’t believe you were so nervous to meet all those nerds.” I was so impressed though, because they were doing exactly what I wanted to do. PIGSquad is still mostly white men. That’s why going to the Queerness and Games Conference [QGCon] for the first time this year was amazing. I got to meet all these other queer developers. Before QGCon, I’d had very little interaction with other people who make queer games. I still do feel like I’m part of a queer games movement, though. Ruberg: How did you decide to make Queer Quest as your first game? Where did the idea for Lupe and Alexis’ story come from? Cohen: A few years ago, there was a homophobic hate crime in Portland. The queer community’s response was to hold hands across a bridge. I didn’t go. I was so cynical; I thought it was pointless. I had some idea about the right way to respond to grief, but the truth is that there isn’t a right way to respond. Now, years later, I’ve been to many hand-holding events and I see why they are powerful. As a result of that, a lot of Queer Quest is about how community responds to tragedy. One of my biggest influences in making Queer Quest has been the Pulse shooting. The night that it happened, my friends and I went to a big queer party. It was a bizarre way to mourn, but we needed to be in a physical queer space together. There was this heaviness that I felt the need to dive into with the lens of a game developer. Maybe that’s my coping mechanism. Ruberg: It’s surprising to hear that tragedy was an inspiration for Queer Quest, since the game’s tone is so lighthearted and funny. Cohen: Point-and-click adventures are known for their campiness. I use humor to tackle serious issues. I don’t think I could get through real life without humor. Ruberg: Has your interest in exploring grief shaped the design of the game? Cohen: Definitely. Lupe has moments of very intense feeling. At one point, you can lie on the ground and just stare at the sky. It doesn’t help you 40

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progress; you just need to process. Some people have said that Queer Quest seems like a twist on a typical damsel-in-distress game, but you never see Mario cry for Peach. Grief also appears as this object that breaks the standards of the pointand-click genre. Point-and-click adventure games are very inventory based. Normally, you have items that help you solve problems. At the moment Alexis get kidnapped, an item appears in Lupe’s inventory that is “grief.” It doesn’t help you in any traditional way. If you use it, it triggers statements like, “I wish I could have done something differently” or “I’m so angry!” or “Why couldn’t it be me instead?” Ruberg: What responses have you gotten to Queer Quest when you’ve showed the demo at game events? Cohen: In the demo, you play as Lupe. You have to make nachos for your cute girlfriend Alexis. Lupe goes into the kitchen and when they come out Alexis has been kidnapped. It’s really painstaking to make a game, so I’m always surprised when people react to it. Like, “What! The demo is over?” They’re concerned. When I play my own game, I’m bug testing. When I see other people playing it, they’re in a completely different mindset. Sometimes little kids play it. The youngest to beat it so far was an eightyear-old. I always get nervous when parents are like, “Oh, can my kid play your game?” I’m thinking, “Probably, but it has the word ‘pussy’ in it.” I was ten when I was playing Leisure Suit Larry (Sierra Entertainment, 1987) though. Why shouldn’t an eight-year-old play a queer, sex-positive game? Sometimes, when I show the game, people see the title and make this squinty, judge-y face. They’re trying to tell whether the game is going to be offensive—like, “Is this going to make fun of queer people or support queer people?” I call the game a “feminist Leisure Suit Larry” but that doesn’t always get the response I hope it will. You know, Leisure Suit Larry was super sexist, but you can also imagine a game that is very sex positive where there are boobs in it and that’s ok. Ruberg: On your blog, you’ve written about interviewing a wide range of queer people so that you can bring a diversity of voices to Queer Quest (Cohen, 32016). Why has that been important to you? Cohen: I want Queer Quest to represent the full texture of queer people’s experiences in the real world. For example, I have trans characters in the 41

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game, so I interviewed trans femmes about representation. That’s how I learned about the Topside Test. It’s like the Bechdel Test, but it’s with trans characters. When two trans characters are talking but they aren’t talking about being trans, then they pass the Topside Test. Next up on my list is to talk to folks who identify as bisexual, because they’re queer but often they’re invisible in queer communities. There are a lot of people of color in the game, too. Alexis and Lupe are Latina and Latinx. I knew I couldn’t make a video game with white people as the main characters. We have plenty of that already. I’ve also been interviewing people about race, but that been a slower process, unfortunately, because Portland is such a white city. A lot of what I’m learning are things I know from my background in writing. I was talking to a friend of mine about physical disabilities. He asked me, “When did this character end up in a wheelchair? How did that happen?” With characters of color, I need to ask myself questions like, “What is this character’s cultural identity? What is their family heritage?” Those are things that a lot of game-makers never think about. Their characters aren’t influenced by the past. They’re only influenced by what the player does. They use white-dude characters like blank slates, because they have the privilege of not needing any background. To me, that is a real failing of character development. The details are vital. Figuring out those details is way easier said than done though. It’s like, “Ok, what city should Lupe’s family be from? What will the impact be if I pick a city that is more northern or more southern?” How much research do I do before I say, “Enough, I just need to focus?” One thing that helps is that almost all my characters are based off friends. So I can pick their brains and I can learn about their families. It spares me having to make things up. I want to be as well informed as I can without getting so dragged down in the details that the game never gets finished. Ruberg: It sounds like you’ve tried to be very conscientious about how you represent marginalized folks in your games. Have there been times when you’ve found that challenging? Cohen: I’ll tell you about a time when I fucked up. When I was promoting the Kickstarter for Queer Quest, the Huffington Post wrote an article about the game. In the article, I describe a puzzle where Lupe is at a bar and there’s a drag show, but there are too many straight people in the bar and you need to get them to leave to make room for the queer people. In the quote, I

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describe the straight people as “breeders.” When I used that word, I didn’t realize that I was hurting bi, trans, and pansexual folks. A lot of people left comments telling me the word was offensive. It was a funny experience of getting called out by the people I wanted to support. I’m glad I’ve been in enough intersectional and feminist spaces that I know to use it as a chance for self-reflection. I talked to a lot of friends who said, “Oh, you can’t make everyone happy.” But I was like, “This is a game about queer community. If it’s going to make anyone happy, it should be queer people.” So now I’m editing the dialogue in that scene so that Lupe talks to a drag queen who calls the straight people “breeders,” and a dialogue option comes up where you can explore that word. Lupe can say, “Hey, I heard that’s not a great word for these reasons .  .  . .” Another comment on that same Huffington Post article was someone saying, “I don’t care about the word ‘breeders,’ but what about the word ‘queer’? That’s offensive. I was like, ‘No, I have to draw a line somewhere and that’s where it is.’” Ruberg: Queer Quest is a game about queer people, but it’s also a game you’re designing for queer people—that is, queer players. Do you have plans for how to reach that audience? Cohen: When the game comes out, I intend on making it pay-what-you-can for queer folks but also putting it on Steam for a set price. The idea is to make it available for the people who it’s actually made for. I was reading recently about a game developer who makes gay games. They were saying that more straight people were more likely to play their game than gay people or queer people. That made me worried about who my audience is going to be. Really, it’s about figuring out where queer art clusters. Those are the places where you want to share a game like this. You don’t want to share it somewhere where people don’t care. Ruberg: You gave a talk at the Queerness and Games Conference this year [in 2017] about the importance of self-care for queer indie game-makers. What are some of your own self-care practices? Cohen: Indie game-makers usually have to do everything themselves, so it’s easy to burn out. It’s important to take care of yourself. For me, friendship has really helped—and so have cat gifs. I ride my bike, I hang out with a lot of my friends, my queer community, we lay at the beach when it’s good weather. For how antisocial I am, I’m really into being very social. It’s about having that balance of living in the moment versus staring at a computer all the time. 43

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While I was working on my Kickstarter campaign, I had a little altar with some candles where I could set my intention for the day. Another thing that worked well for me was making fun of Internet trolls. Someone online left a comment about the game that said, “I bet a white straight guy did the kidnapping, right?” I had the honor of replying, “I’m sorry, there’s no one in this game that fits that description.” Other things didn’t work as well for me. I was bad at delegating. Also, I tried taking Ritalin and writing three blog posts in one night. I showed them to my friend the next morning and she was like, “Wow, these make it sound like you’re on drugs.” Not good. Ruberg: Are there lessons that you learned from your Kickstarter campaign that would be helpful for other indie game-makers who are figuring out how to fund their work? Cohen: It takes so much work to run a successful Kickstarter campaign. You need to build up a reputation. You also need friends who have money, which I didn’t have. I wasn’t going to be like, “Hey, broke-ass queer community, help me fund this game.” I tried appealing to tech people, but it was also weird to be like, “Hey rich, straight people, pay for me to make this game that isn’t about or for you.” In retrospect, I wish I’d picked Indiegogo instead of Kickstarter, since Indiegogo lets you keep the money, even if the campaign doesn’t reach its goal. Since then, I’ve moved to Patreon, which is much better. It’s more creator-oriented and interactive. I also struggled with people’s perceptions of how much money it should take to make a video game. The goal for the Queer Quest Kickstarter was around $40,000. People would always say, “Oh gosh, you’re asking for so much money.” Some trolls would even be like, “You’re a greedy Jew.” Who are these people? The ways I see trolls, it’s like if you went to a supermarket and you picked up a can of beans and you were like, “I hate you, beans!” Why are you telling me that? Who asked you? I don’t like you either, so we’re even. Ruberg: Over the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about how anyone can make an indie video game these days, even without expertise or money. Given how much effort you’ve put into learning to code and raising funds, it sounds like you would disagree.

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Cohen: To anyone who thinks that, I would say, “That’s ridiculous.” It’s true that a lot of development tools are free these days, but no one has all the skills to make a game. Let’s say I want to hire an artist or a musician. I have to pay them. Their time is worth money. Also, a big part of the cost of making an indie video game is emotional. If you are making queer games, then you’re putting yourself out there on the Internet, and the Internet can be really harsh. Sometimes it’s vital to just walk away—to be like, “Okay, I’m pouring my heart into this thing in my computer, but also, if I close my eyes and breathe, there is my heart. It’s right there in my chest.” When I knew my Kickstarter was going to fail, I went to a hippie retreat in the woods for a few days with no Internet or cell reception. I really needed it. Ruberg: Are there self-care techniques that you recommend specifically for queer people? Cohen: Consume a lot of queer art. For me, things like Steven Universe and Sense8 are really helpful reminders of why I’m making this game. Also, spend time with other queer people. I was doing some work with a friend, and they were like, “Let’s take a break.” Five minutes later, I was ready to work some more. My friend said, “Are you kidding me? That was not a break.” We went out to a queer party. It was great because I got to interact with the community I’m making the game for. Ruberg: Once you’re finished with Queer Quest, are there other queer games or related projects you’d like to make? Cohen: After Queer Quest, I want to make a historic gay bar tycoon game inspired by the ONE Archives collection. They have all these magazines about queer bar culture. You would start the game in a gay bar in the 1920s. How do you get people there if you can’t be openly gay? How do you keep the cops away? Bars are such an important part of queer history, but all the lesbian bars are closing, and a lot of gay bars, too. The queer community has a generational issue. I really want to help keep the stories from older queer people alive. I’m also getting into building arcade machines. I have one that is sitting in my basement that’s made out of a weird dollhouse. I would really love to open up a mini homemade arcade museum where anyone can play for free, with a gallery vibe, and just fill it up with strange things. Down the street 45

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from me there’s this tiny shop that use to be an Anarco-Punk bookstore. Now it’s a candle shop. I want so badly to fill it with little arcade machines and have really odd hours and let people off the street just to come in and play and go on with their lives. The arcades in Portland are loud, flashy, and intense. I like the idea of an arcade where you can sit calmly and not feel pressured to get the high score. That’s my ten-year plan.

Conclusion One of the many notable elements of this interview is Cohen’s perspective on their position within the tech industry. They explain that, while they never expected to become a coder, they learned to program in order to create queer video games. In a contemporary moment when many educational initiatives insist on the uplifting potential of teaching women to code, Cohen tells a more pragmatic and less idealizing story. Their knowledge of programming has allowed them to build what they call their “dream game,” but they also encounter sexism in their role as a programmer. Cohen’s experience offers an important counterpoint to the often-repeated misconception that queer indie games are being built by artists without technical skills. By contrast, Cohen’s path highlights the fact that most queer game-makers do indeed have—and often need—computational expertise. For Cohen, the “steep emotional learning curve” of programming is just one of the prices they have paid for getting to make their passion project, which they describe exuberantly as “this really fucking gay game.” As Cohen’s interview highlights, developing indie video games as a queer person comes with its own unique challenges. As more and more artists enter the queer games avant-garde, many are finding that the vibrant work of making video games that engage with non-heteronormative experiences is both highly rewarding and surprisingly taxing. Often, valorized tales of indie game-making overlook the fact that this work takes considerable financial, educational, and emotional resources. Even as we appreciate the increasing democratization of video game development, it is crucial to recognize that the “accessibility” of gamemaking is still only accessible for some. Stories like Cohen’s are crucial because they address the complexities of lived queer experience while also sharing candid advice about how to make indie game development possible for marginalized people.

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Works Cited Anthropy, A. (2012). Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Boluk, S., & Lemieux, P. (2017). Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making and Breaking Videogames. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cohen, M. (2016). “Having trans women+femme characters in a game (when you aren’t one).” Retrieved from https​://qu​eermo​games​.tumb​lr.co​m/pos​t/154​69370​ 4345/​havin​g- trans-women-femme-characters-in-a-game. Ruberg, B. (2018). “Queer indie video games as an alternative digital humanities.” American Quarterly, 70(3), 417–38. Ruberg, B. (2019). “Conclusion: Video games’ queer future: The queer games avant- garde.” In B. Ruberg, Video Games Have Always Been Queer (pp. 209–28). New York: New York University Press.

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CHAPTER 3 POSTMORTEMS AND INDIE CULTURAL WORK

M. J. Clarke

The second season of the recent cable drama series Halt and Catch Fire (2014–2017) depicts the travails of a fictional, fledgling gaming and social media firm, Mutiny, during the pre-PC 1980s and, in the process, provides a mythic representation of a distinct indie culture of production with unique participants and practices. Mutiny’s founders, as the organization’s name clearly suggests, harbor a deep dissatisfaction with the computing industry and work in the face of chronic underfunding, not to mention possible career sacrifice. Yet, ironically, Mutiny’s online gaming platform is only made possible by a secret collaboration made with a large oil company, which sells its excess server capacity at a bargain rate. Key personnel at the firm include a wide mix of frustrated professionals and complete outsiders. Their work at Mutiny sunders the traditional boundary of work and life as the office, a converted family home, serves as a flophouse for the fledgling firm’s employees. Workers at Mutiny leverage new technologies in a manner that eludes slow-moving incumbent firms resistant to change, resulting in the pioneering development of online gaming. And understated, loose hierarchies within the organization enable Mutiny to respond to market shifts and embrace innovation, specifically by “inventing” social media when the employees notice that users prefer just talking to one another over simply playing games. As numerous television scholars have demonstrated, nostalgia programming acts more often as a reflection upon the present than as a reexamination of the past (see, for example, Gordon, 2003), and Halt and Catch Fire is no exception, offering a fairy tale of contemporary interest in digital disruption and post-Fordist flexibility. Through the guise of Mutiny, the program offers a useful inquiry into the motivations, forms, and functions of current indie cultural work, and specifically indie gaming. The show marks the group as not simply an experiment in artistic creation but also one of social and economic experimentation in which its participants actively interrogate their internal cultural and economic motivations, their

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relations to the larger community of makers and users, and their attitude toward the technological affordances available to them. Popular culture acts as only one of many sites to interrogate the status and function of indie cultural work and the production of indie games. Amending these representations, indie game-makers and their supportive institutions currently produce an enormous amount of self-assessments and self-explanations. This chapter builds on an analysis of one such type of public-facing self-examination: a class of reflective articles written by game-makers to examine the perceived success and failure of their own work often dubbed as postmortems. While these documents cannot serve as simply objective records of the how’s and why’s of indie game-makers, I contend that they can act as instructive self-theorizations in the manner described in John Caldwell’s (2008) investigation of cultures of production in which the everyday practices, conversational scripts, and available tools all establish, maintain, and represent the core assumptions of loose communities of cultural workers. While Caldwell’s film and television workers repeat predictable stories of self-motivated bootstrapping or engage in endless, ritualistic rounds of development notes, indie gamemakers practice their own rituals, repeating their mantras of intrinsic motivation and engaging in an eager embrace of middleware technical solutions. In other words, like old media workers, groups of indie gamemakers and supporters, just the same, have their communal mores and beliefs that can be illuminated through analysis. In both Caldwell’s and our current case, the role of the analyst is less about discerning the truth of each practitioner discussion or the relative value of each practice and more about understanding the mythic role of each in the creation, performance, and maintenance of an artistic identity and a vocational niche for workers. To be sure, this form of evidence must be triangulated, not necessarily for empirical accuracy but for preponderance of recurrence. As such, this chapter will use a combination of postmortems of indie games drawn from the industry website gamasutra from January 2013 to February 2016 (listed in Appendix One) and a smaller set of five in-depth primary interviews with indie game developers to identify and discuss the themes of indie workers’ self-theorizations. A number of recent scholars have produced similar analyses examining video game work occurring on the boundaries of what is considered the industry. Olli Sotamaa (2010) has outlined the case of a group of modders (i.e., hobbyist game-makers) congregating around a single game title and the online forums devoted to them. Drawing on the debates and controversies 49

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found on these forums, Sotamaa isolated an ideal typical taxonomy of modder activities and tracked unsettled fissure lines in the shared scene that had developed around issues of property and professionalization. Orlando Guevara-Villalobos (2011) has also produced research based on social scientific interaction with indie game-makers in the United Kingdom. Using this evidence, Guevara-Villalobos isolated important contradictions of late capitalist ideas around work found in the roles and identities of these workers who often voiced an organizational dedication to self-managed, antibureaucratic careers as well as to a deep desire for meaningful and “artistic” work. And Hector Postigo (2014) has investigated the work of YouTube “let’s play” uploaders who, in the author’s analysis, not only make do with that platform’s technical limitations but also cultivate their own unique social and cultural practices within these parameters. Postigo also posits his own work as a corrective directed at “analysis [that] sometimes falls short of explaining from a grounded perspective how participants in [user-generated] platforms see their work and the technosocial systems that frame it” (p. 334). Arguing similarly and drawing on these important earlier studies, this chapter will examine the shared reflections of and reflections upon indie cultural work (Geertz, 1973) to be found within postmortems as well as the shared implicit theories and explicit practices of indie game-makers. This study aims not only to give a better picture of this emerging sector but also to challenge broader assumptions of cultural theory as well as debates over digital and immaterial labor. More specifically, this chapter will consider indie gamemakers not only as a new financial model but also as a cultural one, isolating three key themes resonant throughout the postmortems revolving around intrinsic motivation, resocializing transactions, and embracing technology, which all point to a larger economic diversity growing within indie cultures of production. Investigating indie game self-theorizations and sociocultural practices elicits a reconsideration around the debates over the status of usergenerated content and digital labor more broadly. As Internet affordances have increased, interested critics often have espoused a great difference of opinion concerning individuals’ investment and activities within and through digital spaces, specifically with respect to the question of whether or not this activity contributes to or disrupts models of preexisting modes of capitalist accumulation and, concomitantly, whether or not they add too or diminish cultural freedom. Mimicking the enthusiasm and hopes of adopting new media technologies, many early theorists of user-generated content cast new media technologies, from blog publishing to podcast 50

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broadcasting to indie game production, as a great leveling, allowing for the expansion of the prosumer, acts of produsage, and great freedom of identity play (all usefully summarized in Ritzer and Rey (2016)). More recently, the professionalization of these tendencies has been held up by several thinkers as a new gig or sharing economy (Sundararajan, 2016) that allows forward-thinking laborers to regain economic security in an era of larger occupational obsolescence and a reduced public safety net. However, the growing centrality of the digital economy along with the consequent growth and emergence of a handful of dominant, monopolistic new media firms has prompted the sympathetic expansion of a potent and countervailing strain of critical analysis that, skeptical of the gifts of new technology and Internet affordances, has recast user behavior as the mechanism by which capital has reterritorialized and monetized seemingly two-way, open, and participatory user activities. Critical authors in this vein have given us a set of compelling and convincing narratives of victimization examining how the intrinsic enthusiasm already celebrated by previous critics activates the trap of expanding circuits of capital. Important works in this tradition have demonstrated how new media firms have pioneered new forms of alienation and exploitation for paid cultural workers by shifting the risks of an unstable, neoliberal employment onto “precarious” workers (Ross, 2009) and how these workers have been disciplined into demolishing traditional barriers of work—and enjoy it—through the implementation of “playbor” (De Peuter, Dyer-Witheford, and Kline, 2003). And this expansion of capital reaches even into the external world of unpaid, firm-less cultural workers, where creators of user-generated and indie content can typically be located, thanks to the “society factory” (Terranova, 2000) model in which our collective online activity becomes like a new raw material to be extracted and converted to value for the platform. Here participatory digital culture and efforts such as indie games are recast as cash grabs designed “to strip mine consumers of value, and to celebrate it as co-creation” (Van Dijck and Nieborg, 2009). Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford’s groundbreaking work Games of Empire (2008) (GoE hereafter) adapts and fleshes out these narratives of victimization about makers and users of digital culture and applies them to the exact subject of video game studies. In this work, the authors give a bleak picture of mainstream video game production which has been trapped by, on the one hand, global capital and, on the other, by the war machine, collectively the two steering mechanisms of so-called Empire. For example, the history of  the popular video game is explained as one of continual recapture as 51

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hackers from MIT, discredited Japanese mangaka, and feminist cyberenthusiasts progressively found their ideas appropriated and transformed into the unpaid, biopolitical labor that powered subsequent advances in AAA game production. Moreover, it is not only game workers who are victims in De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford analysis but also players who, in the manner of the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002/1944), are configured to the priorities of so-called immaterial production, just as film, according to the earlier critics, prepared and trained workers for industrial labor. In the historically former, we were compelled to make do with the familiar cogs of star, genre, and formula, mimicking the repetitious nature of our work lives, while in the historically latter we now are compelled to think on our feet and improvise for individual success, like good precarit. In both The Dialectic and GoE popular culture is mostly an ideological expansion of the work day. And while GoE concludes with a handful of examples of game-making and gameplay escaping rearticulations of power, the authors are cautiously pessimistic about such a line of flight because of the economic realities of game production and because of the subjective problems of socalled self-administered reality in which subjects already deeply immersed in a commodified and militarized regime are provided the means to animate, elaborate, refine, and extend their own commodification and militarization all the while having empowerment-through-interactivity trumpeted in their ears by acolytes of corporate power (p. 190). In other words, games themselves are unlikely to change much unless property relations do so first. While broadly in agreement with De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford, I will attempt to demonstrate how my sample of indie games and their particular culture of production complicates these authors’ suggestions, especially when taking into consideration the consequential technological and social changes that have occurred within video game work since GoE’s initial publication. Specifically, theories and practices within contemporary indie game production, as outlined by maker postmortems, demonstrate a rich mixture of motivations and economic formations not at all reflected in GoE’s psychic-industrial domination.

Intrinsic Motivation For all the emphatic differences separating the theoretical schools of political economy and neoclassical economics, they do share at least one 52

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common feature: namely, a distant vantage of their subject matter. Both avoid the messiness of firms and individuals laboring within them in favor of macroscopic systems based on demonstrating market harmony or contradiction, depending on one’s sensibilities. More specifically, both schools of thought blackbox the operations of the unit of the firm—one assumes market rationality, the other expansive competition, and both posit the end goal of profit maximization—and the operations of the unit of the individual—one assumes economic rationality, the other exploitation. Undoubtedly these conceptual frames inform our understanding of cultural labor, but at the price of losing the analytic differentiation of indie cultural work whose practitioners espouse a set of logics and practices, sometimes intermixing but often at odds with these dominant discursive systems. This criticism echoes the findings of economic sociology, a field which has closely examined the “the complex interplay between economic, cultural and sociostructural factors” at play in so-called market exchanges (Zelizer, 1988, p. 629). More plainly, indie game self-theorizations also problematize the positioning of individual workers as simply either rational or alienated. These game-makers actively question the appropriate role of the relationship of art to commerce and negotiate a position of “semi-autonomy” between the poles of cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu, 1996) in both their work, the practices that animate it, and their discussions around it. While all contemporary cultural workers deal with this dilemma, indie workers often voice and enact a shared set of rhetorical and practical strategies to deal with it. Here indie game-makers model less the theories of Adam Smith or Karl Marx, but more the foundational work of sociologist Georg Simmel who wrote extensively on the unsettled fate of the individual in modern capitalist social and labor systems. For example, Simmel (1971) argued that the historical emergence of the cash system acted not as a deterrent or perversion to self-expression but as an accelerant of innovation (as well as inequality) in all its forms. This works principally through what the sociologist calls the “dilation of economic circles,” that is the manner in which cash allows transactions and its attendant goods and services to more freely expand across space and time under singular abstract systems of exchange, and the concomitant “specialization of function,” that is the manner in which this expansion of economic circles allows and even compels individuals to increasingly differentiate themselves in all spheres of activity (p. 277). The drive to differentiation culminates in the invention of Simmel’s famous 53

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notion of “vocation,” a situation unique to modern societies in which individuals find a singular balance between objective culture (what outward society “allows” us to do) and subjective culture (what individuals are compelled to do by felt inner-direction), offering an apt enough theoretical description of indie cultural work (p. 21). Collectively these themes—a drastically expanding market, a dire need to differentiate, and a will to selfexpression—give a useful theoretical skeleton through which to discuss indie cultures of production. Most indie postmortems activate the demands of Simmel’s subjective culture by articulating the writers’ deep need and inner devotion, describing their own work as an inner calling or vocation and using this premise reflexively to frame and explain technical and organizational decisionmaking. Indie creation often flourishes in moments of excess production capacity. In the case of gaming, this means an abundance of frustrated or laid off workers from the AAA world, notorious for worker burn out, and a glut of outsiders who because of age, region, or access cannot break in or simply are uninterested in doing so. In fact, the postmortem for the game Rollers of the Realm (2014) describes that game as only being possible because of the large number of laid off game workers in Montreal. These reports typically frame the motivation for worker exodus or resistance usually as a matter of creative frustration or a desire for more control in indie projects, which often allow creators to take on multi-hyphenate roles in smaller teams. In many cases, one creator takes control all the aspects of a game, as in Toby Fox’s Undertale (2015) or Joel McDonald’s Prune (2015), reflecting the auteurist stance celebrated by Amy Anthropy’s (2012) celebration of indie game work. Several developers cited the relative smallness of indie work teams as important in granting workers a clear holistic sense of the game in production, a clarity often impossible in AAA studios where growing budgets and differentiated teams have resulted in a production process strictly divided into work hierarchies and divisions. The will to differentiate also overdetermines indie game-maker’s embrace and discussion of resolutely different, personal, risk-taking, and in the words of one designer “weird” projects in contradistinction to AAA studios’ stated reliance on standardized genres, proven business models, and long-held intellectual properties. Many creators celebrate the field as one that allows for darker and upsetting themes, such as Sproggiwood’s (2014) use of video game violence to comment upon colonialism as well as the frank discussion of religion in Edward McMillen’s very popular Binding of Isaac (2014), of which the creator commented that “I’d be lying if I said that having the first 54

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game rated 16+ due to blasphemy didn’t feel awesome.” In conversation, one indie developer described the personal nature of his own game work, permitted within the indie structure, not the in the sense that, “this is a tale that we have to tell because it reminded us of our mother . . . [but my games are] personal because it’s just like a home-cooked meal in terms of how few people worked on it, how much personality exists in it.” Moreover, indie “weird”-ness is a corollary of the resistance to routinization, the cultural industry practice to repeat established practice to simplify work and to target audience. This tendency looms large in game labor where games are typically built around a series of repeating mechanics, experiences, and intellectual properties. In contrast indie developers often discuss attempting to complicate these mechanics, introducing unproven elements and including “one-off ” features, flying in the face of financial common sense. Or, as described to me by one game developer, For us, it’s okay if we have something that will only be in the game for two or three minutes, where in a AAA [studio], if you’re making something, there’s such huge start-up costs to it . . . to make sure all the tools work and the documentation’s there—you don’t get as many bizarre one-offs. Prune’s McDonald explains this attitude more modestly as a “creneau,” a slight but noticeable difference or tweak of existing standards that simultaneously demonstrates individuality, gives competitive advantage, and self-justifies the entire game as an artistic experiment. This mantra of inner devotion also informs other work practices and attitudes within indie gaming associated with staffing and timeliness. For example, self-motivation is often accompanied with a lack of clear hierarchy and contractual relations, which can delay games’ releases as in the case of Drinkbox Studios’s Guacamelee (2013) or more infamously in Phil Fish’s Fez (2012). Also relying on inner-motivation means that several job functions— basically anything that is not game design—are often understaffed or neglected in indie game work, resulting in a great reliance on outsourcing and freelance labor to fill the gaps. From the perspective of media studies, it is odd to hear that visuals, sounds, and narratives—the elements most traditionally associated with artistic authorship—are the elements that in indie games are the most outsourceable. Indeed, the award-winning indie game, 80 Days (2014), a game which is essentially an interactive, branching narrative, was produced with a single freelanced writer creating all the story 55

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content for the game’s two ostensible makers. Similarly, several indie game developers have described to me their tasking of freelanced collaborators, both for pay and for credit, to work on game art and music. This reliance on outside workers, and digital marketplaces to reach them, also demonstrates a difference from a purely artisanal logic and the particular form of semi-autonomy among many indie game creators, who espouse inner-motivation, but are not opposed to a cheaper, easier way to complete creative work. And since no one has a deep, inner need to playtest games, quality assurance, important for the iterative structure of game production in general, is usually rushed, neglected, or overlooked by indie cultural laborers, impacting quality and extending production work (to fix programming errors after the fact) well past product launch. However, it is precisely the interfirm social formations often termed scenes or communities, that often occupy this vacated position and offer indie cultural workers and means by which to access playtesting, feedback, and criticism. Indie postmortem writers also often take the opportunity rhetorically to distance themselves from economic capital and worries of money. Mario Mihokovic the maker of Starpoint Gemini 2 (2014) described success as an indie as making just enough to keep the team together. Similarly, Prune’s McDonald has stated that “my goals for going indie were to live modestly, work on interesting games, and make just enough to get by.” These sentiments are echoed indirectly with many bootstrapping descriptions of foregoing payment, siphoning off personal savings, and living off top ramen, a foodstuff synonymous with hardship. Another indie game developer, in personal conversation, described working a day job at a prominent, mainstream game studio, but channeling more of his time, money, and effort into his own, after-hours and as-of-yet-unreleased game stating, “work wise things are a lot more stable and pay is very good at [employer video game firm], but a lot of my paycheck I’ve been using to fund my own title because it’s what I’m really interested in.” Devotion also bleeds into vast temporal commitments and unexpectedly expanding timetables; for example, lone designer James Dearden spent four-and-half years creating his point-andclick adventure, Technobabylon (2015). This mythology of indie devotion and struggle is so powerful that several developers suspected that they were unable to achieve the internal financial goals of their crowdfunding campaigns because their product looked too polished or too professional and therefore out of step with indie expectations of hardship. While there is nothing new about romantic notions of art for art’s sake and starving artists, 56

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they are relatively new life scripts for game-makers and are being framed in novel ways among them. The collective author J. K. Gibson-Graham (2006) coined the neologism capitalocentrism to name and question the pervasive hegemonic discourse used to undergird the arbitrary power of neoliberal, global capitalism. For the authors, capitalocentrism acts as a limiting of possibilities of action, a forestalling meaning and a collapsing of thought. Specifically, capitalocentrism subordinates all notions of exchange under the rubric of pure market exchange, positions all individual behavior within the frame of calculative rationality, and diminishes any logic outside that of self-interest or competition. Gibson-Graham problematizes this capitalocentrism (as critical feminism did with phallocentrism, or as deconstruction did with logocentrism), urging readers to think critically about difference, or in their case economic diversity. Applying this same impulse to the study of cultural production generally, and indie cultural work specifically, diversifies the available logics, positions, and motivations of workers. For example, indie game workers often complicate market logic by pursuing work that flies in the face of reigning industrial common sense of success by purposefully avoiding typical gameplay patterns, gaming genres, and the industry’s reliance on intellectual properties, a set of principles that lead to what one developer characterized to me as “licensed shlock.” The posed resistance of instrumental rationality too can be found among indie cultural workers, who again use postmortems to stress their essential separation from the routines and logic of mainstream games and their rigid genres and categories. In conversation, one developer poetically described this impulse in the preproduction of his own game stating: The initial idea was what is it like to be scuba diving underwater and to look at the bottom of the ocean sloping away, out, essentially forever, where it goes into a murky, unknown depth—and that’s not really a thing that you can use for a programmer or animator and have them start making things. In other words, the core of the idea for the game resists characterization as strictly a business model and, only with great difficultly, fits within the patterns of games’ typical division of labor and industrial common sense (despite their frequent eventual fate as commodities). Questioning and diversifying economic logic complicates our very understanding of cultural industries and the cultures of production that 57

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animate them. Gibson-Graham cites any number of alternative economic movements such as fair trade commodities, eco-sustainability, and worker factory takeovers which have foregrounded the social relations and the ethical practice in organized behavior not by neglecting gain and profit but by foregrounding and problematizing the issues of surplus, wealth distribution, and the cultural commons, which are largely neglected in capitalocentric thinking. To this list of alternative economic movements, one might also add any number of indie cultural workers and similarly disruptive organizations who base their own decision-making on debates between economic survival and commitment to a shared ideal. Indie cultural work then offers a privileged space to question the capitalocentrism of theories of cultural production, a vital revision of the academic field as it keeps up with a changing context where the barriers between professional and amateur as well as between consumption and production have become less clear. More simply, the self-theorizations of indie game-makers give researchers a new perspective on the presumed binary dilemma of exploitation and expression.

Resocializing Transactions Works like GoE also lack a fuller explanation of new cultural practices, such as indie cultures of production, because of their particular use of Marxist theory. The authors draw primarily on the autonomist tradition of Italian Marxism which has examined how so-called immaterial labor has replaced physical production in capitalist systems, abetted mostly by processes of biopolitical exploitation wherein shared social, cultural, and intellectual resources become a source of private wealth. The authors of this tradition elaborate on Marx’s (1971) specific notion of “full development of productive forces” in which the advancement of social production offers an obstacle or limitation that capital must master, but with the price of deepening contradiction (p. 119–20). Applying specifically the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2012), GoE describes a similar global domination in immaterial game labor and an “expropriation of the commons” (p. 105) in that field as the latest frustration to the full development of its own productive forces. However, since GoE’s publication, even Hardt and Negri (2012) have updated their own theory to take into consideration the contemporary moment explaining that “the powers of the new technical composition of labor power cannot be contained by the capitalist modes of control; in fact the exercise of capitalist 58

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control is increasingly becoming a fetter to the productivity of biopolitical labor” (p. 143). For these theorists the centrality of value formation outside of traditional systems of capital and the dismantling of scarcity—both tendencies reflected in the opinions and practices of indie game-makers— make traditional capital incapable of dictating wealth accumulation and only able to follow in the path of external biopolitical work in a new form of rentism. While it would be naive to assume that indie game production is dismantling property relations entirely, it may also be equally shortsighted to ignore the many ways that indie cultures of production points toward an unruliness of biopolitical labor through a resocialization of exchange. Indeed, indie game sales and wages are, echoing work of economic sociologists, deeply embedded, complicating the notion of a pure market relation completely captured in circuits of capital (Polanyi, 1944). In a very modest way indie game-makers reimagine exchange and labor as a resocialized relation. In fact, many of the typical ways we understand and recognize exchange and mass cultural consumption actively are questioned by indie practices and ideals; specifically, transactions are not anonymous, they are not one-off, they are not disinterested, and they are not facilitated by traditional financial intermediaries. Recent theoretical work gives shape to such a reconsideration. Sensing similar trends, brand theorist Adam Arvidsson and his collaborators (2008) have recently posited the emergence of a new so-called “ethical economy” where, in the diminishment of industrial controls and logics, cultural production has become a space more often navigated by entrepreneurial creators whose informal interactions themselves create affective intensities, brand loyalties, and economic value. Recent work by Kylie Jarret (2013) expands upon this supposition (and Marx’s original notion of commodification) by suggesting that all digital content is a complicated and contested object in which affective use-values always continue to exist and linger within socially reproductive exchange values. This complication is furthered when taking into consideration the reframing of capitalocentrism, the informalization of production, and the embrace of accelerating technologies that abound in indie practices and self-theorizations. In concert with these thinkers, indie game cultures of production and its vernacular theory (McLaughlin, 1996) seem a particularly rich site for experimenting with alternative economic subject positions, perhaps symptomatic of capital reaching another significant boundary per Hardt and Negri’s suggestion. Both the practices of financing and distributing indie games, as well as the postmortem conversations around these decisions, demonstrate 59

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the economic diversity of the field and the positions within it. Gamemakers discuss funding their works with a combination of instruments and techniques. While some complete their work through self-financing, others have pursued support from educational, governmental, or other nonprofit institutions. Several others have developed partnerships with indie-specializing publishers, such as Devolver Digital or Positech. A few have pursued special incubation deals with major hardware-console manufacturers such as pioneered with That Game Company’s (Flower (2009), Journey (2012)) work with Sony. Other makers have leveraged venture capital financing in manner typical of new media start-ups. And many have used a combination of these mentioned mechanisms. However, the most frequently discussed, if not used, indie financial instrument certainly is access to funds through new, Internet-enabled banks of microfinancing, which hypothetically reduce the barriers to the means of financing as much as free-to-download game engines have reduced the barriers to the means of production. Intermittently referred to as a savior and a false prophet, microfinancing in general and Kickstarter in specific appears as a point of discussion in most indie postmortems. Kickstarter, established by several investment bankers specializing in microfinance, has provided funding for thousands of indie games by connecting webhosted indie game pitches with others active in the scene who provide production funds acting as so-called backers. And while over 35,000 digital and analog games have been funded by the platform’s own count (as of June 2017), any current pundits (Wright, 2018) worry of a steep dropoff in the viability of this source, referred to by indie cultural laborers as Kickstarter fatigue, or more drastically “indiepocalypse.” Regardless of its sustainability, the use of the funding platform by indie cultural workers not only has become a bank for potential producers but also acts as a hotly debated set of cultural practices with its own shared conventions, rituals, and motivations outside of just raising capital. In fact, many indie gamemakers decry the platform for exactly this reason: it simply cannot provide the necessary, multimillion-dollar funds to finance more ambitious titles, and that it is for other reasons that Kickstarter is used and deployed. Many indie postmortems discuss these implicit Kickstarter rules such as the need to constantly update content and respond to backer inquiries; the need to protect an image of professionalism mixed with amateurishness to establish indie bona fides; and the need to use the site only as a so-called “kick-ender,” that is to ask for money only when your own has run out (thus proving intrinsic motivation) and the project is near completion. In conversation 60

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one indie game developer invoked the notion of kick-ender as guiding the production of his own as-of-yet unreleased game stating, our plan is essentially to create a Kickstarter for the game, but the Kickstarter field has been [exposed to] more scrutiny because of certain projects that have come out and didn’t live up to expectations. So, in order to succeed there, we’re going to have to put a lot more effort into the game ahead of time. And while Kickstarter (along with other microfinancing platforms such as Indiegogo and Patreon) certainly provides a substantial amount of funding for indie cultural work, game-makers frequently discuss and debate the indirect tactics and motivations for using the site. For example, the site itself can serve as a reliable, updateable, and scalable web space for aspiring projects, with little or no cost, that is networked with other like-minded offerings. Kickstarter itself then often acts as a form of marketing in an industry that is often starved for visibility. The makers of Crypt Run [Wizard Lizard] (2014), for example, discuss the trickle-down effect of Kickstarter supporters and views leading to likes and subscriptions on the firm’s other social media content. This visibility can also be enhanced by working with the Kickstarter staff who, in corporate language, mentor projects in exchange for favorable placement and “editor pick” status, which drives visits and engagement (as well as the site’s own potential 5 percent cut on invested projects). Response and reaction to Kickstarter proposals can also be used as market research in an indie field that often lacks access to such tools, as demonstrated by Anthony Smith’s (2015) discussion of the effect of backer response on several contemporary indie games. As a further example, the makers of Race the Sun (2013) note that the critiques of wouldbe Kickstarter backers fueled an overhaul of the look and the mechanics of their game, a complex accommodation for an indie creator. These uses and functions for microfinancing evidence an economic diversity of positions in which users can intermittently be understood again not simply as buyers, using backing status to pre-buy the game, but possibly as advocates, supporters of the art, or at least as minimally active members of a more nuanced social whole subtly directing what we term indie games. The digital distribution of games produced with liberalized tools carries with it the potential, like all digital culture and new media, of everyone being heard, a great leveling of artistic voices, as well as of the reconfiguring of economic positions, replacing market relations with those of longer 61

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bonds between “friends” or “peers.” But while all can increasingly “speak,” being heard is an entirely different matter, a fact often acknowledged in indie game postmortems. In fact, Parker, Whitson, and Simon’s (2018) recent analysis posed the dilemma of discoverability and the role played by cultural intermediaries (Hirsch, 1972) to facilitate visibility as central to indie cultural work. Or as the designer of Starlicker (2013) astutely put it, “We are not competing against one another, but are competing with obscurity.” Online visibility is ruled by algorithms based on both social dynamics such as reputation and digital calculations such as engagement. In addition to practicing self-promotion and relational labor (Baym, 2015) as well as leveraging what residual notoriety they might have, indie cultural makers rely on new, specialized institutions of promotion such as specialist trade websites and online journalism to gain visibility and cultivate long-standing relationships. In this regard, indie game-makers often combine roles of cultural production with community engagement in a manner similar to other makers of social media entertainment (Craig and Cunningham, 2019) such as so-called YouTubers or Instagram influencers. Trade websites such as TIG source and gamasutra give a forum for makers to talk back to the scene and promote upcoming work. And at scene-endorsed social events producers can access workers from a very small set of influential news-blogs such as Polygon (part of the Vox Media Group), Kotaku (part of the Gawker media group), and Rock, Paper, Shotgun (an independent UK-based outlet). Indie postmortems, however, cite video “let’s play” demos (hosted primarily through Google’s YouTube) and livestreams (accessed primarily through Amazon’s Twitch) as the most desirable form of marketing, displaying long segments of gameplay, and capitalizing on the video makers’ established audience which can, depending on the user, number in the millions (see Postigo (2014) for a fuller examination). And like the game-makers themselves, along with producers of the engines that are used create them, these streamers evidence a hybrid motivation of devotion to the medium and making what little advertising revenue they can manage through these corporate video hosting portals. Most game-makers in the sample mark these high-value blogs, and more specifically these streamers who act ostensibly as freelance marketers, as the only reliable way to drive new interest and new traffic to game sites and Kickstarter drives particularly. In other words, indie cultural workers create visibility primarily through parasocial relations with what is usually termed the community or scene (a process discussed at length by Brey and Rutheford, in this volume). One developer in personal conversation described to me the dilemma of indie creators, benefiting 62

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from lowered technical barriers to access, but suffering from an equal and consequent social barrier of a production glut. This developer answered the problem of visibility with a combination of traditional marketing, by targeting a very specific audience, and most importantly by creating content that is “shareable,” or in Henry Jenkins and his collaborators’ (2013) terminology “spreadable.” As a case study he credited the $500,000 Kickstarter success of Hyper Light Drifter to the popularity of gifs created from in-game assets and shared broadly on Tumblr and other social networking portals, echoing the later success of Stardew Valley (2016) and its use of Reddit as discussed by Rutherford in this volume. Another game developer described his surprise at getting little or no user response to marketing support from a major independent publisher, a major hardware-console manufacturer, and only gaining followers after being featured by the so-called streaming community on YouTube and Twitch. The importance of the community and the value it provides indie cultural workers who participate in it and labor to sustain it along the more circumscribed value of a market-based relationships indicative of traditional, industrial mass culture, indicates an economic diversity of those in the indie gaming scene. In this diversity, political economic positions are freely swapped as makers are just as often users and peers as they are sellers, and end users act just as often as peers, advocates, collaborators, and marketers as they do as simply buyers.

Embracing Middleware Technologies Recent critical theorists have posed the reinvention of the global economy around incentivizing online participation and acquiring the data left in its wake as the very reshaping of capitalism around new logic of platforms (Srnicek, 2016), rentism (Frase, 2016), or surveillance (Zuboff, 2018). In each formulation, platforms act as network intermediaries that corral and hoard digital users, and increasingly have become dominant economic firms as physical production lags and social media firms occupy and absorb of our lifeworlds and their very functions. In his lucid analysis, Nick Srnicek sees this evolution of capitalism and its fetishization of data as responsible for everything from contemporary slumps in productivity (data is purely extractive), the post-2008 jobless recovery (new media is so far a net job loser, especially when calculating its facilitation of part-time, precarious gigs as in the case of Uber drivers or indie game developers) to a new rise in monopoly capital (as platforms attempt to maximize network effects 63

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by capturing more and more of users’ actions and affects). Media theorist Christian Fuchs has made similar arguments about the false promise of social media and their platforms, but from the perspective of labor. Most emphatically, Fuchs (2018) recently used the loaded comparison of slavery to discuss digital labor, upon which, the theorist points out, capitalism has historically depended, but whose ideology compels us to neglect, forget, or even excuse. Platforms and social media are designed to soak up external, unpaid value whether this be a Facebook “like,” a “let’s play” video posted on YouTube, or a mobile game sold on iOS. While classing each activity as an economically significant creation of data or mere exploitation is broadly true, such a theorization disallows further critical inquiry into the motivation behind, the mores informing, and the results of the activity—precisely the sort of inquiry which is allowed for in a cultures of production approach to digital labor like indie games. I contend that a fuller examination of the tactical use of these platforms (of distribution and production in the case of indie games) condenses a number of conflicting and conflating decisions in their interaction with platforms as well as in the complex products of these interaction that should not be explained away as merely exploitation. Platform theory often reanimates more traditional Marxist ideas of the machine: that hypothetical mechanism of absorbing labor and converting it into capital, once an enormous factory now an immaterial platform backed by an even larger informational infrastructure. For Marx (1992/1867), technology was solely designed to increase productivity, cheapen commodities, and decrease necessary labor time, becoming a “means for producing surplus labor” (492). And for many contemporary thinkers like Hardt and Negri, the institution of immaterial and biopolitical labor has done little to change this core relationship. In the authors’ words, “corporations such as Apple and Microsoft survive by feeding off the innovative energies that emerge from the vast networks of computer and internet-based producers that extend well beyond the boundaries of the corporation and its employees” (2012, p. 297). However, indie game-makers frame their relationship to digital technology and its affordances differently, as evidenced by their embrace of so-called virtual consoles and middleware production tools. These attitudes and practices instead model a newer trend in critical theory, dubbed accelerationism, which poses that technology as not simply a biopolitical trap but as a site where forward-looking producers “must take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society” in order to “develop a cognitive map of the existing system and a speculative image of the future economic system [my 64

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emphasis]” (Williams and Srnicek, 2013). In other words, it is the embrace of technology itself that empowers the growth of economic diversity cited in the previous two sections. Over the past ten years growing ubiquity in broadband has allowed for the emergence of virtual storefronts ranging from the more counterculture such as itch.io to the more mainstream such as Nintendo’s eshop. Nearly every indie postmortem, however, cites Valve’s virtual shop/console, Steam, as central to both their sales and marketing plan. Before Steam and several like-minded ventures, indie creators typically gravitated to flashbased game sites, such as Newgrounds, which lacked a scalable market function and significant reach. But for a modest 5 percent cut (a pittance compared to Apple’s standard 30 percent fee), Steam gives indie games equal placement with major publisher releases. Indie postmortems also laud the Steam’s ability to quickly implement and post upgrades (essential for the endemic problem of bugs in indie games); its license to grant game-makers use early access, or preview downloads, as a substitute for proper beta and playtesting; and its hands-off approach to content, providing a market for uncensored and unrated games, essential for the ideal of creative freedom in indie creation. However, this openness is guided by new media algorithms; specifically, Steam had used scene-specific, crowdsourced voting, dubbed Steam Greenlight (used from 2012 to 2017), to curate game proposals, once again making marketing along with community cultivation (largely through Kickstarter) as well as prior renown, and not simply supposed artistic integrity, essential to indie success, or even viability. Greenlight incentivized users to take a more active part in the scene not only by compelling them to buy a product but also by asking them whether they would support a project, provisionally guiding the standards and values of the scene itself and further socializing seemingly market exchanges. In 2006 a professor at Utrecht University, Mark Overmars, released his program Game Maker, a video game production suite designed for young students and eventually indie game-makers, who used the Game Maker to build, for example, Undertale and Hyper Light Drifter. In a 2009 PR piece Overmars discussed the goal of his work as “not really to make money with Game Maker but to create social networking place for amateur developers” (“Mark Overmras .  .  . ,” 2009). By 2015, the program boasted 750,000 monthly average users and was sold to Playtech, a Great Britain-based online gambling firm, for $16.4 million, not only complicating Overmars’s stated intentions but also demonstrating the balancing of economic and cultural capital typical of indie cultures of production (“YoYo Games . . . ,” 2015). 65

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Earlier in 2005, Danish programmer, David Helgason, released his own Unity game engine claiming, “We have always wanted to change the way the game industry looks today where it requires a ridiculous amount of money to make PC and Mac games” (Carless, 2005). And by 2014 Unity boasted 600,000 monthly average users and now has become the overwhelming choice of most indie game-makers and many so-called mainstream new media firms (Johnson, 2014). These two programs, along with Epic Games’s (now a subsidiary of the Chinese media conglomerate, Tencent) release of its own Unreal engine have, according to postmortems and interviews, have been embraced by indie cultural workers because of their ability to lower the barriers of entry into game work (Hinkle, 2013). Specifically, use of these game engines and software suites has liberalized indie cultural work by reducing licensing, engineering, skill acquisition, and porting costs. All three of these important programs are available to download, which allows student learners and aspiring makers to experiment with game production and, for a series of payments on sliding scale, give users access to additional options, outputs, and the ability to monetize the games built on these engines. While the end-user license agreements between users and engine suppliers the vary slightly, they all offer the engine user the freedom to pay back the engine supplier on a sliding scale, based upon surpassing certain thresholds in actual sales. For example, Unreal collects a royalty of 5 percent of sales, but only after a game surpasses $3000 in actual sales in one quarter. These license agreements allow indie game-makers to avoid massive start-up engineering costs, giving them the ability to render builds almost from day one of production. Or, as one developer explained to me in conversation, “when I started in the industry, you had to have a team of ten to fifteen full time engineers and we do what goes on in [our game] with our one engineer.” These tools also make much more feasible the single author games such as Fox’s Undertale and Thomas Harp’s Axiom Urge (2015). Not only have the means of production been liberalized but so have the skills and expertise necessary to use them by way of extensive user forums and online communities of like-minded indie cultural workers. For example, the postmortem of Rollers of the Realm describes building the game with Unity on the fly by periodically scanning and soliciting information from Internet forums. Like the preference for outsourced creative work, the use of middleware game engines—or outsourced engineering labor—also demonstrates a difference between the indie production culture and the purely artisanal. 66

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In the recent past, technology and particularized development kits for individual gaming consoles and hardware meant that once producers completed a game for one piece of hardware, moving it to another, a practice called porting, was often time-consuming, complex, and cost-prohibitive. While these barriers still exist, the major middleware game engines have cultivated deals with hardware and console manufacturers to ensure ease of interoperability, making it feasible for smaller indie firms to conduct multiplatform launches and, therefore, to expand greatly their market scalability without significant additional costs to engineering. Indeed, several of the postmortems marked Unity as the best program for this translation and, because of this, was the most preferred build option in my small sample. This sentiment was reinforced in a personal interview with another indie game-maker who explained that before these programs: Porting to other platforms was pretty much unheard of. You would have to basically re-write it from scratch. But now you can make a game, put it on PC, Mac, Linux, put it on Android, iOS, whatever you want to, the consoles, handhelds. And it’s not that much more development time. Interestingly these engine designers share the same hybrid intentions as indie game-makers, semi-autonomously mixed between developing the market and developing the medium between encouraging sales and encouraging, in the manner of Overmars and Helgason, nascent makers. And, in the process, the designers ostensibly have acted as prototypical alternative economic movements in Gibson-Graham’s terminology and, through their policies, have acknowledged the centrality of knowledge accumulation over resource scarcity in social media driven markets. These analytic themes of intrinsic motivation, resocialized transactions, and technological implementation are demonstrative, but not exhaustive of indie game-makers and their self-theorizations. They indicate a site of cultural production invested in experimenting with economic diversity and complicating the capitalocentrism of cultural theory, thereby offering an analytic difference to a new and emerging site of cultural production. However, this chapter stops short of at least two ideals to be addressed in further work: one, further work should consider how this embrace of economic diversity both enables and limits creative decision-making. Two, additional studies should also examine how the ability to complicate capitalocentrism may or may not be a symptom of larger structural 67

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inequality, a supposition espoused in McDonald’s postmortem of Prune in which the creator admits that the success of his game has mostly to do with a combination of his own white, upper-middle class privilege, combined with dumb luck.

Appendix One—List of Postmortems Brown, L. (2015). “An indie-style experiment at a AAA Studio: Insomniac’s Slow Down, Bull.” Retrieved from http:​//gam​asutr​a.com​/view​/news​/2591​63/An​_indi​ estyl​e_exp​erime​nt_at​_a_AA​A_s tudio_Insomniacs_Slow:Down_Bull.php. Cacace, H. (2014). “Reflections on an indie failure: StarLicker postmortem.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/Hayd​enCac​ace/2​01404​17/21​ 5695?​Refle​ction​s_on_​an_In​die_F​ailur​eStar​Licke​r_Pos​tmort​em.ph​p. Chang, J. (2014). “Postmortem for a Kickstarter project that just made it over the line.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/JoeC​hang/​20141​117/2​ 30163​/Post​morte​m_for​_ a_Kic​kstar​ter_P​rojec​t_tha​t_jus​t_mad​e_it_​over_​the_l​ ine.p​hp. Culp, P. (2013). “Forge developer diary: Postmortem.” Retrieved from http:​//www​. gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/Paul​Culp/​20130​424/1​91143​/Forg​e_Dev​elope​r_ Diary_ Postmortem.php. Daw, D. (2013). “Crowdfunding, one year later.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​ sutra​.com/​view/​featu​re/19​1521/​crowd​fundi​ng_on​e_yea​r_lat​er.ph​p. Deardon, J. (2015). “Postmortem: Technocrat’s cyberpunk adventure game Technobabylon.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​view/​news/​24856​7/ Pos​tmort​em_Te​chnoc​rats_​cyber​p unk_adventure_game Technobabylon.php. de Jongh, A. (2013). “Postmortem: Gave Oven’s Bam Fu.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/Adri​aanDe​Jongh​/2013​0607/​19389​5/ Pos​tmort​e m_Game_Ovens_Bam_fu.php. Frampton, D. (2013). “Postmortem: The Blockheads.” Retrieved from http:​//www​. gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/Davi​dFram​pton/​20131​012/2​02246​/Post​morte​m_The​_ Bloc​khead​s.php.​ Gravelyn, N. (2014). “Shipwreck postmortem.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​ sutra​.com/​blogs​/Nick​Grave​lyn/2​01407​06/22​0377/​Shipw​reck_​Po st_Mortem. php. Grinblat, J. (2015). “Design postmortem: Story-driven roguelike, Sproggiwood.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/Jaso​nGrin​blat/​20150​526/2​ 44216​/Desi​gn_Po​st morte​m_Sto​ryDri​ven_R​oguel​ike_S​progg​iwood​.php. Hackett, M. (2013). “Postmortem: Crypt Run 180% crowdfunding campaign.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/Matt​Hacke​tt/20​13082​1/198​ 768/P​ostmo​rtem_​Cr ypt_Run_180_crowdfunding_campaign.php. Harris, C. (2013). “Indies publishing indies: Redshirt, 1 month after release.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​view/​news/​20699​7/Ind​ies_p​ublis​ hing_​indie​s_Red​shirt​_1_mo​nth_a​fter_​relea​se.ph​p.

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Postmortems and Indie Cultural Work Harvey, C. (2013). “Postmortem: DrinkBox Studios’ Guacamelee!” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​view/​featu​re/20​0658/​postm​ortem​_drin​kbox_​studi​ os_. php. Ingold, J., & J. Humfrey. (2015). “Postmortem: Inkle’s 80 Days.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​view/​news/​25597​0/Pos​tmort​em_In​kles_​80_Da​ys.ph​p. Jikovsky, J. (2014). “Dex at EGX Rezzed 2014: Indie exhibitor postmortem.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/JanJ​irkov​sky/2​01406​05/21​ 8876/​Dex_a​t_EGX​_ Rezze​d_201​4_Ind​ie_Ex​hibit​or_Po​stmor​tem.p​hp. Kanarek, M. (2014). “NotOnSteam postmortem.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​ sutra​.com/​blogs​/Mike​Kanar​ek/20​14012​2/209​023/N​otOnS​team_​ Postmortem. php. Mahler, T. (2015). “Postmortem: Moon Studios’ heartfelt Ori and the Blind Forest.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​view/​news/​24253​0/Pos​tmort​em_ Mo​on_St​udios​_hear​t felt_Ori_and_the_Blind_Forest.php. McDonald, J. (2016). “Postmortem: Joel McDonald’s Prune.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​view/​news/​26493​0/Pos​tmort​em_Jo​el_Mc​Donal​ ds_Pr​ une.php. McMillen, E. (2012). “Postmortem: McMillen and Himsl’s The Binding of Isaac.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​view/​featu​re/18​2380/​postm​ortem​_ mcmi​llen_​and_h​im sls_.php. McNeil, E. (2013). “Bombball postmortem.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​. com/​blogs​/EMcN​eill/​20130​702/1​95505​/Bomb​ball_​Postm​or tem.php. Mihokovic, M. (2015). “Postmortem: Starpoint Gemini 2—living the dream . . .” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/Mari​oMiho​kovic​/2015​0123/​ 23491​0/Pos​tmort​em_St​arpoi​nt_Ge​mini_​2Livi​ng_th​e_dre​am.ph​p. Moore, T. (2014). “Postmortem on Grave’s Kickstarter launch: The good, the bad and the ugly.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/Tris​tanMo​ore/2​ 01404​21/21​5757/​Postm​ortem​_On_Gr​aves_​Kicks​tarte​r_Lau​nch_T​h e_Go​od_Th​ e_Bad​_and_​the_u​gly.p​hp. Morris, T. (2015). “Postmortem: Petroglyph’s Grey Goo—getting back to the roots of RTS.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​view/​news/​23766​6/Pos​tmort​ em_Pe​trogl​yphs_​Grey_​G oo getting_back_to_the_roots_of_RTS.php. Payton, R. (2012). “How Camouflaj saved Republique’s Kickstarter.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​view/​featu​re/17​6187/​how:c​amouf​l aj_s​aved_​rpubl​ ique s_.php. San Filippo, A., & San Filippo, F. (2016). “Postmortem: Flippfly’s Race the Sun.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​view/​news/​26412​7/Pos​tmort​em_Fl​ ippfl​ys_Ra​ce_th​e_Sun.php. Sheff, P. (2013). “Tetrapulse Kickstarter Postmortem.” Retrieved from http:​//www​. gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/Pete​rShef​f /201​31015​/2023​34/Te​trapu​lse_K​icks tarter_ Postmortem_Part_1.php. Sick, C. (2015). “Postmortem: Cave Dash iOS.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​. com/​blogs​/Case​ySick​/2015​1207/​26103​5/Pos​tmort​em_Ca​v e_Dash_iOS.php. Thompson, S., Walsh, T., Evans, E., & Evans, D. (2014). “Postmortem: Pinball-RPG hybrid Rollers of the Realm.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​view/​ featu​re/23​3340/​postm​ortem​_pinb​allrp​g_hyb​rid_.php. 69

Indie Games in the Digital Age Tibitoski, P. (2015). “Octodad: Dadliest Catch Post-mortem Pt 1: Summary.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/Phil​Tibit​oski/​20150​202/2​ 35408​/Octo​dad_D​adlie​ st_Catch_PostMortem_Pt_1_Summary.php. Wangler, A. (2013). “Shelter—A post mortem.” Retrieved from http:​//www​. gama​sutra​.com/​blogs​/Andr​easWa​ngler​/2013​1003/​20155​5/She​lterA​_Post​_ Mort​em.ph​p. Wong, K. (2014). “The Pilgrim Postmortem.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​. com/​blogs​/Kevi​nWong​/2014​0610/​21905​3/The​_Pilg​rim_P​o stmortem.php. York, D. (2013). “Postmortem: ROBLOX Mobile.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​ sutra​.com/​blogs​/Davi​dYork​/2013​0520/​19260​4/Pos​tmort​em_RO​ BLOX_ Mobile.php.

Works Cited Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical investigations (E. Jephcott, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published in 1944). Anthropy, A. (2012). Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Arvidsson, A., & Bauwens, M. (2008). “The crisis of value and the ethical economy.” Journal of Future Studies, 12(4), 9–20. Baym, N. (2015). “Connect with your audience! The relational labor of connection.” The Communication Review, 18(1), 14–22. Bourdieu, P. (1996). Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary field (S. Emanuel, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Caldwell, J. (2008). Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Carless, S. (2005). “OverTheEdge announces Unity 1.0.2 Release.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.gama​sutra​.com/​view/​news/​5937/​OverT​h eEdg​e_Ann​ounce​s_Uni​ ty_10​ 2_Release.php. Craig, D., & Cunningham, S. (2019). Social Media Entertainment: The Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. New York, NY: New York University Press. De Peuter, G., & Dyer-Witheford, N. (2008). Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. De Peuter, G., Dyer-Witheford, N., & Kline, S. (2003). Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Frase, P. (2016). Four Futures: Life after Capitalism. London, England: Verso. Fuchs, C. (2018). “Capitalism, patriarchy, slavery and racism in the age of digital capitalism and digital labor.” Critical Sociology, 44(4–5), 677–702. Geertz, C. (1973). Interpretations of Culture. New York, NY: Basic Books. Gibson-Graham, J. (2006). A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 70

Postmortems and Indie Cultural Work Gordon, I. (2003). “Superman on the set: The market, nostalgia and television audiences.” In M. Jancovich and J. Lyons (Eds.), Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (pp. 128–62). London, England: BFI. Guevara-Villalobos, O. (2011). Independent Gamework and Identity: Problems and Subjective Nuances. Paper presented at the DiGRA 2015 Conference. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2012). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hinkle, D. (2013). “Tencent sunk $330 Million into Epic Games, owns nearly half of studio.” Retrieved from https​://ww​w.eng​adget​.com/​2013/​03/21​/tenc​ents​unk-3​30- milli​on-in​to-ep​ic-ga​mes-o​wns-n​early​-half​-of-s​/. Hirsch, P. (1972). “Processing fads and fashions: An organization-set analysis of cultural industry systems.” American Journal of Sociology, 639–59. Jarrett, K. (2013). “The relevance of ‘women’s work’: Social reproduction and immaterial labor in digital media.” Television & New Media, 15(1), 14–29. Jenkins, H., Green, J., & Ford, S. (2013). Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York, NY: New York University Press. Johnson, E. (2014). “Unity founder, Ex-CEO: I didn’t enjoy being on top.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.reco​de.ne​t/201​4/10/​23/11​63217​6/uni​ty-fo​under​-ex-c​eo-i-​ didnt​-enjo​y- being-at-the-top. “Mark Overmars talks about Game Maker’s past and future.” (2009). Retrieved from http:​//gam​emake​rblog​.com/​2009/​11/19​/mark​-over​mars-​talks​-abou​tgam​e-makers-past-and-future/. Marx, K. (1971). The Grundrisse. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Marx, K. (1992). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. London, England: Penguin. (Original work published 1867). McLaughlin, T. (1996). Street Smarts and Critical Theory: Listening to the Vernacular. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Parker, F., Whitson, J., & Simon, B. (2018). “Megabooth: The cultural intermediation of indie games.” New Media and Society, 20(5), 1953–72. Polanyi, K. (1944). The great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. New York, NY: Beacon Press. Postigo, H. (2014). “The socio-technical architecture of digital labor: Converting play into YouTube money.” New Media & Society, 18(2), 332–49. Ritzer, G., & Rey, P. (2016). “From ‘solid’ producers to ‘liquid’ consumers.” In M. Davis (Ed.), Liquid Sociology: Metaphor in Zygmunt Bauman’s Analysis of Modernity (pp. 157–76). London, England: Routledge. Ross, A. (2009). Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York, NY: New York University Press. Simmel, G. (1971). On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings (D. Levine, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, A. (2015). “The backer-developer connection: Exploring crowdfunding’s influence on video game production.” New Media & Society, 17(2), 198–214.

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Indie Games in the Digital Age Sotamaa, O. (2010). “When the game is not enough: Motivations and practices among computer game modding culture.” Games and Culture, 5(3), 239–55. Srnicek, N. (2016). Platform Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Sundararajan, A. (2016). The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Terranova, T. (2000). “Free labor: Producing culture of the digital economy.” Social Text, 63, 33–58. Van Dijck, J., & Nieborg, D. (2009). “Wikinomics and its discontents: A critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos.” New Media & Society, 11(5), 855–74. Williams, A., & Srnicek, N. (2013). “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics.” Retrieved from http:​//cri​tical​legal​think​ing.c​om/ 20​13/05​/14/a​ccele​rate-​ manif​esto-​for-a​n-acc​elera​tioni​st-po​litic​s/. Wright. S. (2018). “There are too many games. What now?” Retrieved from https​://ww​w.pol​ygon.​com/2​018/9​/28/1​79113​72/th​ere-a​re-to​o-man​y-vid​eoga​mes-what-now-indiepocalypse. “YoYo Games Sells to PlayTech for $16.4 Million.” (2015). Retrieved from http:​//www​.game​sindu​stry.​biz/a​rticl​es/20​15-02​-16-y​oyo-g​ames-​sells​-top​layte​ch- for-USD16–4-million. Zelizer, V. (1988). “Beyond the polemics on the market: Establishing a theoretical and empirical agenda.” Sociological Forum, 3(4), 614–34. Zuboff, S. (2018). Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York, NY: Hachette Book Group.

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CHAPTER 4 FIVE NIGHTS AT FAN GAMES: FEMINISM, FAN LABOR, AND FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S

Betsy Brey

Seemingly out of nowhere, in 2014, players were invited to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, “a magical place for kids and grown-ups alike, where fantasy and fun come to life. Fazbear Entertainment is not responsible for damage to property or person” (Cawthon, 2014a). By 2015, this magical place of fun and fantasy has become the eighth most frequently featured game on YouTube (Cork, 2015) and thousands of fan games were featured on GameJolt (O’Connor, 2015). By 2019, the creator of the series was apologizing to fans for accidentally using fan art in a game promo because it was functionally impossible to tell the difference between his own work and that of his fans (Cawthon, 2019a). The relationship between fans and game developers is a complicated one, especially as fans become more and more interested in creating content based around their favorite games. As Hector Postigo (2007) explains, “The fan culture for digital games is deeply embedded in shared practices and experiences among fan communities, and their active consumption contributes economically and culturally to broader society” (300). These shared practices increase in scope, complexity, and polish over time, with many content creators taking their own chances as indie developers. While the majority of indie games do not see large-scale success, there are a number of independently developed games that have formed the basis for multimillion-dollar franchises and game series, one with fans creating content based on these indie titles. While the relationship between AAA titles and their fan’s content creation is the subject of many academic studies (see Terranova, 2000; Postigo, 2007; Carlson, 2009; Sotamaa, 2010; Ehrentraut, 2016), the question arises: How does the smaller scale of indie development change the relationship between producers and fans? One influential example to explore these relationships and power dynamics is Scott Cawthon’s horror-game empire, Five Nights at Freddy’s

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(FNaF). The first game, released in 2014, gained widespread success and Cawthon released a sequel in 2014, two more games in 2015, another main title game and a spin-off game in 2016, another main title game in 2017 with a yet another spin-off in 2018 and a VR spin-off in 2019. The franchise also includes four novels, a fictional guidebook, a continually delayed film, and an avalanche of merchandise, all inspired by the games. Each game grows in narrative and mechanical complexity as the series progresses, but the core concept remains relatively the same: survive through the night at an isolated location by avoiding contact with the animatronics. The series has received very little academic attention, despite its notoriety in games culture and YouTube culture, and the fact that the FNaF series remains one of the most successful indie franchises to date with multiple transmedia adaptations and an enormous active fan base. While fan games created by enthusiasts are not uncommon, FNaF fan games in particular are incredibly common. In fact, FNaF fan games are so common that GameJolt, one of the larger hobby-focused indie publishing platforms, includes FNaF games as its own genre to help avoid overwhelming the entire site with FNaF fan games. At the time of writing in 2019, there are over 7,800 FNaF games hosted on the site, created and published in the span of just a few years. These fan games vary greatly, from humorous spinoffs and spoofs, to remixing genres and settings, to clones and remakes of the originals. The smaller scale of development—FNaF was originally created by one person entirely, and is still creatively, fiscally, and legally controlled by Cawthon alone—allows a more personal engagement with the games from fans. This relationship both reinforces and shifts the traditional power dynamics of digital labor. This chapter will first discuss these traditional power dynamics of fan labor in a capitalist society before focusing specifically on how these dynamics play out in a digital economy. Then, by exploring the particulars of Cawthon’s FNaF as a specific example, I will discuss how capitalist hegemony is complicated and reinforced in an indie development sphere. While indie development allows some opportunities for a more egalitarian engagement in what Mel Stanfill (2019) calls “lovebor” (p. 19), indie development still benefits equally from the unpaid passion of their fans as its AAA brethren do. Regardless of the power dynamics within indie development between developers and fans, the threat of exploitation still stands as a serious concern. 74

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Fans and Fandoms The formation of a dedicated fan identity and the production of fannish value are well studied (see de Certeau, 1984; Radway, 1991; Jenkins, 1992; Lewis, 2003; Hills, 2005; Sandvoss, 2005; Hellekson and Busse, 2006; Jenkins, 2006; Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington, 2007; Hochschild, 2007; Harris and Alexander, 2010; Fiske, 2011a, b; Jenkins, 2016), and high among the concerns of scholars are the complexities of copyright, community, and culture. Running parallel to the advent of so-called Web 2.0 and its affordances of interest-focused networking, fandoms and fan communities have become more and more central to models of cultural production. In “Fan Labor and Feminism: Capitalizing on the Fannish Labor of Love,” Kristina Busse (2015) explains: As customers, viewers, and users get rebranded as fans, and as fannish modes of sharing and spreading interest get rebranded as viral marketing, entire companies are dedicated solely to mimicking and replicating fannish passions as user-generated content. Although such companies furnish infrastructures, fans provide the content populating that infrastructure for free. These fans often forgo remuneration—as well as the rights to their own creative contributions. (p. 112) The tensions between creation, care, and capitalism have always been of concern to feminist fan scholars (Busse, 2015, pp. 113–14). But equally of note in this rebranding, as Busse refers to it, are the clear cases of exploitation of fan labor, as these cases intertwine with the fan’s willingness and, in many cases, consent to the terms of the relationship and deny its exploitative qualities (see Terranova, 2000; Kücklich, 2005; Postigo, 2007; Scott, 2009; Noppe, 2011; de Kosnik, 2012; Stanfill, 2013; Turk, 2013; Stanfill and Condis, 2014; Stanfill, 2019). These practices of fans in service to the commercial properties they love, called lovebor, is described by Mel Stanfill as a dual process of “loving and demonstrating love” (2019, p. 19) in ways that create value for the commercial property (2019, p. 19) through content creation, promotional labor, and the occupation of time and emotional resources—when fans are invested in a particular fandom, they will spend their time engaging within that fan community, which according to a neoliberal capitalist logic means they are not focused on other competition. This centralizes fannish attention, labor, and money, which then circulates throughout fan communities, further engaging others which then serves to 75

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reinvest the fans performing labor in the first place. That labor encourages others to invest, which then repeats the process. As Stanfill and Condis remind us, fandom is dependent on fan labor (2014, para 3.1). This labor is performed on principles of love and passion, which is devalued in capitalism in general (Busse, 2015, pp. 113–14), but this love and enjoyment of the labor, as well as the love of sharing it is fundamentally connected to capitalist enterprise. Clearly, the commercial entities and media productions that fans engage with are commodities, and so are the very platforms through which fans mobilize and share their labor. YouTube, Livejournal, Twitter, Tumblr, and more are all sites of fan labor and community-building that are businesses dependent on the creation and proliferation of created content. On top of that, the basic barriers to enter such digital fannish spaces—the technologies and products that allow access to these platforms in the first place such as smartphones, computers, Internet service, and more—are commoditized products (de Kosnik, 2012). So, fan labor, performed through the lens of lovebor, is deeply commodified from the start. Fans pay to be part of a community that inspires them to perform labor on behalf of, quite often, multibillion dollar enterprises which have received those billions from the very fans who are performing the fannish labor in the first place (see Larsen and Zubernis, 2012; Zubernis and Larsen, 2013; Geraghty, 2017). However, most often fans choose to engage in these practices out of enjoyment of the labor itself as well as pleasure in the sharing of the labor with others. Stanfill and Condis (2014) note that participants in such an economy use gift giving as the means to circulate goods and services; this exchange does not typify the colloquial notion of a gift as a freely offered expression of affection but rather is obligatory. (Para 3.3) This kind of gift economy is incredibly common in fan communities for several reasons, such as the inaccessibility of commercial spaces for their work, as well as a preference for an economy of likes, kudos, and upvotes for emotional and social capital as opposed to financial capital (Pearson, 2007; Scott, 2009; Noppe, 2011, para. 4.1). Yet, we see a “fannish culture in which commercial and gift cultures often contentiously coexist” (Busse, 2015, p. 114) through what Susanne Scott (2009) refers to as “ancillary content models”—where additional content, such as interviews, podcasts, comics, behind-the-scenes views, videos, and more—is released through licensed means like an official website or YouTube channel. This encourages 76

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further fan participation, remix, and creation, often through rewarding fans members who engage with that particular facet of the fan community through recognition, fan contests, and more. These kinds of authoritative presences within fan communities mimic the kinds of engagement that fans themselves practice outside of ancillary content models, wherein created content “gifts” are emphasized affective elements of “producing and reinforcing fannish identities and relationships” (Stanfill and Condis, 2014, para. 3.3). However, ancillary content models can limit the kinds of engagement that fans take part in, as ancillary models deeply shape the landscape of what is and what isn’t “good fandom.” The kinds of officially released content that fans are encouraged to play with as part of these content models impacts the directions of fannish activity and labor in directions that are approved of by the licensing companies. While some kinds of fan practices are legally monitored through means such as EULAs for a modding kit, there are also socially formed expectations and guidelines about what is “good” content based on the emergent values of a fandom. Fan labor or practices that fall outside of the guided direction of these ancillary models can be understood as unwanted, inappropriate, or deviant, but they are also often the very same practices that are being repackaged and stamped with an “official” sticker through these ancillary content models in the first place (see Scott, 2009, para. 3.5).

The Politics of Payments Both franchised ancillary models, which mimic gift-economies, and the creations of fan lovebor are extremely prevalent in digital culture and in video game culture. The social nature of play and games combined with their nature as objects and commodities (Carlson, 2009) makes the fans of games a particularly active group of producers and consumers simultaneously. Indeed, the earliest discussions of playbor, a now important element of discussing social media and digital engagement as a whole, were focused around discussions of game mods in AAA gaming spheres (Kücklich, 2005). Drawing on both Kücklich (2005) and Postigo (2007), Judy Ehrentraut (2016) argues that while enjoyment is a large part of what drives many modders, many are driven by the desire to improve their skills, reputation, and portfolios for future work in the games industry, or, on the rare occasion, by the hope that their mod may be purchased by a developer and integrated into AAA titles. So, while many fans produce mods out of fannish desires, it 77

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is also seen as an investment of a future within the gaming industry, the kind of “hope labor” described by Kuehn and Corrigan (2013). AAA developers are deeply aware of the value of this investment, not only as methods of reengaging players into their games, effectively extending the lifespan and replayability of their products (Postigo, 2007, p. 308), but also as acting as a kind of “proving grounds” for “the big leagues” (Postigo, 2007, p. 310). The commodification of game mods has a relatively short but difficult history, with a few notable attempts to introduce pay structures for this labor. Famously, a model introduced by Valve on multiple occasions has failed spectacularly (Gallagher, Jong, and Sinervo, 2017), while other attempts to recognize and pay for the labor of mods continue to be contentious—not just on behalf of the companies who technically own the IP but on part of the modding community, some of which have expressed concern about plagiarism, pricing models, and inaccessibility, but moreover, concern for a community that partially felt that their “hobbywork” should be free because it was a gift to the larger community (Meer, 2015; “Paid Mods are Dead: PC Gamer Reacts,” 2015). But the question of paying modders for their labor often comes down to the fact that the labor performed by game modders is understood to be a valuable skill. While coding and programming are regarded as high-skill labor forms, other fandom products which also require a high amount of skill to create, such as art, cosplay, or fan fiction, are not valued as skilled labor in the same ways. It should not be surprising that fan activities concerned with art, fashion, and writing—that is, Feminine activities—are not seen as skilled labor while simultaneously being performed predominantly by women (Stanfill and Condis, 2014; Busse, 2015; Stanfill, 2019). Indeed, fan communities as a whole are often viewed as feminine spaces; Noppe (2011) defines fandom itself as “a predominantly female space that makes use of a gift economy” (para 4.1). But modding is predominantly a masculine community, connected to the larger masculine gamer culture. It would follow the patriarchal logic of capitalism that the skilled labor of men would be more worthy of pay than the perceived unskilled labor of women, although both are centered on fannish labors of care and community. Busse (2015) explains this issue, stating: This becomes all the more important at a time when mainstream culture embraces, supports, and encourages fannish endeavors—as long as they remain controllable. The new geek hierarchy of positive (white, male, straight, intellectual, apolitical) and negative (person of 78

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color, female, queer, embodied, political) fan identities creates legal and economic chasms. (Busse 114) And while it is true that in rare cases, cosplayers may be offered sponsorships and featured as a spokesmodel or in photo shoots for advertising. However, these are deeply controlled spaces wherein the cosplayer is subject to commercial demands and expectations for their art as well as their personal behavior and appearance. These sponsorships do pay fans for their labor, but only in the most controllable fashions. Additionally, particularly for cosplayers, there are extreme expectations of normativity (Scott, 2015). The cosplayers most likely to receive sponsorship are conventionally attractive, thin, Caucasian, or Asian women who are not allowed to act outside of the boundaries of the character they embody (Stone, 2015; Chong-Umeda, 2016). Most wear complex, revealing, and sexualized clothing to best appear like the characters they represent, falling in line with a long history of sexualization of not just women, but Asian women in particular (Peirson-Smith, 2013). On the other hand, a number of fan content creators, such as cosplayers, Game Masters, and fan artists, are just beginning to break with the traditional pay structures of capitalism through crowdfunding or patron-donation services like Patreon or Ko-Fi to support their high-skill labor outside of commercial spaces. However, these often operate as donations within the gift economy and financial support of fan content creators is becoming part of being a good fan, and there are often other rewards associated with financially supporting fan laborers, ranging from being publicly thanked for a donation or subscription by a creator to digital tags and badges socially marking the donor highly, to physical or digital gifts of thanks from creators for continued support. In this way, financial support through crowdfunding in fandom spaces simply adds traditional economics into fandom economics, perhaps functioning more as a reward to fan content creators rather than payment for their labor. Clearly, questions of fan-labor practices, in digital contexts and physical contexts, are of deep concern to feminist scholars. The inequalities of carefocused labor practices as they intersect with the hegemonic control of identity, labor, and capitalist value are at the forefront of fan-created content. In digital contexts, modding is, without a doubt, the best studied form of digital game fan creations, but there are other forms of playable content creation within game culture that are subject to these kinds of institutional power inequalities. While Postigo’s (2007) discussion of playable content 79

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creations focuses on reskins, mods, and maps, another important element are fan games, which I define as free-standing creations inspired by another game but are independently playable without the original game. Where mods, reskins, and maps are all dependent on having already purchased existing software, fan games might take inspiration from purchased software, but are created through other means, such as professional and or free-touse game engines and other game design technologies (Salter, 2009, para 4.1). Some modders and fan-game developers hope that their creations and talents will be noticed by larger developers and their skills will be recognized and rewarded. However, many participate in modding or fan-game creation for the sake of creating, archiving, and sharing their work. In “‘Once More a Kingly Quest’: Fan Games and the Classic Adventure Genre,” Anastasia Salter (2009) discusses fan games as a kind of evolving folk art, which she calls “personal games” (para. 1.2). She notes that the creators of these fan games “build games and tools, share those processes and their code, and expand upon the games and tools made within the community and outside in commercial projects” which act to “replicate and expand upon the forms” of the games that inspired them (Salter, 2009, para. 1.2). We can also view fan games as adaptations, as fan games follow the same kinds of patterns of adaptations as traditionally defined by Linda Hutcheon (2014); games are “acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works,” and “creative and an interpretive act[s] of appropriation/ salvaging,” as well as an “extended intertextual engagement” (Hutcheon, 2014, p. 9) with the games which inspired them. However, no matter what the status of fan games might be—adaptations, personal games, or digital folk art—fan games are also subject to the same questions of labor exploitation that game mods are. And they are perhaps even more vulnerable than mods. Where mods may be freely distributed or even purchased by developers when they reach a noticeable level of attention from fans, the creators of fan games do not receive the same responses. Indeed, in examining the specifics of adventure fan games, such as fan developer LucasFan’s remake of Lucas Art’s Maniac Mansion or fan development group Tierra’s remakes of Sierra’s King’s Quest, Salter (2009) discusses the industry’s responses of cease-and-desist orders against fan games and the removal and shutdown of the resulting games. In the example of King’s Quest IX: The Silver Lining, after publicizing the cease production order by Vivendi (the current copyright holders of the series, a rebrand of the original Sierra Entertainment), the fan development team was given legal permission to continue production due 80

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to overwhelming fan support, but it is crucial to note that The Silver Lining is being developed independently for free. As Salter reminds us, “There is no corporate powerhouse behind The Silver Lining project, and no one on the creative team is being paid. When the final game is released, no one will make a profit: the game will be available for free, whereas a comparable effort by a corporation would be priced at $30 to $40 a copy” (2009, para. 6.4). While the pleasure of creating the game may be all the volunteer developers want, it is deeply beneficial for Vivendi to allow The Silver Lining project; it is a free way to test the waters for such a product and see if development of such a property in the future could be lucrative. There is absolutely no risk or cost to Vivendi to allow the years of skilled labor by its fans to test their market without pay or recognition. A project like The Silver Lining may even prime fans for a potential remaster of Vivendi’s IPs. Even if Vivendi does not take advantage of the free market testing and hype created by The Silver Lining team, at minimum this fan game extends the lifespan of their products and reinvigorates their fan community, which in and of itself is of economic value under capitalism.

Indie Fans and YouTube Hams The question arises, though, to how the relationship between fans, fan labor, and game-makers altered when we shift from the AAA industry toward something smaller and more personal, as we see in indie game development. Indie game development in and of itself is already a complex site of lovebor, production, and creativity. While the traditional power dynamics of fan labor in the AAA industry are well studied, the dynamics of fan labor in indie development are not, likely because of the scale of many indie games—the majority of indie titles see smaller scales of consumption and long-term fan engagement. However, there are several indie giants which have produced massive fan bases that rival AAA produced titles, such as Minecraft, Undertale, and the aforementioned FNaF. In 2014, after receiving negative feedback from a previous game’s unintentionally terrifying character designs, Scott Cawthon released the titular FNaF, a survival horror game with resource-management tactics and  a  plethora of jumpscares. The premise of this first game falls on the conceit  that you must survive a siege of angry, haunted pizzeria animatronics from midnight to 6:00 a.m. for five nights. Four animatronic 81

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monsters approach the building’s security office where the player is holed up for the night shift. If any of the animatronics reach the office, a frightening jumpscare animation leaps across the entire screen accompanied by a horrible scream. To avoid this, all the player can do is check security cameras, lock and unlock doors, and turn lights on and off. The player cannot move or hide to avoid the oncoming monstrous animatronics. The only obvious narrative context the game supplies is focalized through a short message on a phone’s answering machine each night, which vaguely instructs the players on survival tactics and feeds the player limited story information. FNaF saw moderate success early, rising to notoriety on IndieDB before Desura and Steam Greenlight. The predevelopment hype of the trailer and demo led to the approval of the game by the Steam community and its release on August 8, 2014, to generally favorable reviews on Metacritic (“Five Nights at Freddy’s,” 2014). But when it was picked up by a number of well-known YouTube streamers, it became an Internet sensation. I argue that there are three main factors from YouTube culture that shaped FNaF fandom and primed it for fan-game creation—the competing elements of humor and drama, the competition and challenge of the game, and the curiosity and mystery which formed a fan culture eager to create and labor for their fandom The impact of YouTube on the game’s success cannot be overstated. Streamers including Felix Kjellberg (PewDiePie) and Seán McLoughlin (Jacksepticeye), most notably Mark Fischbach, known as Markiplier and the self-proclaimed “King of Five Nights at Freddy’s” (Fischbach, 2014a), produced animated and over-the-top “let’s play videos” featuring themselves playing the game and their reactions. While McLoughlin and Kjellberg both contributed greatly to the success and legacy of FNaF, Fischbach arguably has had some of the most lasting and long-term engagement with the series and its fandom. At the time of writing, Fischbach’s first FNaF video, “WARNING: SCARIEST GAME IN YEARS | Five Nights at Freddy’s—Part 1” has more than 74 million views, and he has made videos of every single FNaF game released to date. They are some of his most popular videos, as well as frequently rewatched throughout the years. There is a clear amount of overlap between the fan bases of these YouTubers and the game’s fandom. Looking specifically at Fischbach, his videos feature a few common points that help define the FNaF fandom— finding a sense of humor in the fear, a sense of curiosity in the hints of story, and a sense of determination in the difficulty. 82

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Fischbach’s channel predominantly features humorous let’s plays and other content, but he is best known for playing indie horror games of varying quality. However, there is a sense of optimism in his production style and he does not play these games for the purpose of lambasting them to his viewers. Rather, even when he plays something poorly produced or buggy or incomplete, he tends to be encouraging and understanding about the conditions under which indie games are made. However, his production style of dramatic, loud, and humorous reactions to horror games, as well as the editing effects he includes as part of his videos, created notoriety for the game as something that was both terrifying and something with a dark kind of humor toward it. Seeing Fischbach panic, blubber in fear, and overreact to the game attracted a player base interested in the scares and drama and overthe-top reactions; the games were presented humorously, and fans found humor in them. Many players became deeply invested in the humor of the premise. To be fair, it is ridiculous, a disorganized cluster of fears and laughs and screams without a solid narrative or organizational logic to explain or understand the events. On the flip side, seeing Fischbach struggle with the difficulty of the game as he praises its high points and points out issues with its gameplay also encourages a different kind of fanbase, fans interested in a challenge. To play FNaF and beat it at its highest difficulty level is a difficult task, one that Cawthon himself didn’t know was possible (Cawthon, 2014b). According to YouTuber BigBug, the first player to beat the game on its highest difficulty mode, it took twenty-three hours of trial and error to finish the eight-minute round without dying (BigBug, 2014). Borrowing this strategy, Fischbach took seven hours of straight gameplay to complete the same task of surviving the game level for the eight minutes of the round (Fischbach, 2014b). The sheer challenge of this task encourages the formation of a fanbase interested in hard games, ones that not everyone can beat. The difficulty, combined with the fact that the game is frightening, gatekeeps a large number of players, which automatically makes the game more intriguing for the kind of fans eager to prove themselves. Therefore, the contradictory ways in which this game was presented to fans through YouTubers—not only as something funny and dramatic and silly but also as something difficulty, scary, and requiring skill—creates a divisive fandom, one interested in competition as well as cooperation and community-building. The third and final prong of YouTube’s influence on the FNaF fandom and its outpouring of fan-game labor is the ways in which YouTube culture and YouTubers themselves obsessed over the mysteries of the games’ 83

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story, creating a deeply forensic fandom invested in filling in the blanks of the story themselves. The story is difficult to follow, hard to understand, indefinite, and contentious; curated, conjectured, and collected by fans on wikis and in fan games rather than cleanly created within the series and its spin-offs. Parts of the story in one game can contradict the next; website metadata from Cawthon’s website hints at an upcoming plot revelation, only to be countered by a comment in a YouTube video. The plot of the game’s overarching narrative is arguably impossible to map out in a linear timeline, not unlike other Internet storytelling forms and folklore, such as Slenderman stories and other “creepypasta” (Chess and Newsom, 2015). And while it is easy to dismiss these struggles as caused by a lack of organization on Cawthon’s part, authorial intention is less relevant to this discussion than is the community storytelling that occurs perhaps because of the lack of clarity. It is deeply doubtful that the convoluted story was intentional, however, as Cawthon was very close to ending his game-making career before the success of FNaF. Cawthon has even admitted that he “can’t explain” why some of the characters exist in the game at all (Morgan, 2014). However, trying to explain the story became an alluring puzzle to many fans. The confusing, incomplete story created from the supplied narrative frames, in combination with the difficulties in constructing it, has engaged and fascinated players, forming a deeply forensic fandom. Forensic fandom, as explained by Jason Mittell, refers to forms of fan engagement that “convert many viewers into amateur narratologists, noting patterns and violations of convention, chronicling chronologies, and highlighting both inconsistencies and continuities across episodes and even series” (Mittell, 2015, para. 47). But it’s left up to players to piece together what horrors have occurred at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. And there are hundreds of comment threads on Steam, on Reddit, on GameJolt about the stories and trying to understand. There are YouTube videos. People have tried to make timelines. There’s a very detailed game wiki. But these are all just fragments, and because the narrative pieces are dark, titillating, and contradictory, it means there are a lot of opportunities for the community to create their own interpretations of plotlines and share their theories through discussion boards, wikis, and fan games. This desire to “fill in the gaps”—much like fan fiction— isn’t unique (Jenkins, 1992). But in this case, one of the major influences on fan-game production within this fandom depends on these gaps. Fan games may attempt to smooth over gaps in the plot, explain and explore their own versions of what happened, or take the premise and expand it beyond the Fazbear universe.  84

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Table 4.1  A Small Taxonomy of FNaF Fan Games on GameJolt

Satire/Spoof (Humor) ●●

●● ●●

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●●

●● ●●

Five Nights With 39 Dayshift at Freddy’s Five Night’s at Fuckboys Golden Freddy Debauchery Simulator Five Nights in Anime

Genre Swaps (Challenge) ●●

●● ●●

●●

●●

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Pingas Doki Doki Literature Club Except is a Mediocre Fazbear World Game

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Five Nights at Love Creepy Puppet Five Fights at Freddy’s 1000 Rooms of Spooky Five Nights in Minecraft Bonnie Simulator Chef Wanted

Reimagined Settings Expanding (Challenge and/or the Universe Narrative) (Narrative) ●●

Five Nights at Candy’s

●● ●●

Those Nights at Rachel’s

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One Night at Flumpty’s

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Bubba’s Diner

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Popgoes

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Jolly

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Five Nights at Treasure Island

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Super FNaF! The Joy of Creation Five Nights Before Freddy’s Final Nights Fredbear’s Fright Fredbear and Friends >Dormitabis

So, these three tensions transferred from the game’s YouTube presence— humor, challenge, and narrative mystery—shaped the fandom’s creative desires, as can be seen from the variety of fan games produced. Hutcheon (2014) notes that an adaptation acts as “derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary” (p. 9), and a taxonomy of the most popular fan games can reveal the wide range of game adaptations from wild and zany to inappropriate and offensive to fascinating and emotional. Michael Moore (2010) reminds us that fan-made games balance fidelity with first-hand game play experience. These adaptations do not hope to become facsimiles, but rather, expressions of fans’ desires—realizations of what the original game could have been. In this sense, fan production is neither borrowing nor intersecting, but rather transforming. (p. 189) These kinds of transformations and interpretations, stemming from YouTube culture and the context from which fans engage with each other, are reflected not just in their created games but also in their created communities. Shared 85

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materials, systems of feedback and support, as well as active communication between members of the community are crucial to the proliferation of fan games. In his study of game mods, Olli Sotamaa (2010) finds that there are many kinds of common collaboration, including giving advice, playtesting, sharing tools, creating documentation, and the borrowing and/or lending of objects and data packages (p. 247–48); the same can be observed within fan-game communities through patch notes, updates on download pages, and even within the programs themselves. The fan-game community is also wide-ranging in the age and experience of its participants, ranging from a first-grade student making his first game to professionals making games for fun in their spare time (O’Connor, 2015). However, the range of ages and experiences with game-making within this community does not make it a diverse or inclusive community—it is still dominated by men. But, for better or for worse, in the FNaF fandom, there is a dedicated community of fans creating and sharing games they made and helping each other learn along the way. The lovebor required to maintain a community, much less to develop games for that community and engage in helping others with their own games, is immense. It is important also to note that a number of FNaF fan games make their way back onto YouTube and are played alongside the original games on channels like Fischbach’s, repeating the cycle of attention, praise and critique, and creation. Pearson (2007) writes that gifts of knowledge, skill or creativity lend themselves to peacock-like displays for the wider community to enjoy and acclaim. Such acclaim may reinforce participants’ willingness to make the effort to give gifts, providing added incentive to continue to offer capital into the system. This added incentive (the “ego boost,” an idolization and acclaim of peers) may also help to keep the communities’ social capital “account” balanced against members who consume freely of the offered gifts, but who, for various reasons, offer little in return themselves. Getting their own fan game played by a famous YouTuber is enough of a draw to many to keep these fan games in production. It also reenacts a sense of competition and collaboration between developers, as only the best titles have a chance of being noticed; many work together to create the most humorous, imaginative, technically proficient, scary, or narratively meaningful they can, thanking each other in the credits for the help along the way. The potential of millions seeing their game is beyond the typical scope 86

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of fan games. Salter states that for most fan-game communities, the audience is expected to be small and ownership of the game is always understood to belong to the original creators, rather than the fan-game designer (2009, para. 7.1). However, in the case of FNaF, the relationship between the original games’ creator, Scott Cawthon, and the fan-game designers, is more complicated. Traditionally, fan games are “in dialogue with the work of the original developer,” but not with the developers themselves (Salter, 2009, para. 4.1), likely due to the massive scale of labor that is required to form a AAA game. But in something like FNaF, which began as the creation of a single person, that relationship can be different. Cawthon has since collaborated with others on his games, but it is still his choice alone who works for him, what they create together, and how he licenses his IP. Cawthon is a creator who is very in touch with his fanbase, giving fairly regular updates on his game’s Steam forums, the official FNaF website, and his personal website. His Reddit, YouTube, and GameJolt accounts are verified to be his own, and he regularly comments on fan pages, videos, and games. Cawthon even plays his own fans’ games about his game, even mentioning a number of popular titles he was “way behind on” in an update on Steam (Cawthon, 2017). So, while Cawthon is not legally endorsing any fan games, he is engaging with them, which certainly acts as encouragement to many fans and creators. In top of that, Cawthon himself participates in the gift economy of his own fanbase, posting a number of his own games on GameJolt as well—to date, four of his own FNaF games (two spin-offs, one main storyline game, and a joke game) are free on GameJolt as gifts to his fans. It is debatable if these “gifts” are or are not equatable with their fannish brethren. There is a power dynamic at work here, because even as Cawthon participates in fannish economies, he is still the one who financially profit from them. He fundamentally is unlike anyone else in that fan economy and I would argue his “gifts” to the community operate on a different level than the fannish gift economy, more along the lines of official anciliatory content offerings than as gifts, even as Cawthon and many fans frame his participation as a gift. The cliché “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” might come to mind, but it is unfairly harsh as it casts Cawthon as a knowing predator to his fan’s labor. The relationship and the power dynamic between Cawthon and his fans is not a predatory one, and it does not even appear to be exploitative; fans consent to and seek to perform lovebor in this community, and Cawthon’s admiration and attention is one of the many incentives that keeps this community running. Cawthon seems to take many steps to engage 87

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with, thank, and avoid exploiting the lovebor of his fans. However, it is important to keep in mind the differences between financially compensated labor, which all of Cawthon’s work in this community ultimately becomes, and the financially uncompensated lovebor that fans give to the community. Based on his consistent and heartfelt updates and communication with his fans, it is clear that Cawthon’s community-building efforts are done with care in mind. But, he is also privileged in that he has the financial means and time to put into a fan community, and even more hegemonically incentivized to do so. The distinction between fans and producers is always tedious in a Web 2.0 environment (Jenkins, 2016), but in the case of FNaF, the borders are especially vague and perhaps less important to the members of the community. However, that makes it especially important to consider the potential exploitation of fan labor within this indie development sphere. The relationship that Cawthon has with fans is next to impossible for a AAA developer to create, and as the FNaF brand is making its first foray into a AAA title, scholars have a unique opportunity to explore the intersections of labor, lovebor, game development protocols, and fans.

Come Share in the Joy of Creation The line between the work that Cawthon and his team performs and that of his fans continues to blur over time. While the sheer quantity of fan games produced is noteworthy, the quality of them also cannot be ignored. A number of fan-made games rival Cawthon’s first four games—the ones produced by him alone (the fifth game onward have been created by a team directed by Cawthon which he also worked on). The skill and time required to produce some of these fan games is staggering. For example, the very first FNaF fan game, Five Nights at Treasure Island, is a stand-alone game with a comparable amount of content to the first FNaF game. Based on urban legends about the Treasure Island ride in Disney World, this game has five nights of playable game, its own voice acting, sound mixing, and animations, and its own unique game mechanics and character adaptations. Of course, not all FNaF fan games feature wholly fan-created content, as some may borrow from the original games. But it’s much more common for the fan developers to borrow from each other than from Cawthon. The amount of quality control and polish, the caliber of animations and the smoothness of mechanics, and the additional narrative directions outpace the FNaF canon in many ways. Additionally, many of the fan games have proven so popular and successful 88

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that they have spawned their own sequels. Indeed, Those Nights at Rachel’s, Jolly, Five Nights at Fuckboys, Dayshift at Freddy’s, Five Nights at Candy’s, The Joy of Creation, and One Night at Flumpty’s are all series containing at least two titles, but most have three or more games of comparable product. In some cases, the fan games overtake Cawthon’s in terms of professional polish or visual and/or mechanical condition. For example, The Joy of Creation series features free-roaming modes, where the player controls where their avatar in the game is located—something missing from the FNaF series until the fifth game and still only functional in limited areas. The character models in The Joy of Creation are not only stunningly detailed adaptations of Cawthon’s animatronics built from scratch but also are animated more fully to suit the free-roaming needs of the game. The Those Nights at Rachel’s games also feature detailed animatronic models and settings made from scratch, and although there are resemblances to some of Cawthon’s animatronics—for example, the Rachel character is a rabbit-like Cawthon’s Bonnie character, and the Doug character from Those Nights at Rachel’s is a dog animatronic with a similar frame to Cawthon’s Foxy character—the animations and detail quality surpass their inspirations. Meanwhile, the Jolly series has its own completely unique animatronics creatures which do not borrow visual inspiration from FNaF whatsoever, along with complex and difficult gameplay that operates without bugs or glitches. Fans have become so adept at professional-grade animation and art creation that it actually has caused a problem for Cawthon. For the most recent FNaF game, a VR game with a metanarrative-based story, the official trailer for the game had to be removed after release and remade, as it was found to contain fan-made character models. In the FNaF subReddit page, Cawthon apologized to fans, saying: Hey everyone. I was really looking forward to teasing something new for you today. I’ve been working on so many things over the last six months, but I can always count on you guys to call foul when you see a foul, and I appreciate that. I can’t tell you all how many times I’ve put a halt to a toy or a poster because Freddit informed me that it was using a fan-model. So I hope you can all imagine my devastation to learn that my first teaser in more than half a year was made using questionable choices at best, and traced fan-models at worst. I’ve taken the image down and I’m going to be thinking about where to go from here. The only thing I care about is doing right by this community. (Cawthon, 2019a) 89

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His statement here indicates two things. First, this response indicates his willingness to listen to fans, to not abuse their labor, and to be part of the community that has made his career what it is. He comes across as earnest, apologetic, and most importantly, he doesn’t try to cover up what happened. He apologizes, fixes it, and thanks his fans for their support. However, the second thing this response reveals is perhaps less flattering. While this was the first image promo for the Help Wanted VR game, it is not the first time that Cawthon has noticed or been informed that an official product was using art assets created by fans. Rather than purchasing or licensing that art from a fan, Cawthon “put[s] a halt” to production and churns out his own art instead. This has clearly been an issue for Cawthon throughout the creation of his transmedia monsters. Whether it is more exploitative to purchase fan assets, or to ignore them entirely is a question for debate. However, Cawthon clearly wants to avoid using fan art on accident, but this raises the question of how many times fan art was used without anyone noticing, as it seems to be an issue Cawthon was familiar with. In a follow-up post on the same subReddit, he assures fans that this is not the case, writing: As you all remember, the artwork that I’d teased for the game (which was actually a portion of the cover artwork), included characters that had used fan art and fan models as references. When I learned about that, I was obviously pretty upset and took down the teaser. I’ve been speaking with the team over at Steel Wool (the VR company) for the last few days, working through this, and figuring out from them what happened. Based on what I’ve heard, I do believe that it was an isolated incident and that it wasn’t done with bad intentions. The person working on the artwork used images that he thought were mine. If anything, everyone who had one of their models referenced should pat themselves on the back because your models looked like they were canon! I think it’s a testament to the fan community that the fan models rival mine, many of them look identical, and some of them look BETTER! (Cawthon, 2019b) The statement continues, balancing Cawthon’s own earnest tone with apologies and compliments to the community, assurances that this was a one-time error, that Steel Wool was extremely sorry for the mistake, and teasers about the finished title; apology, advertisement, and assurance all in one and something very needed to ensure the success of Help Wanted. 90

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The VR game is a big swing for Cawthon, as it’s the first AAA-like title for the series and it’s also a development skill set outside his wheelhouse. It’s the first title he has not been able to have a hand in for coding himself, so the possibility of fans demonizing this other force using Cawthon’s IP was a potential consequence. Cawthon continues his post, noting some exciting features of the VR game and peppering in compliments and admiration. He concludes his post by saying: The point of all of this is just to ensure you guys that the team over at Steel Wool has been working with one goal in mind: to make something that the community will recognize, enjoy, and be scared by. This was still a bad mistake, and they offered to post an apology. I told them I was handling it; but just be aware that they offered. They want to do right by all of you. (Cawthon, 2019b) Based on the responses and comments to this post, fans believe Cawthon and have taken his words to heart, expressing excitement and accepting Steel Wool’s apology via Cawthon. One fan comments: Holy shit, what an update. Thanks for keeping us updated, i don’t think anyone believes what happened was anything other than a simple mistake, and we really appreciate the fact that company were willing to issue an apology too. I’m glad nobody has to lose their jobs over what was clearly just an innocent mistake that has since been rectified. Shit happens, but y’all couldn’t have handled it in a classier way, imo I don’t have a VR headset right now, but this might just make me go out and buy one, because maaan, this actually has me a lil hyped. Thanks for the thorough update, Scott! (DirectDogman, 2019) Such sentiments were echoed across the comments on the page, but it is also relevant that this particular user, whose comment was one of the most upvoted on the page, is also the fan-game developer of the Dayshift at Freddy’s series, showing that this fan community performs labor in multiple immaterial forms across multiple platforms and through different forms of lovebor. It also is a reminder of the social capital created in this community through fan labor—DirectDogman, nicknamed Doggo by his own fans and other community members, is a known and respected individual because of 91

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their success in fan game-making. The levels of power and control at work is a reflection of fannish capital as it collides with capitalist development.

Fantasy and Fun Come to Life Fan games and the lovebor that produces them fall into the intersections of feminist concerns, as care-focused work is often the most exploited. Fan labor, as a whole, falls under the categories of identity, labor, and capitalist value. While game development as a whole—AAA and indie—is widely controlled by cis men, the power dynamics of fan-game development echo with the kind of care-focused work usually undertaken by women. In fact, in most other spheres, the vast majority of fannish work is performed by women. Modding, a form of fan labor performed by game enthusiasts, has been one of the few forms of fan labor to receive attention as a potential site of labor exploitation—unsurprising, since digital content creation and game development in particular are male-dominated industries, and the work is valued as skilled labor under capitalist hegemony. While modding and mod culture have seen increased attention to the labor of fans, fan games have not been studied as thoroughly as sites of labor exploitation. While historically, fan games have been at the mercy of AAA publishers, indie developers have a different, more complex relationship with fans, as well as their fan’s lovebor. The example of Scott Cawthon’s horror series FNaF is a revealing case study about the complexities of a gift economy of fan labor as it intersects and collides with ancillary content models and the power dynamics present in indie development spheres in particular. Capitalist hegemony is certainly complicated in the case of FNaF fan games, but it is also reinforced. Cawthon’s interest and engagement with his fans seems genuine, motivated by interest and care rather than purely profit. He spends a great amount of time and effort within FNaF fan communities. However, it cannot be ignored that Cawthon profits immensely from participating in this gift economy alongside his fans. It’s an essential business decision for developers and publishers, indie and AAA and everywhere in between, to cultivate a fan following that produces value for them, either literally, as we see in game mods, or more abstractly, as we see in online fan communities for a number of media franchises. Yet, at the end of the day, it is still Cawthon who benefits from this labor—while he may deeply enjoy and care about the kind of engagement he has with fans, it is work for his own company and his own name. It might be labor born of care, but for Cawthon, it is work 92

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that pays off in the long run—an investment in the longevity of his franchise and game-making career as it shifts from indie development into something new. Regardless of his motivations, under a capitalist system, Cawthon’s investments and care for his fans will always result in the exploitation of their labor, despite his attempts to have a more egalitarian, fair, and open relationship with them. Ultimately, just as in AAA development, fan games in the indie sphere is a lovebor performed without compensation for the skill and time involved. In the case of FNaF, it is also a support system that extends the lifespan of Cawthon’s horror empire. The smaller scale of indie development complicates this deeply, to the point where, as a fan writing this chapter, it feels uncomfortable to conclude that such a genuine effort of care by a developer is exploitative. Short of sharing profits with his fans, Cawthon does everything he can to respect, encourage, and play alongside his fans. But in the end, he will always win this game we play. Afterall, it’s his world that we’re playing in, and “Fazbear Entertainment is not responsible for damage to property or person” (FNaF).

Works Cited BigBug. (2014, August 20). “Five Nights at Freddy’s world first 4/20” [Video file]. Retrieved from www.y​outub​e.com​/watc​h?v=k​5E4ZJ​QoNrA​&lc=U​gi7We​oKrGZ​ KlXgC​oAEC. Busse, K. (2015). “Fan labor and feminism: Capitalizing on the fannish labor of love.” Cinema Journal, 54(3), 110–15. Carlson, R. (2009). “Games as transformative works.” Transformative Works and Cultures, 2. Retrieved from https​://jo​urnal​.tran​sform​ative​works​.org/​index​.php/​ twc/a​rticl​e/vie​w/116​/95. Cawthon, S. (2014a). Five Nights at Freddy’s [PC]. Cawthon, S. (2014b). Re: Five Nights at Freddy’s world first 4/20 [Video file]. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=k5E​4ZJQo​NrA&l​c=Ugi​ 7WeoK​rGZKl​XgCoA​E C. Cawthon, S. (2017, July 3). “Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister location :: An update on the project—Steam community.” Retrieved from http:​//ste​amcom​munit​y.com​/ game​s/506​610/a​nnoun​cemen​ts/de​tail/​13436​11811​9 51288957. Cawthon, S. (2019a). “[animdude] R/fivenightsatfreddys—Update on the VR situation.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.redd​it.co​m/r/f​i veni​ghtsa​tfred​dys/c​ ommen​ts/b0​p7ad/​updat​e_on_​the_v​r_sit​uatio​n. Cawthon, S. (2019b). “[animdude] R/fivenightsatfreddys—Sorry guys.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.redd​it.co​m/r/f​i veni​ghtsa​tfred​dys/c​ommen​ts/b0​0y83/​sorry​_ guys​/.

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Indie Games in the Digital Age Chess, S., & Newsom, E. (2015). Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology. London, England: Palgrave Pivot. Chong-Umeda, S. (2016, September 9). “16 top female cosplayers you need to follow.” Retrieved from https​://ww​w.ani​meimp​ulse.​com/b​log/2​017/1​0/24/​17-to​ p-fem​ale- cospl​ays-y​ou-ne​ed-to​-foll​ow-on​-inst​agram​-righ​t-now.​ Cork, J. (2015, May 13). “YouTube marks let’s play day with all-time site top 10 list.” Retrieved from https​://ww​w.gam​einfo​rmer.​com/b​/news​/arch​ive/2​015/0​5/13/​ youtu​be-ma​rks-l​ets- play-​day-w​ith-a​ll-ti​me-si​te-to​p-10-​list.​aspx. de Certeau, M. D. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life (S. F. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. de Kosnik, A. (2012, December 1). “Interrogating ‘free’ fan labor.” Retrieved from https​://sp​reada​bleme​dia.o​rg/es​says/​kosni​k/. DirectDogman. (2019). Re: Update on the VR situation [Website Comment]. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.red​dit.c​om/r/​fiven​ights​atfre​ddys/​comme​nts/b​ 0p7ad​/upda​te_on​_the_​v r_sit​uatio​n/eig​4w0d?​utm_s​ource​=shar​e&utm​_medi​ um=we​b2x. Ehrentraut, J. (2016, March 30). “The ethics of commodification: Game modding and the new digital economy.” First Person Scholar. Retrieved from http:​//www​. firs​tpers​onsch​olar.​com/t​he-et​hics-​of-co​mmodi​ficat​ion. Fischbach, M. [Markiplier]. (2014a). “Five Nights at Freddy’s: Secret 6th and 7th night—part 4” [Video file]. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/ watch?v=l1gQ8VvRszs. Fischbach, M. [Markiplier]. (2014b). “Five Nights at Freddy’s: 20/20/20/20 COMPLETE” [Video file]. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/ watch?v=s5GfhGFVCFE. Fiske, J. (2011a). Television Culture. London, England: Routledge. Fiske, J. (2011b). Understanding Popular Culture. London, England: Routledge. “Five Nights at Freddy’s.” (2014, August 8). Retrieved from http:​//www​.meta​criti​ c.com​/game​/pc/f​i ve-n​ights​-at-f​reddy​s. Gallagher, R., Jong, C., & Sinervo, K. (2017). “Who wrote the Elder Scrolls?: Modders, developers, and the mythology of Bethesda Softworks.” Loading . . ., 10(16), 32–52. Retrieved from http:​//jou​rnals​.sfu.​ca/lo​ading​/inde​x.php​/load​ing/ a​rticl​e/vie​w/169.​ Geraghty, L. G. (2017). “Class, capital and collecting in media fandom.” In M. Click and S. Scott (Eds.), Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (pp. 212–19). New York, NY: Routledge. Gray, J., Sandvoss, C., & Harrington, C. L. (2007). Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. New York, NY: New York University Press. Harris, C., & Alexander, A. (2010). Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Hellekson, K., & Busse, K. (2006). Fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Hills, M. (2005). Fan Cultures. London, England: Routledge. Hochschild, A. R. (2007). The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Five Nights at Fan Games Hutcheon, L. (2014). Theory of Adaptation. London, England: Taylor and Francis. Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers Exploring Participatory Culture. New York, NY: New York University Press. Jenkins, H. (2016). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, NY: New York University Press. Kücklich, J. (2005). “Precarious playbour: Modders and the digital games industry.” FibreCulture, 5(1). Retrieved from www.j​ourna​l.fib​recul​ture.​org/i​ssue5​/kuck​ lich_​print​.html.​ Kuehn, K., & Corrigan, T. (2013). “Hope labor: The role of employment prospects in online social production.” The Political Economy of Communication, 1(1). Retrieved from http:​//www​.pole​com.o​rg/in​dex.p​hp/po​lecom​/arti​cle/v​iew/9​/116. Larsen, K., & Zubernis, L. S. (2012). Fan Culture: Theory/Practice. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars. Larsen, K., & Zubernis, L. S. (2013). Fangasm: Supernatural Fangirls. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press. Lewis, L. A. (2003). The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London, England: Routledge. Meer, A. (2015, April 24). “Steam charging for mods: For and against.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.rock​paper​shotg​un.co​m/201​5/04/​24/pa​id-mo​ds-st​eam/. Mittell, J. (2015). “Complexity in context.” In Complex TV The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York, NY: New York Press. Moore, M. R. (2010). “Adaptation and new media.” Adaptation, 3(2), 179–92. Morgan, J. (2014, October 25). “Scott Cawthon: Christian Developer Spotlight.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.geek​sunde​rgrac​e.com​/gami​ng/de​velop​er-sp​otlig​ ht-sc​ott- cawthon/. Noppe, N. (2011). “Why we should talk about commodifying fan work.” Transformative Works and Cultures, 8. Retrieved from https​://jo​urnal​.tran​sform​ ative​works​.org/​index​.php/​twc/a​rticl​e/vie​w/369​/240. O’Connor, A. (2015, January 26). “A list of 1139 Five Nights at Freddy’s  fan games.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.rock​paper​shotg​un.co​m/201​5/01/​26/fi​ve-ni​ghts-​atfreddys-fan-games/. “Paid mods are dead: PC Gamer reacts.” (2015, April 28). Retrieved from http:​//www​.pcga​mer.c​om/pa​id-mo​ds-ar​e-dea​d-pc-​gamer​-reac​ts. Pearson, E. (2007). “Digital gifts: Participation and gift exchange in Livejournal communities.” First Monday, 12(5). Peirson-Smith, A. (2013). “Fashioning the fantastical self: An examination of the cosplay dress-up phenomenon in Southeast Asia.” Fashion Theory, 17(1), 77–111. Postigo, H. (2007). Of mods and modders. Games and Culture, 2(4), 300–13. Radway, J. A. (1991). Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Salter, A. M. (2009). “‘Once more a kingly quest’: Fan games and the classic adventure genre.” Transformative Works and Cultures, 2. Retrieved from https​://jo​urnal​.tran​sform​ative​works​.org/​index​.php/​twc/a​rticl​e/vie​w/33/​71.

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Indie Games in the Digital Age Sandvoss, C. (2005). Fans: The mirror of consumption. Oxford, England: Polity. Scott, S. (2009). “Repackaging fan culture: The regifting economy of ancillary content models.” Transformative Works and Cultures, 3. Scott, S. (2015). “‘Cosplay Is serious business’: Gendering material fan labor on Heroes of Cosplay.” Cinema Journal, 54(3), 146–54. Sotamaa, O. (2010). “When the game Is not Enough: Motivations and practices among computer game modding culture.” Games and Culture, 5(3), 239–55. Stanfill, M. (2013). “Fandom, public, commons.” Transformative Works and Cultures, 14. Retrieved from https​://jo​urnal​.tran​sform​ative​works​.org/​index​.php/​ twc/a​rticl​e/vie​w/530​/407. Stanfill, M. (2019). Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press. Stanfill, M., & Condis, M. (2014). “Fandom and/as labor.” Transformative Works and Cultures, 15. Stone, Z. (2015, November 26). “Meet the girls making a living from cosplay.” Retrieved from https​://th​ehust​le.co​/meet​-the-​girls​-maki​ng-a-​livin​g-fro​m-cos​ play. Terranova, T. (2000). “Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy.” Social Text,18(2), 63rd ser. Turk, T. (2013). “Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandoms gift economy.” Transformative Works and Cultures, 15. Retrieved from https​://jo​ urnal​.tran​sform​ative​works​.org/​index​.php/​twc/a​rticl​e/vie​w/518​/428.

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PART II INDIE GAME TOOLS

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CHAPTER 5 FROM TOOL TO COMMUNITY TO STYLE: THE INFLUENCE OF SOFTWARE TOOLS ON GAME DEVELOPMENT COMMUNITIES AND AESTHETICS

Emilie Reed

The phenomenon of indie games, as enabled by online communities and distribution through online storefronts in the late 2000s onward, is often conceptualized as a marriage of the popular and entrepreneurial aspects of the mainstream video game industry, with more individually crafted or artistic characteristics originating from indie’s smaller production scale. However, scholars like Paolo Ruffino (2012) have argued that “independent gaming, while basing its emergence on a discursive practice that often evokes ideals of freedom and emotional attachment to the final product, very often tends to organize itself on practices strikingly similar to those of the ‘dependent’ companies” (p. 114). Ruffino also notes that “precedent cases of networks of ‘home brew’ developers and ‘bedroom’ coders” undermine the revolutionary narrative of indie emerging in the late 2000s (p. 107). Such criticisms of the supposed novelty or uniqueness of indie games imply that video games made in the context of “indie gaming” also only represent one segment of the broad variety of nonmainstream video game production that has existed and is still ongoing. Through the 1980s, arcade and console games were primarily brought from idea to completion by a single programmer or small team, while in home computing, the lines between professional and amateur software distribution were not yet clearly drawn (Montfort and Bogost, 2009; Kirkpatrick, 2017). As more technologically advanced consoles and computers were released during the 1990s, the increased complexity of developing video games, as well as the increased corporatization of video game production that followed its recognition as a profitable form of entertainment led to the mainstream video game production using a larger teams and proprietary development tools (Kirkpatrick, 2017, p. 25). The idea of indie games emerged in the

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mid- to late 2000s as an apparent disruption of these financial and practical gates to video game development, building on the increased availability and speed of the Internet, which allowed individuals to not only distribute their games online but also download and learn about a variety of tools for making games (Anthropy, 2012, p. 36). The role of online storefronts in both enabling and, later, potentially challenging this new form of indie success story is frequently discussed both in popular games press and in game studies (see Chalk, 2017; Robertson, 2015; and Kunzelman, 2017 for examples of how Steam policies can negatively affect smaller developers). However, less has been written about the variety of software toolkits, such as GameMaker, RPG Maker, Unity, and Klik n Play, that enable a broad variety of independent development practices and independently developed video games that are not intended for commercial distribution. In 2012, Game Designer Anna Anthropy compared these game-making tools to the opportunities afforded by the publication and circulation of zines, which made creation and distribution of small publications not only more accessible but also more expressive, personal, and casual (p. 9). Brendan Keogh (2019) has more recently elaborated on this concept, stating: “Videogames have obtained their printing press through the rise and acceptance of third-party engines. Videogames, as a creative industry, are being reconfigured by the increased credibility of informal development practices as a feasible avenue towards reaching an audience” (p. 27). Compared to earlier points in the history of game development, where video game developers primarily had to work directly with coding languages, proprietary technologies, and physical distribution networks, the increased accessibility of the Internet and freely downloadable software tools provide a method of game creation that does not require advanced technical knowledge. In this chapter, I aim to temporarily set aside discussions of profitability or big-name successes in indie games as a popular phenomenon, instead focusing on how tools have enabled communities of mostly noncommercial independent game-making, communities which still often play an understated role in the development history of well-known titles. Using three examples, RPG Maker Forums, Glorious Trainwrecks, and the emerging Flatgames community, I explore not only how these tool-centered communities empower game-makers who otherwise have minimal industry or programming experience but also how the tools themselves are vital to the structure of communities and styles of games that emerge. As these examples will demonstrate, an understanding of software tools and their communities 100

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is vital for a broader understanding of independent development practices on the Internet, and can also offer deeper context for frequently discussed, popular indies.

Accessible Tools, Aesthetic Style, Collaborative Communities Investigating the history of artistic expression in video games, Lana Polansky (2016) argues: If we take the official history of games at its word, we have what appears to be only a recent golden age of artistic experimentation and emotional maturity in games. The overwhelming cultural narrative posits that certain independent games .  .  . have succeeded as both critical and commercial successes and therefore represent a milestone in the actual artistic development of the medium. However, she notes that this view does not incorporate independent practices prior to these successes, or ongoing independent practices that are not commercially oriented. The consequence of the narrative Polansky criticizes, which frames the independent developer as a male-coded individual working from a base of technical and design skill, often making original works which reference the history of video games or deliver an emotionally meaningful “point,” has determined both the development of indie games as a distinct subcategory of video game production and the aesthetics, personalities and practices that are considered to be included in this category (Parker, 2012, p. 42). Anna Anthropy (2012) draws a firm line between the video games she discusses as representing new creative opportunities and the critical and commercial successes that serve as the most prominent examples of indie games, noting that while some independent developers, like Johnathan Blow and Jason Rohrer, have received mainstream recognition, “these rich white dudes were professional programmers before they came to videogames, and so they don’t represent the new dynamic that I’m excited about: hobbyists and non-programmers making their first games” (p. 8). These “hobbyists and non-programmers” make up the majority of the users of accessible game-making tools. Anthropy conceptualizes the new indie environment as a parallel to zines, small, personal, or fan publications that are circulated cheaply. She states: “This is what game creation is becoming, small, personal and made 101

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by people’s own hands. . . . It’s the creation of an author and her accomplice, the player; it is handmade by the former and personally distributed to the latter. The videogame is a zine” (Anthropy, 2012, p. 141). The tools and communities that spread primarily online have produced visual and gameplay styles that define categories beyond the binary of AAA games or indie games in the eyes of players and creators, and are a representative and influential frontier of creativity in the digital and networked age. “Accessible tools” for making video games do not have a single, strict definition and can take many forms. They can be accessible financially, being cheap or free. They can also be accessible in terms of the hardware needed to run them, only requiring basic personal computers or mobile devices. By providing clear visual information and avoiding jargon in options and labels, they can be accessible in terms of how the interface is presented and used. They can also be accessible by enabling the user to easily distribute their games. Whether a program offers preexisting resources for the user to begin building their own game with is also an element of its accessibility. In the examples Anthropy cites as suggested starting points for someone new to making games, she discusses free software, tools with visual, drag-and-drop interfaces, and simplified scripting languages. Most are a combination of several accessible features, such as Twine, a freely downloadable program and web app which allows a user to build text-based games with “passages” that can be moved around and connected through simple markup language. As opposed to game industry SDKs or “engines,” accessible game tools often feature built-in demos and highly visual interfaces with preset actions and behaviors, allowing those without experience of other forms of game development to quickly begin experimenting. Some of these tools were designed to introduce children to programming concepts and have been embraced by a broader group of creators, and others are oriented at hobbyists creating a certain genre of game. Many of these tools come with asset packs for developers to use and alter. The game-making communities discussed in this chapter use different tools and processes that complicate the focus on coding, originality, and relationship to mainstream game history that define the framing of indie games Anthropy and others have critiqued. RPG Maker forums, Glorious Trainwrecks Pirate Karts, and Flat Jams are all sites where communities come together around certain tools, and the structure of the community and the nature of the tool influence stylistic output. While not the only examples, these three communities demonstrate important ways accessible game 102

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tools, combined with the digital copying and distributing capabilities of the Internet, and the communities which bring both technologies together are enabling stylistically innovative independent game production beyond and outside of commercial indie games. Aesthetic “style” can mean multiple things within the context of discussing video games. Especially within video games, style is sometimes framed as that which is frivolous or extraneous to the function of an object. Simon Niedenthal (2009) points to perspectives in both teaching the design of video games and the analysis of video games where visual aesthetics are considered “a thin veneer of ‘eye candy’ that may attract attention and provide fleeting [player] motivation, but otherwise serves as a less important part of the experience of playing (or designing) a game” (p. 1). However, in the case of Jesper Juul’s (2014) research on emerging styles of indie video games featured at the Independent Games Festival, he notes that visual style, beyond making a game attractive to the player, plays an important signifying and boundary-creating role for creative producers, influencing individual development practices and communities of practice. Niedenthal (2009) similarly attempts to expand the concept of aesthetics within video games beyond just a synonym for graphical quality, arguing that the term can include all sensory elements of the video game (such as visual, aural, haptic, and embodied aesthetics), points of similarity or influence from other art forms (incorporating it into the aesthetic tradition of the History of Art), and the experience of the game as pleasurable (including what emotional or social experiences it enables) (p. 2). The aesthetic styles I discuss in relation to specific video game tools encompass all of these elements to varying degrees, as they enable certain visual qualities and mechanics and rhythms of play, engage with historical influences, and are used and experienced socially. Within art history, visual style also serves as a site where specific technological developments, processes, and community networks become visible. For example, John Berger deftly connects the luscious realism that the spread of oil-based paints across Europe enabled to the simultaneous emergence of a merchant class with money to spend, who desired images that skillfully depicted the rich fabrics, furs, food, and other objects which they owned and traded in (Berger, 1972, p. 99). “Style” in a work of art partially comes from the artist, but also is determined by the tools used by the artist, and the community the artist works in or for. These elements are intertwined, and if, as Niedenthal notes, the aesthetics of video games often take a marginal place in game studies discussions, examining how 103

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communities and processes enabled by tools influence a video game’s style is especially important to investigate. The sections in this chapter will describe the community and technical structures which define three different accessible game-making tools, and how they have shaped the work of amateur developers. The first is RPG Maker, a software series that spread on pre-Web 2.0 forums, by sharing a unique cracked translation patch of a piece of software that had previously only been released in Japan. In the RPG Maker community, fandom of the JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game) genre, specifically titles like the Final Fantasy series, means that fan game and original work, or homage and intensely personal expression mingle and blur together. JRPGs typically focus on long fantasy narratives, exploring large overworlds and dungeons, and managing a party of characters in turn-based battles, all elements that are core features that are easy to set up using the RPG Maker software. While the interface of RPG Maker 2000 and the provided base assets give users a canvas to begin building their game immediately, the community hosts many elaborate passion projects that may be in development for years or never released. The Glorious Trainwrecks site, alternately, created a space for extremely short, two-hour long game-making events. This speedy, impulsive approach to game design was possible through making and sharing games made with the 1994 program Klik n Play, a piece of educational software later released as freeware, designed to allow children to create games. The site, hosted by Jeremy Penner, is a place to hold these events and compiles a collection of the games made by the site’s community. Its focus on quick turnaround, community feedback, and embrace of the idiosyncrasies and library of sprites and sound effects included in Klik n Play influences the look and type of games created within Glorious Trainwrecks. While some popular, commercially released games have emerged from ideas formed in their two-hour game-making sessions, the site is primarily focused on reframing video games as a spontaneous and communicative medium. The final game-making tool and community I discuss is also one of the most recent. “Flatgames” typically consist of 2-D assets that are drawn by hand within a limited time, then put together in an accessible, free game engine like Unity or Construct 2, with only the addition of text and music. As Llaura McGee, a game designer for Dreamfeel Studio and the originator of the term elaborates on the jam page, “Flatgames are focused on presenting a game as the most raw and immediate combination of movement, art and sound” (FLATGAME Annual 2016). The suggested “rules” of Flatgames 104

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serve as an interesting challenge to those with game-making experience, and a set of useful limitations to newbies to ensure their game can be satisfactorily completed. The community participating in Flatgame jams has made a custom file for Unity that has an included tutorial to begin making Flatgames, as well as a mobile app, which can import images from the phone’s camera and add them to a Flatgame on the go. The community processes around Flatgames demonstrate how communities can not only share and reappropriate tools but also have a hand in making them.

RPG Maker—“something to tinker with while waiting for limewire downloads to finish” In a historical study of the emergence of video games as a separate category of personal computer software, and the parallel emergence of the “gamer” as an identity, Graeme Kirkpatrick discusses “toolkit” software as playing an important role in codifying early game genres. Prior to this, games on personal computers were written manually, and often shared over code listings in magazines, where they would be typed up in full then altered or tweaked by other subscribers to the magazines. Kirkpatrick notes that around 1985, programs like Adventure Game Toolkit emerged, allowing less savvy users to work with a basic template for making an adventure game, rather than coding it from the bottom up (Kirkpatrick, 2017, p. 19). In the 1980s, this development was indicative of the trends that would shape computing going forward, a focus on user friendliness and visual interfaces that was intended to move computer usage away from the command line or working directly with code. However, the home computing community experienced some internal tension from these developments. The toolkit programs not only removed the need to build how one’s video game worked from scratch but also codified how various genres of game, such as a space shooter game, should work. While home computers originally advertised an endless frontier of possibilities as their selling point, toolkits attempted to corral game creators into preferred practices (Kirkpatrick 2017, p. 20). Creators saved the time and frustration of working directly with code to build an engine for their game from scratch, but toolkit programs were a trade-off in that they did not encourage the wide variations in subject matter, form, and quality the software listings in computer magazines previously could contain (Kirkpatrick, 2017, p. 22). These toolkits also emerged alongside the 105

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appearance of the “gamer” subjectivity, a type of computer user who valued the fun and excitement of the “gameplay,” rather than being interested in how well a piece of software was programmed, and was not afraid to let the editors of computer magazines know it (p. 29). These gamers, and the video games they championed played a major role in the process of bringing computers into the mainstream as fun, user friendly, and entertaining, but the development of these demands in the gaming industry led to the wide adoption of proprietary game engines and SDKs. The tools for making what was considered a commercial quality video game were now inaccessible to gamers and potential amateur game-makers, especially when companies wanted tight control over what games appeared on their consoles. Combined with technological developments and companies which wanted to offer the best in detailed graphics, complex gameplay, and more and more content, this also created an environment where game development, rather than done by a solo developer or small team, required a more complex division of labor, many people of many different skills (p. 25). This remained the primary way mainstream games were created through the 1990s, making single-authored projects unusual to consumers when they were once the norm. In a way, “indie” games could only emerge as a new phenomenon once video game companies attempting to control the ability to peek at, to copy, and to modify code became standard. The RPG Maker series, as software, is similar to the initial toolkits that Kirkpatrick describes. The first game in the series was released in 1992 for the PC-9800 series of Japanese personal computers, and through the 1990s more versions followed, but the general premise of the tool remained the same (Enterbrain, 2004). Using the provided assets or importing their own, users could create a game in the style of traditional JRPGs like Final Fantasy, where the main character primarily moves around a tile-based topdown map, collects items, solves quests, and strengthens the party through random turn-based battles. Within the framework of the JRPG, creators can do whatever they like, but the RPG Maker software sets the terms of what a JRPG itself does. The series was initially limited by only being available in Japanese, despite avid players and fans of JRPGs in the North American and European markets during the 1990s, but it went international in the early 2000s, when a hacker/programmer under the alias Don Miguel released a version of the game translated into English (Babineau, 2010). The translation of RPG Maker 2000, which ran on Windows computers, had many idiosyncrasies 106

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from the amateur translation process that could make it difficult to use. However, it also included a tutorial in the form of an example game, which featured the hacker’s persona as a main character alongside a cat, Marcus, and other animal companions. Don’s Adventure presents the typical visual language of games made in the RPG Maker software. The player controls Don, who wanders around an overworld map made with the inbuilt assets. Battling monsters, solving basic puzzles and commandeering vehicles all demonstrate basic scripting functions offered by RPG Maker software, which players could replicate in their own projects. The translated RPG Maker 2000 software, bundled with this game, was distributed via Miguel’s personal site. This act of modification and distribution was seen as unauthorized by RPG Maker’s publisher, who requested he take it down. While he did remove the software downloads from his site to avoid legal action, those who had already downloaded the translated versions of RPG Maker began distributing their copies of the files to other enthusiast game-makers. Like many previously Japan-only video games and media properties that were fan translated and distributed through unofficial channels, it was only through this act of unauthorized translation and piracy that the RPG Maker series gained such a wide pool of users and fans, becoming influential as an amateur game development tool and leading to the eventual release of official English translations of the game. Popular games made with the software include traditional JRPGstyle games, but also works frequently cited in the Game Art movement like Super Columbine Massacre RPG (2005), influential freeware horror games like Ao Oni (2008) and Yume Nikki (2004), and commercial video games associated with the indie games movement like To The Moon (2011) and LISA: The Painful (2014). The aesthetic of these games is highly informed by the software. Whether the user is working from the base RPG Maker assets, their own artwork, or graphics ripped from different video games, the software unifies and transforms this visual information to fit the specific paradigms of overworld map, chipset, and battle screen. This is, in one sense, very limiting, since anything that is not a common function within JRPGs would require advanced scripting or simply be impossible to implement. Yet it also creates a feeling of familiarity with the player, as the menus, controls, and visuals remain identifiable as typical of role-playing games. The frequent use of graphics or music either taken directly from other sources or strongly based on them is also indicative of how RPG Maker became available to use through piracy and a community of enthusiastic JRPG fans. 107

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The pirate ethos of Don Miguel’s simultaneously charitable and illicit distribution lives on in how many users, beyond those responsible for these well-known and generally acclaimed titles, use both official and unofficial versions of RPG Maker. These users are not simply corralled into normative, desirable production, separate from and agreeable to the values of mainstream commercial production, as Kirkpatrick noted was the original goal of software toolkits. Instead, drawing on the Internet as a platform for the free circulation of software, video game ROMs, and emulators allowed aspiring game-makers to take apart and rebuild the locked down, black boxed video game in new ways. Sprites and tiles ripped from ROMs of popular RPGs, such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and early Legend of Zelda games, were formatted to be easily importable to RPG Maker, modified, remixed, and distributed on the forums. Further, many of the games created with RPG Maker are unauthorized fan games, a popular phenomenon which has a relationship to the original games’ publishers that can range from uneasy to punitive. Pierre-Yves Hurel notes, in an ethnographic study of a popular RPG Maker forum, that even users making games that do not use graphics ripped from existing games and do not position their games as explicitly a fan project or sequel, still describe their work in terms of “making their own” Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and so on (Hurel, 2016, p. 3). Similar iterative development concepts and sequels to successful games are typical practice in AAA development, and many commercial indie video games. Johnathan Blow’s Braid is a particularly illustrative example, which borrows the imagery and mechanics of well-known retro games. The use of references to existing video games is often considered homage, or even indicative of mature, meta-textual themes in commercialized indie games. On the other hand, because it is a more marginal, non-commercialized practice, the reuse and remixing present in RPG Maker games problematizes a clear distinction between fan game, piracy, and original work. Reflecting on the RPG Maker community can reveal how concepts central to the initial promotion of indie games, like originality and artistic autonomy, are established socially, being defined and valued differently in different communities of game-making. While creators using RPG Maker may be referencing games which originated in the context of mainstream video game production, for the most part they do not consider their use of RPG Maker to create games as professional, work, or even a step toward working in commercial video game development. Instead, Hurel notes that the RPG Maker forum users he 108

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interviewed primarily see their practice as “playing.” They both connect their use of RPG Maker to earlier play with action figures, blocks, or drawings where they attempted to emulate favorite video games, and describe the sensation of using the software itself as playful. This play can take multiple forms, which Hurel differentiates into two main categories. Players can test the tool by trying to see what can be done within it, or can, on the other hand, see what they can make it do, or if they can make it behave the way they want. Hurel describes the first of these two groups as “classics,” who tend to make typical JRPGs, often using the preexisting assets, or assets ripped from existing RPGs. They tend to work on one long-term project, updating the community with screenshots or demos as they complete areas. Because these games primarily used premade or ripped assets, they only tend to circulate as demos within the community. The others are “customs” who are more interested in trying “different,” “personal,” or “artistic” things that may be detached from the RPG genre the software is designed for, and try to stretch what kind of games the community produces (Hurel, 2016, p. 6). Users taking this approach tend to release shorter games, prototypes, and demos, and develop at least some of their own graphical assets for the games, which can differ significantly from the look of traditional JRPGs. As opposed to “classics,” several games which originated as “custom” projects have gained popularity as niche freeware games, such as Mortis Ghost’s OFF, which incorporates original art, multiple endings, and unusual puzzle elements. While tensions between the partially opposing goals of these two groups within the community sometimes led to debates which became intense and alienating for the users Hurel interviewed, what both groups of creators have in common is seeing the process of using RPG Maker more as an end than any attention their work may receive beyond the community local to RPG Maker forums. Accidental success, where a game gains broader popularity, such as by going viral through Let’s Play channels or other forms of social media, is considered “weird,” an unexpected and awkward consequence of a “non-serious, free” activity (Hurel, 2016, p. 5). Many RPG Maker users do not see themselves as aspirational commercial video game creators in the way that independent development work is often seen as adjacent to, either preceding or following, a mainstream industry role. While the visuals in the games of these two groups may seem drastically different, the menus, movement, and features available are generally still organized by the JRPG structure RPG Maker provides. Further still, the community’s approach to making—prioritizing playful remixing and low109

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pressure passion projects—also informs the formal and structural qualities of the games. Updates to projects can often feature community references or in-jokes, or may be more about developing a specific script or unique feature that can be reused by other members of the community. RPG Maker presents an interface for users to create within existing codified and commercialized JRPG paradigms, but the RPG Maker community does not correspond to the attempts to corral users’ creativity and willingness to use computers into condoned activities for which toolkit software was created. Instead, the community often frames the value of discussing their work, sharing resources, and using the software as enjoyable in the way aimlessly playing with building blocks is. If the aim of toolkit software is to allow existing gaming fans to create their own video games within codified genres, adding value to the platform in question by producing predictable amateur titles that reinforce the desire for while not infringing on the intellectual property of “official,” commercially released video games, the RPG Maker series does not work as intended, especially when the piracy within the community is considered. Enterbrain, the company which now owns the series’ IP, has made some attempts to recuperate this lost ground, officially releasing the significantly revamped RPG Maker XP in English in 2005 and even addressing the situation in a blog post (Enterbrain, 2006). However, the RPG Maker community interested in ripping, tinkering, and remixing retro JRPGs still remains profoundly shaped by the context of discussion and file sharing facilitated by the early 2000s personal sites, forums, and emulation resources, the context in which the tool became available to a broader audience. Degica, the company now responsible for publishing the RPG Maker series internationally made an official English version of RPG Maker 2003 available in 2015, fifteen years after Don Miguel’s translations began circulating the Internet. The video used to promote the release on both Degica’s website and the game’s Steam page feature a small cameo of the Don Miguel character and his cat, a significant change in response from the cease and desist issued by Enterbrain. In a blog post describing the relationship between video games and a general fascination with the capabilities of computers, Stephen “thecatamites” Gillmurphy (2018) states: “I started making computer games so that i’d have something to tinker with while waiting for limewire downloads to finish, but i downloaded music through limewire partly as an excuse to sit around and do nothing on a computer.” Gillmurphy is the creator of the popular “custom” RPG Maker game, Space Funeral, which uses an idiosyncratic art 110

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style, pirated music in the soundtrack, and references to both RPG clichés and the dueling aspirations of the RPG Maker community Hurel cites. The game is distributed freely through his GameJolt site since its release in 2010. Gillmurphy has also released more games using tools like Multimedia Fusion, Unity, and Adventure Game Studio, some free, and some costing just a few euros. Even if the Internet has now become much more commonplace, and creators who initially used the pirated versions of RPG Maker software to create games have moved on to other tools and other forms of online community, the novelty of the Internet as a source of information and community emanating from a single machine that was in an increasing number of homes shaped how the RPG Maker community organized to have a lasting influence. The coexisting new frontier of seemingly limitless piracy and recombination of found game assets and other files, provided by accessible downloads of software, music, and game ROMs, also contributed to its playful use by community members, and the variety of visual aesthetics available they explored.

Glorious Trainwrecks—“Time to take the plunge into glory” Glorious Trainwrecks is a game development community that differs from most other social media groups, forums, and in-person meetups about game development because of its broad use of a particular nonprofessional game-making software tool, Klik n Play. Like many other PC programs of the 1990s, Klik n Play was intended for use as an educational resource within schools. It was far from a software development kit in the traditional sense, in that it would allow a specific type of conventional video game to be made and distributed to expectant gamers. Klik n Play has far more in common with what Mizuko Ito describes as “construction software.” In her study of children’s educational software, she describes construction software as different from other forms of educational software marketed to schools with computer labs as well as to parents in the 1980s and 1990s, because they positioned children “as producers rather than consumers” and proposed alternatives to “educational approaches that aim to transmit a standardized body of knowledge” (Ito, 2009, p. 184). Rather than simply being evaluated on how well a child answers multiple-choice questions or enters the solution to simple sums, for example, construction software aimed to be more openended, encouraging learning through experimentation. 111

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Ito relates these pieces of software, which often present children with exercises in understanding systems, logic, and gaining technological literacy, to Seymour Papert’s LOGO programming language and corresponding “turtles,” tiny robots which children could instruct to move in different directions with LOGO code. Papert argued these tasks would allow children to “engage intuitively with mathematical concepts” and programming logic (Ito, 2009, p. 150). This model of learning is still applied to the development of other game construction software like Scratch, which is also presented as an accessible video game-making tool for students. However, for the purposes of informal game-making communities, whether these pieces of software successfully teach systems logic or programming concepts is secondary to how they can be used as tools to create and share their work. Klik n Play was released by Maxis and Europress in 1994, eventually becoming freeware when Europress went on to become Clickteam and develop more advanced versions of similar software known as Clickteam Fusion and Multimedia Fusion for wider commercial use (Clickteam.com, “Download Klik n Play”). Unlike most software for making video games, Klik n Play is not limited to a specific genre of game in the manner of RPG Maker or other prior toolkit software. Despite significant technical limitations (the engine only works in 2D, and does not allow fine-tuning of the basic “rules” it provides or some of its visual elements, for example), it offers a more open-ended set of possibilities than the interface and underlying structure of RPG Maker. In a listing of accessible game-making tools, Anna Anthropy specifically notes that Klik n Play is most useful for “help[ing] you think about and structure your game in terms of rules” (Anthropy, 2012, p. 165). Further, it conforms to the style of similar children’s construction and creativity software of the time, which presented the program’s interface as responsive, fun, and surprising. When objects are selected and dragged into the blank game area, they immediately begin animating as the user decides where to place them, and the function of menus and tools are primarily communicated with colorful images. Like RPG Maker, Klik n Play also comes with a built-in variety of visual and audio assets as well as with object behaviors that determine what users are able to do with the software, and imply what sort of games they can make with it. Instead of specifically referencing the character types, objects, and visual styles in an established video game genre, Klik n Play’s libraries offer not only a sampling of many topics, some standard to video games like spaceships and dragons, but also strange gremlins and children skateboarding, as well as a number of music and sound files of varying quality 112

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which could also be added. Anthropy notes that the provided assets have a distinctly “clip art” aesthetic, referencing the generic images that began to be included with office software to enhance documents and presentations (Anthropy, 2012, p. 164). Klik n Play has been adopted as a primary tool recommended in the Glorious Trainwrecks community. In 2007, Jeremy Penner began the Klik of the Month Klub. This was a monthly event where participants are encouraged to complete a game in only two hours. This may seem similar to formats like “game jams,” events where participants form teams and have a weekend or three days to create a prototype of a game. These events can be international, and have complex judging systems to decide winners. However, because these events mimic the division of labor in commercial game studios, as well as industry crunch practices in the expectation to work late or through the night to finish at any cost, participation in these jams tend to favor people with existing game development experience, and jam events are well-integrated into commercial gaming culture. Klik of the Month events differ because they limit participants to a much more manageable amount of time to work continuously, and also explicitly encourage, or almost require by their nature, using a piece of software which provides premade assets and behaviors, rather than designing and coding from scratch. The Glorious Trainwrecks site (glorioustrainwrecks.com) provides a hub for news about events as well as a catalog of game tools, and a place to upload small, quickly made games where users can comment on them. Klik n Play is the primary tool recommendation offered by the community, but a variety of others have also been used. The Glorious Trainwrecks site includes a page on Klik n Play which notes that many of the bundled graphics and sounds have become in-jokes for the community, and while the software has aged poorly and can be incredibly buggy, these are embraced as elements of what makes the software perfect for their purposes (Glorious Trainwrecks, 2010). Idiosyncrasies rather than predictability in terms of how a game will behave is seen as potentially productive, and aiming for absolute perfection can be a major hurdle in both new creators starting work and existing creators finishing it (Anthropy, 2012, pp. 124–25). The brevity and frequency of Klik of the Month jams offer an alternative to professionalized, judged game jams by lowering the pressure, time commitment, and knowledge requirement involved in participating. The Glorious Trainwrecks community’s appropriation of a piece of freeware educational software to make games in a way that is spontaneous and indifferent to mainstream ideas of originality or quality again represents 113

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an approach to game-making that is not easily absorbed by mainstream commercial games nor included in most discussions of “indie.” The community’s use of Klik n Play and its eventual compilation of Pirate Karts, where hundreds of games will be loaded into a single launcher, a process which references bootleg cartridges that include multiple pirated games, challenge indie’s focus on authorship and originality which sets them apart from the ostensibly lowbrow and illicit types of video games which appear on these unofficial compilations. Felan Parker notes that the primary discussions of video games as art that emerged alongside the indie games movement do not “contradict the standard critiques of digital games as childish, sensational low culture—they accept this devaluation” and try to make work that differentiates itself (Parker, 2012, p. 56). The Glorious Trainwrecks community, however, embraces the underbelly, the junk, and the failures of video games’ history as also worthy of being celebrated and used as influences. The description on the front page of the Glorious Trainwrecks site says the site “is about bringing back the spirit of postcardware,” a term used to describe small programs circulated for free in the early 1990s, where the creator only expected a postcard or email if an eventual user enjoyed it. Like the software listings Kirkpatrick discusses in his examination of 1980s computing magazines, these programs could vary wildly in topic and quality, with many being buggy and incomprehensible. The style of creation encouraged by the site also relates to complaints about “shovelware,” software collections seen to be made of haphazardly thrown together parts, and more recently, “asset flips” (Frank, 2017). Glorious Trainwrecks, alternately, embraces the use and reuse of preexisting assets. That this practice again runs close to practices framed by the video games industry as piracy or illegitimate approaches to game design and distribution, as the RPG Maker community also did, situates these practices as outsider or even antagonistic to the industry, in a way other indie games are not. In his study of the uses of personal computers for gaming in 1980s Czechoslovakia, Jaroslav Švelch points out that video games circulated through elaborate networks of trade and piracy not only for entertainment purposes but also as a form of communication. “Cracker” intro screens gave credit to the individuals responsible for pirating and distributing games which were unavailable through official means, and were also an opportunity to show off skills, make in-jokes, and air community drama, as well as reach out for connections with the other players their software had ended up in the hands of. Further, homebrew games offered the opportunity to add political 114

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commentary to the popular structure of text adventure games, by creating new or remixed games that dealt with issues of repression and police violence (Švelch, 2013). This approach to video game creation also becomes apparent in the submissions to Glorious Trainwrecks. Because video games can be made and distributed quickly, and the rapidity is valued and encouraged by the community, multiple games can be in communication with each other, as commentary on the same in-joke or theme, made as a sort of gift or digital card for specific community members, or even functioning as journal entries or recollections of moments from everyday life. For example, World of Explore Pro Edition (Ordered by Sergio Cornaga) by user “mno” primarily riffs on PC Software registration screens that are used to prevent software piracy. When the player types in their name as “Sergio Cornaga,” another longtime member of the community, on a parody of a software registration screen, they are granted access to a world full of frequently used Klik n Play graphics. The clip art pieces are combined and recombined into both logical and nonsensical combinations, animating at different rates, and creating a dense and chaotic texture rather than a clear space with discernible goals. While only one of the four thousand-plus games listed on the site, this game is representative of the reuse of assets, community references, and anarchic sense of humor that define many Glorious Trainwrecks games. Many creators who have participated in Glorious Trainwrecks events have gone on to produce more elaborate or polished work elsewhere. Terry Cavanagh’s Super Hexagon, which started as a prototype on the site, is one of the most influential examples. While these projects may go on to influence broader independent game practices or aesthetics, “leveling up” to making more mainstream or financially successful games is not a goal within the community. Instead, Glorious Trainwrecks is much more interested in turning game-making into a truly mass art, with a low bar of skill and time investment required for entry, a practice that can be both expressive and a communication medium, and fit into everyday life. The front page of the site not only encourages but also urges visitors to become participants, proclaiming “Time to take the plunge into glory.” After all, to become a game-maker on the site only demands around two hours.

Flatgames—“And release it!” The description accompanying The Isle Is Full of Noises most succinctly captures the vision of Flatgames: “That all you need to make a game and 115

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to present an idea is a couple hours, a laptop, and some markers.” Released by Llaura McGee in 2016, The Isle Is Full of Noises represents a personal narrative of changing times and how to cope with them. More importantly, it does this with “intentionally no interactions or even collisions” while the player moves around the screen (Dreamfeel, 2016). Flatgames typically consist of graphics drawn on paper and scanned or photographed, then cropped and simply animated to make up the background, foreground, and player character in the game. They can also be accompanied by a single file of music or ambient sounds, and these elements can be combined with existing movement settings in free game-making tools like personal editions of Unity or Construct. Both of these engines allow for in-browser sharing of the resulting games, which can be uploaded to sites like Itch.io. Flatgames, unlike Glorious Trainwrecks and RPG Maker forums, did not organize around the potential of a specific software tool. Instead, Flatgames offer an alternative approach to game design that adapts to what creators have at hand. The use of doodled art on paper, personal photos, and other physical ephemera as visual material differs strongly from the race for technological refinement in mainstream games, or the preference for retro pixel art in other indie titles. Brian Schrank connects the visual aesthetic emerging in these games to the art theory of John Ruskin, who argues that “if an artist allows spontaneous evidence of their human handiwork—such as accidents—to remain present in their art, it breathes more life into the experience.” Schrank concludes that this gives the video games in question a “loose, lively energy” which rejects the “usual desire for machinelike control in games” (Schrank, 2014, p. 144). Flatgames draw from casual forms of writing (like journaling) and drawing (like sketching) as their source, resulting in a visual style that bears more explicit marks of its process than other technological forms do at first glance. Flatgames not only accept the loosest, most casual scribbles as valid visual styles alongside more elaborate art but Flatgame creators are also encouraged to base their games on real events, especially events from their own lives. Annual Flatgame jams have been held at the end of the year, with the theme typically to represent something that has happened to the participant in the past year. Though this is more of a guideline than a rule, and imaginative approaches are also allowed, a majority of Flatgames are based on personal experiences and give the feeling of a diary entry or a recounting of a story from everyday life. For example, Dreamfeel’s The Isle Is Full of Noises, the game which was the first instance of the “flatgame” 116

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being explicitly theorized by a creator, describes the creator’s feelings during a period of moving between one location and another. The only form of control offered the player is to move a character with in four directions over a 2-D plane, using the arrow keys. The background, character, and animated elements are all made from highly saturated marker drawings, and the text which relays the narrative is embedded in the space the character walks around and over. The single track of music which accompanies the game begins with the sounds of drums and bagpipes, gradually escalating into various combined noises. All of these elements relate to the game’s thematic aim of expressing a moment of personal transition and uncertainty. Aesthetically, the core goal of Flatgames as a form is to present video games as “the most raw and immediate combination of movement, art and sound” (Dreamfeel, 2016). This de-emphasizes the focus on systems or gameplay styles that dominate most other forms of game creation. While there are other rules that are listed on the Flatgame jam pages, such as not spending more than a day on the game, and limiting what you draw to a single sheet of paper, these rules exist to keep the scope of the Flatgame in check, rather than to add challenge, and can be bent so long as the creator “stays true to the ethos” (Flatgame Annual 2016). One of the most important rules, however, is to release the resulting Flatgame, whether it is uploaded to an itch.io page or personal site, or played at an event with friends. The Flatgame jam page notes “finishing games is also a skill,” encouraging creators to practice a more casual and spontaneous approach to work, rather than feeling obligated to spend significant amounts of time on polish and testing. Outside of the annual online Flatgame jams, there have also been other events where people gathered to make Flatgames together in person, or develop new ways of making them collaboratively. A major example was at the Now Play This festival, held at Somerset House on April 6–8, 2018, where visitors provided handmade pieces of art that were scanned and added to a Unity game file by facilitators to make a different game for reach day of the festival. While the other communities discussed in this paper have adopted and altered an existing paradigm of game creation, defined either by toolkit software or by educational software designers, Flatgames began as a new set of rules and goals to approach creating games, with no existing software tools. The focus on casually hand-drawn elements is an attempt to make video game creation as accessible as familiar forms like writing and drawing, and the development of tools shared within the community like templates or original software support the primary tools of pen or pencil and paper 117

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and attempt to make the transition from drawings to digital objects making up the game world as intuitive as possible. Because the first Flatgame was made in Unity, the template provided with the first game jam took the form of a Unity game file, which already had certain scripts and settings in place to make it easier for someone who has never used Unity to add the art and sound, and set character movement. However, entries to the jam included games made in other tools, like Construct or Multimedia Fusion, which simply followed the rules and “ethos” of Flatgames. In the time since the first Flatgame jam, more elaborate tutorials and formalized Unity template files have been made available within the community, but game-making applications specifically tailored to making Flatgames have also emerged. A primary example of this is Flatpack by Mark Wonnacott. Developed for mobile devices, Flatpack increases the spontaneity of the Flatgame process by allowing Flatgames to be worked on anywhere the user has a touchscreen device, such as a smartphone or tablet. The application connects to the device’s built-in camera and image library, allowing the user to take, crop, and place photos within the app, and access sounds from their audio library and sound recordings. The resulting games, described as “navigable collages” on the software’s itch.io page, can be exported as HTML documents that can be uploaded or embedded into webpages (Wonnacott, 2017). Flatpack remains a work in progress, and has been used to help gather images made by visitors during the Now Play This festival. Despite their short history, Flatgames already have a very specific meaning to the people who make them, so much so that specific tools to enable their creation are being developed. As creators interested in Flatgames continue to share their work and organize further events, tutorials, and tools to support the creation of Flatgames, the distinct identity of these games within independent game production will also solidify. Flatgames are not a case of a community gathering around an existing tool to fill their needs, but instead a community gathering around a certain approach to game development and collaboratively creating and iterating on their own tools and contexts to enable the accessible creation of Flatgames. Starting with tutorials and template files that serve as a base for Flatgame creation in existing engines like Unity, and then progressing to a broader network of events and specific applications for the creation of Flatgames, those working within Flatgames are certainly influenced by game-making tools and communities like Glorious Trainwrecks and RPG Maker. However, they also take a step beyond these communities, not stopping at stretching a tool or using it in unexpected and unauthorized ways, but developing their own tools. 118

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Conclusion This chapter has given an overview of three communities, three approaches to making games, and three tools which enabled these communities and approaches to be realized. RPG Maker forums, Glorious Trainwrecks, and Flatgame jams are only three examples among many emerging communities that adopt and create experimental tools, apps, and templates that are continuing to change the process of game development. Returning to the concept of informal game development, Brendan Keogh emphasizes that these practices have always existed, and that these “fringe-yet-foundational” development practices represent not a subordinate activity that needs to be professionalized, but a vital part of “the much broader field of creative practice that the formal video game industry is (and has always been) embedded within” (Keogh, 2019, p. 31). Based on the examples discussed in this chapter, I have demonstrated that several of these practices, enabled by software tools and Internet-based communities, have developed distinct styles and aesthetic approaches to game development which have become influential within the community of tool-users, among informal developers, and even in commercially successful indie game titles. A consideration of these tools and their effects on both the proliferation and style of independent games is vital to a deeper understanding of the broad field of video game production, and only becomes more relevant as more examples gain popularity and influence. Adam LeDoux’s Bitsy is another recent example, an in-browser application first released in late 2016 that allows developers to jump in immediately to making pixel art worlds to explore with 8  ×  8 tiles and limited color schemes (LeDoux, 2016). The game can then be exported as an HTML file that can be embedded into an itch.io page and easily shared online. Because all Bitsy games are reducible to text files that can be interpreted by the Bitsy web app, they are extremely easy to remix, modify, and host online, which has contributed to a lively community stretching the engine in unexpected ways. Fernando Ramallo, after working with David Kanaga on IGF Nuovo Award-winning game Oiκοςpiel, Book I, has also recently produced a Unity plugin that allows users to draw sprites, animations, and shader effects directly in the engine called Doodle Studio 95. This plugin visually references “creativity software” of the 1990s in its interface, like Kid Pix and Klik n Play, a call back to other programs that wanted to make digital creation not only possible but also visually appealing, inviting, and accessible (Ramallo, 2018). 119

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The quotes I highlight to preface each section foreground elements of time and duration that is inherent to process. For these communities, these ways of making fit into their lives, are matched to their existing abilities and resources, and reflect their own use of and interest in video games. Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux note that the “very concept of indie games circulate as a form of cultural imperialism that both colonizes profitable forms of independent production and sanitizes them for mass consumption” (Boluk and LeMieux, 2017, p. 33). Valorizing certain types of precarious labor, leading indie developers to become self-exploiting entrepreneurs for the small possibility of mainstream success, and embracing works that remain, through their self-referentiality, somewhat analogous to mainstream games excludes and further marginalizes other types of already existing independent production of video games. What is left out are the far more common, everyday ways in which people are using game-making software, forming communities, and the unique aesthetics of the resulting video games. This chapter has not exhausted the histories or varieties of practice within these communities; much more could be written about each one. Nor has it fully investigated the many ways the computer interface and software tools used to make games affect the form and aesthetic qualities of video games, an area of research that could be expanded from the most mainstream commercial SDKs down to the smallest, most casual game-making tools. Instead, I hope these three examples of game-making communities which collaborate and distribute their work online offers an expanded view of what types of independent production video game creators are currently engaged in online, indicating potential routes for a deeper understanding of video game production today and historically.

Works Cited Anthropy, A. (2012). Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Babineau, D. (2010). Don Miguel Interview. Retrieved from https​://vg​rants​.word​ press​.com/​2010/​05/29​/don-​migue​l-int​ervie​w-dec​ember​- 2008/. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London, England: Penguin Books. Boluk S., & Lemieux, P. (2017). Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, tradIng, Making and Breaking Videogames. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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From Tool to Community to Style Chalk, A. (2017). “Firewatch is getting review-bombed on Steam.” PC Gamer. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.pcg​amer.​com/f​i rewa​tch-i​s-get​ting-​revie​w-bom​ bed-o​n-ste​am/. Clickteam.com. (n.d.). “About Clickteam.” Retrieved from https​://ww​w.cli​cktea​ m.com​/abou​t-cli​cktea​m. Degica Games. (n.d.). “RPGMaker 2003 press kit.” Retrieved from http:​//pre​ss.de​ gigam​es.co​m/she​et.ph​p?p=r​pg_ma​ker_2​003. “Download Klik N Play. Klik N Play for Schools.” (n.d.). Retrieved from https://knpforschools.webs.com/. Dreamfeel. (2016). “The isle is full of noises.” Retrieved from https://dreamfeel.itch. io/the- isle. “FLATGAME Annual 2016.” (2016). Retrieved from https://itch.io/jam/flatgameannual- 2016. Frank, A. (2017). “Valve removes nearly 200 cheap, ‘fake’ games from Steam (update).” Polygon. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.pol​ygon.​com/2​017/9​/26/1​63681​ 78/st​eam- shovelware-removed-asset-flipping. Gillmurphy, S. (2018). “Songs of the heart.” Retrieved from http:​//myf​riend​pokey​. tumb​lr.co​m/pos​t/174​21807​9385/​songs​-of-t​he-he​art. Hurel, P. (2016). “‘Playing RPG Maker’? Amateur game design and video gaming.” In Proceedings of First Joint DiGRA/FDG, Dundee, Scotland. Ito, M. (2009). Engineering Play. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Juul, J. (2014). “High-tech low-tech authenticity: The creation of independent style at the Independent Games Festival.” In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.jes​ perju​ul.ne​t/tex​t/ind​epend​entst​yle/. Keogh, B. (2019). “From aggressively formalised to intensely in/Formalised: Accounting for a wider range of videogame development practices.” Creative Industries Journal, 12(1), 14–33. Kirkpatrick, G. (2017). “Early game production: Gamer subjectivation and the containment of ludic imagination.” In M. Swalwell, H. Stuckey, and A. Ndalianis (Eds), Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives (pp. 19–37). New York, NY: Routledge. Klik ‘n’ Play. Glorious Trainwrecks wiki.” 2010. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.glo​ rious​train​wreck​s.com​/wiki​/Klik​_’n’_​Play. Kunzelman, C. (2017, December 19). “A bizarre Steam removal shows why Valve is a poor steward of games culture.” Vice. Retrieved from https​://wa​ypoin​t.vic​ e.com​/en_u​s/art​icle/​kzgzm​3/a-b​izarr​e-ste​am-re​moval​- shows​-why-​valve​-is-a​poor​-stew​ard-o​f-gam​es-cu​lture.​ Le Doux, A. (2016). “Bitsy game maker.” Retrieved from https://ledoux.itch.io/bitsy. Montfort, N., & Bogost, I. (2009). Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Niedenthal, S. (2009). “What we talk about when we talk about game aesthetics.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.digr​a.org​/wp-c​onten​t/upl​oads/​digit​allibrary/09287.17350.pdf. Parker, F. (2012). “An art world for artgames.” Loading. . ., 7(11). Retrieved from http:​//jou​rnals​.sfu.​ca/lo​ading​/inde​x.php​/load​ing/a​rticl​e/vie​w/119.​ 121

Indie Games in the Digital Age Polansky, L. (2016). “Towards an art history for videogames.” Retrieved from http:​//rhi​zome.​org/e​ditor​ial/2​016/a​ug/03​/an-a​rt-hi​story​-for-​video​games​/. Ramallo, F. (2018). “Doodle Studio 95!” Retrieved from https​://fe​rnand​orama​llo.i​ tch.i​o/doo​dle-s​tudio​-95. Robertson, A. (2015). “Steam now offers video game refunds for ‘any reason.’” The Verge. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.the​verge​.com/​2015/​6/2/8​71240​3/val​vesteam-video-game-refund-policy. Ruffino, P. (2012). “Narratives of independent production in video game culture.” Loading. . ., 7(11). Retrieved from http:​//jou​rnals​.sfu.​ca/lo​ading​/inde​x.php​/load​ ing/a​rticl​e/vie​w/120.​ Sad Fact. (2006, July 16). Enterbrain.Co.Jp. Retrieved from https​://we​b.arc​hive.​org/ w​eb/20​06071​61910​50/ht​tp://​www.e​nterb​rain.​co.jp​/digi​fa mi/sadfact.html. Schrank, B. (2014). Avant-garde Videogames: Playing with Technoculture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Švelch, J. (2013). “Say It with a computer game: Hobby computer culture and the non-entertainment uses of homebrew games in the 1980s Czechoslovakia.” Game Studies, 13(2). Retrieved from http:​//gam​estud​ies.o​rg/13​02/ar​ticle​s/sve​lch. Wonnacott, M. (2017). “Flatpack.” Retrieved from https://candle.itch.io/flatpack.

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CHAPTER 6 THIS IS HOW A GARDEN GROWS: CULTIVATING EMERGENT NETWORKS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF STARDEW VALLEY

Kevin Rutherford

Independent video game development is notoriously risky, in terms of both securing the time and attention required for long projects and attracting loyal consumers and reaching reasonable sales goals. Given the volatile nature of independent development, successful indie games call for attention and often raise the question of whether such breakout games can serve as useful models for future developers. One of the most outstanding independent success stories of recent years is Stardew Valley. The game is a farming life-simulation role-playing game released in 2016 for PCs (and later ported to various consoles—the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation Vita as of this writing). Stardew Valley is explicitly inspired by the Harvest Moon (Amccus, 1996) series, originally created by Yasuhiro Wada (and produced by several companies in various regions, including Marvelous in Japan and Natsume/XSeed in the United States). Stardew Valley incorporates and extends many of the features of that series—for example, planting crops, selling produce, managing livestock, and developing relationships with local townspeople. In addition, the game features mechanics not found in Harvest Moon, incorporating several RPG elements, including a skill system, a mine filled with monsters, the ability to create weapons, and the ability to gradually improve the player’s adopted hometown, either through helping friendly sprites repair a community center or through delivering goods to a megacorporation’s warehouse in the town. Despite these innovations, the core gameplay and narrative tone of Stardew Valley and the Harvest Moon series are similar: the player character, tired of city life and consumerism, inherits a run-down farm from a relative, arrives to find friendly villagers (including potential romantic partners), and is more or less left to their own

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devices to improve and run the farm as they see fit (whether focusing on profit, playing in a more relaxed style, or something in-between). Given Stardew Valley’s (mostly) iterative improvements on the Harvest Moon series and its return to a simpler, sprite-based visual style (a hallmark of earlier Harvest Moon games), it is slightly surprising that it has been as successful as it has been: the game was nominated for several awards in 2016 (and won awards from Golden Joystick and NAVGTR), and as of early 2018, had sold nearly four million copies. To provide some perspective for that success, recent games in the Harvest Moon series have tended to sell between 200,000 and 300,000 copies over their lifespans (according to SiliconEra figures). Stardew Valley’s sales are even more surprising given that the farming life-sim genre had waned in popularity and quality in the decade before Stardew Valley began development: Harvest Moon games released between 2005 and 2012 rarely scored above a 70 on review aggregator Metacritic, and never above 80.1 With all of these considerations, an independent venture into the farming life-sim would initially seem destined to be a labor of love rather than a best-seller, yet Stardew Valley defied these expectations to sell more than a million copies within two months of launch. Perhaps more impressive than its sales, the game is also noteworthy for its extended development time (roughly four years), and especially for the fact that it was developed by a single creator—Eric Barone, under the alias “ConcernedApe.” Stardew Valley’s phenomenal success, therefore, cannot be the result of coordination with a studio or marketing department. With that understanding in mind, Barone had to rely more effectively on other avenues for achieving success, particularly by distributing the labor of the development process in ways only possible in the networked environment of the twenty-first century. In this chapter, I argue that Eric Barone utilized unique approaches to circulation and community-building afforded by various digital platforms due to an implicit recognition and leveraging of the agency and persuasiveness of nonhuman objects, recognition of the “rhetorical velocity” inherent in creating texts so that audiences can recompose them (Ridolfo and DeVoss, 2009), and clear understandings of purpose, genre, and constraints. To make these claims, I draw from scholarship in objectoriented philosophy (Latour, 1993; Harman, 2005; Latour, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Bryant, 2011), game studies (Montfort and Bogost, 2009; Anthropy, 2012), and rhetoric (Ridolfo and DeVoss, 2009; Gries, 2015). However, despite the game’s success, I ultimately claim that Stardew Valley cannot serve as an easy template for developers to import into other situations 124

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(whether those developers are major studios or, like, Barone, a one-person team) due to the extenuating circumstances and particular contexts of the game’s emergence. However, analyzing Barone’s recognition of the available means of persuasion (perhaps the most common definition of the word “rhetoric”) can help to clarify some of the context-dependent strategies he employed in Stardew Valley’s development and marketing. In particular, I am interested in Barone’s ability to leverage emergent agency in networks where human and nonhuman actors work in concert. I ultimately argue that although the risks of independent development are high, individuals like Barone demonstrate how understanding and collaborating with human and nonhuman actors alike can help to mitigate those risks. To begin, I outline the approaches I use in my analysis, specifically my reliance on a philosophical perspective called object-oriented ontology. From the field of rhetoric and composition, I also foreground the concepts of “rhetorical velocity” and “spreadable media” as considerations of audience and circulation, examining the slow and nontraditional marketing of Stardew Valley directly to potential consumers through Steam Greenlight, indirectly through word of mouth, and through community-building on the social media platform of Reddit. Next, I examine Barone’s keen understanding of genre, remix, and his own positionality in relation to the genre, highlighting the affordances of the malleability of independent development (lack of top-down deadlines, freedom to experiment, immediate feedback from a potential market, etc.). Following this, I consider the position of the game itself as an actor involved in an emergent network (which includes the developer, community, unique material circumstances, genre history, etc.), outlining the ways in which the constraints in Stardew Valley’s development and reception were partially responsible for its success.

Theoretical Underpinnings Much of my understanding of Stardew Valley’s phenomenal success relies on a perspective that equalizes relations between and among human and nonhuman actors. This approach, object-oriented ontology, began as a philosophical movement directly in opposition to a perceived anthropocentrism in the humanities (and the academy more broadly). In short, object-oriented philosophers want to be able to analyze and examine the relationships between and among nonhuman actors without necessarily seeing them as merely responding to or reliant on human action 125

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to be brought into “realness.” Admittedly, the movement’s chosen term of “object” is a complicated one, carrying a variety of meanings dependent on discipline. For instance, computer programmers might see objectorientation as one kind of programming paradigm; humanists may see the term “object” as something opposite a human “subject.” In object-oriented ontology, however, the term “object” refers to any thing. Effectively, the “object” in object-oriented ontology can refer to anything that exists, keeping in mind that symbols, systems, people, material things, fictional characters, and daydreams can all be viewed as equally real objects in an ontological sense. Objects can be animate or inanimate; they can be living or nonliving; they can be material or ethereal; they can be created by humans or exist without us. Importantly, in an object-oriented perspective, all objects have equal ontological status: they are all equally real (and equally really capable of acting). As philosopher Graham Harman (2005) puts it, “All entities are on exactly the same ontological footing.” For Harman, this understanding of objects “ends the tear- jerking modern rift between the thinking human subject and the unknowable outside world” (p. 14). Relying on Harman’s notion of this “flat ontology,” Levi Bryant (2011) emphasizes that equal realness means that objects can be examined as actors in their own right, doing work alongside, within, and apart from the human subject traditionally regarded as the prime mover in philosophy (and humanistic study more generally). In other words, when performing analysis, scholars can broaden their analytical framework to include the agency of media platforms, materiality, culture, and social circumstances, not merely as extensions of human subjective action but as real actors in their own right, equally capable of being influenced by and influencing human subjects. Like Bruno Latour’s (2007) actor-network theory (ANT), an object-oriented perspective is invested in the ability of nonhuman actors to perturb other (human and nonhuman) actors. Unlike ANT, however, object-oriented perspectives argue that things are never solely determined by their relationships to other objects, and have a withdrawn essence that is ultimately unapproachable (and therefore fundamentally unpredictable). In other words, we can coax objects into alliances (as Latour suggests), but we can never truly understand how they might act once they enter into those alliances. I rely on this understanding here in discussing Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone’s usage of social media platforms and distribution channels, which—despite being used by Barone—are also responsible for creating and cultivating a context for his message. 126

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An object-oriented perspective also argues that objects interconnect, enter into relationships, and produce other objects (which have their own being apart from, but dependent on, their constituent parts). Jane Bennett (2010) outlines this scaling, emergent property of being in her political philosophy treatise Vibrant Matter. For Bennett, the emergence of complexity results in agency; more to the point, Bennett argues that human agency, which scholars have traditionally focused on, is only possible as the result of interrelationships of other objects. Bennett uses this perspective to argue for the value of nonhuman objects alongside humans, a project she describes as “raising the status of materiality of which we are composed” (p. 12). In Bennett’s estimation, this heightened status leads to a reconsideration of our fundamental understanding of agency itself; within a flat ontology that recognizes the necessity of larger and smaller networks to provide “vitality” to all being, agency is a matter of relation, not subjectivity. Drawing from both sociologist Bruno Latour and philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Bennet argues that agency is a process of “not fully predictable encounters between multiple kinds of actants” (p. 97), suggesting that agency arises from complexity and cannot truly be said to reside within singular subjects. In other words, for Bennett, agency is simultaneously a distributed and an inherent quality of all matter. In the case of Stardew Valley, I make the argument that the emergent properties of the game itself, its growing base of fans, its creator, and the platforms of its discussion and distribution built a larger network—a singular object with its own agency—that worked to create the eventual economic success of the game. I discuss the interrelationship between these seemingly disparate entities in the latter part of this chapter. Of course, as I outline earlier, an object-oriented perspective is broadly applicable—that is, Stardew Valley is not a unique outlier in terms of applicability of this kind of analysis. Rather than seeing this process of development and this analysis as especially suited to Stardew Valley, what I offer here is a perspective on a particular game with a particular kind of (traceable and public) development process, which lends itself more easily toward this kind of analysis. In other words, I rely on an object-oriented perspective for this examination of the circumstances of Stardew Valley because I believe that this sort of analysis can provide those of us interested in the games industry with a productive set of tools to examine and understand some of the murkier workings of the industry more generally, and independent game development in particular. Other academics have focused on the mechanics of games themselves (as opposed to the surrounding industry). For example, 127

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game studies scholar and object-oriented philosopher Ian Bogost (2012) has outlined the usefulness of computers as sites of theorizing an objectoriented perspective, pointing to their capacity for autonomous action and interaction with a user (p. 22). While this approach is undoubtedly useful for considering games as objects that can do their own work, games also exists as objects within larger material and social systems, and I believe the analysis I present here can be a step toward that kind of consideration. Building on the work done by Bogost and others, I hope to demonstrate the ability of object-orientation to meaningfully contribute to discussions about the games industry, especially because video games (and computing in general) confront users with examples of persuasion that exceed or trouble linear notions of human symbolic action, reminding us that nonhuman objects can (and do) act on us in complex ways.

Rhetorical Velocity As with much independent development, Stardew Valley relied on nontraditional channels to generate interest. Rather than the glossy trailers, a platform at E3, or marketing and public relations teams, Eric Barone managed the game’s online presence from the outset by himself. In a post from his Weebly site (which has since been retired for an official stardewvalley.net address) on New Year’s Day 2013, Barone wrote, “My new year’s resolution is to work harder than ever to make Stardew Valley the best game I can and to get it into your hands as quick as possible. It’s going to be a big year!” Even at this early point in development (and at a time when a release date was anticipated in 2013), Barone emphasized his personal connection to the game’s fans. Other blog posts from the surrounding months showcase simple screenshots, in-progress music, and a short early trailer, and demonstrate Barone’s investment in keeping fans up to date through one of the only official channels for the game. (Stardew Valley had just arrived on Steam Greenlight, the part of the digital distribution service designed to help smaller projects move into mainstream Steam listing, and so anyone seeking information about the game would have only had two outlets for official information.) Tellingly, the earliest available post on Barone’s Weebly blog includes a video demonstrating the ability to place fences on the farm, and is introduced with “I’m kind of a messy guy, but I’m sure some people will make really neat, well planned farm layouts. It’ll be fun to see what people come up with.” At 128

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this early stage, Barone recognizes the affordances of having others not only play his game but publicly playing his game.2 I argue that this recognition of additional audiences, and his interaction with and cultivation of those audiences through collaboration with the various nonhuman agents of the media platforms, is an important element of Stardew Valley’s eventual success. In other words, Greenlight and Barone’s Weebly site were both nonhuman actors that helped Barone’s message reach potential audiences, and his collaboration with those nonhuman agents resulted in his leveraging their affordances, using them as intermediaries through which to manage human activity (i.e., the labor of marketing), and generally drafting them to perform the tasks that he, as a lone developer, was not in a position to spend time and energy on. Jim Ridolfo and Danielle Nicole DeVoss (2009) discuss the idea of rhetorical velocity as “a strategic approach to composing for rhetorical deliver .  .  . both [as] a way of considering delivery as a rhetorical mode, aligned with an understanding of how texts work as a component of a strategy.” For Ridolfo and DeVoss, new communications technologies necessitate rethinking how authors might consider the work future reader/ authors might perform with their writing. That is, in an age where remixing, sampling, and otherwise manipulating written, visual, aural, and interactive texts is increasingly accessible, skilled rhetors will begin composing with an awareness of how their texts might be changed by new audiences, and how they might leverage that recomposition to further their goals. While the term “rhetorical velocity” dates to 2009, Ridolfo and DeVoss point out that the core concept is far older, and use the genre of the press release as an example of “composing for strategic recomposition,” noting that press releases are designed and written so that they can be easily parsed, sampled, quoted, and repackaged for a variety of audiences (i.e., press releases are written to encourage journalists, among others, to liberally quote them). The concept of “spreadable media” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green, 2013) represents a similar perspective. For Ridolfo and DeVoss, rhetorical velocity is a strategy chiefly (though not exclusively) put to work by organizations and individuals in a position to disseminate their work and thereby encourage others to recompose it. For Jenkins, Ford, and Green, that process is far more messy and participatory; it is a sometimes collaborative and sometimes contested process where top-up and bottom-down strategies work to find what equilibrium they can. Ridolfo and DeVoss, in contrast, discuss press releases from the Department of Defense. While the composing strategy for such documents is undoubtedly taking rhetorical velocity into account, they 129

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are not necessarily designed to be “spreadable.” When Jenkins, Ford, and Green discuss centralized versus dispersed access to information (p. 6), they are primarily thinking of commercial uses, but it is difficult to think of a more centralized approach to composing than a government agency. Nevertheless, in the twenty-first century, well-considered rhetorical velocity is a key component of viral videos and the “meme-worthiness” of image macros. Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013) suggest a shift from “hearing to listening” and a strategy of market outreach that focuses on action and meaningful participation (pp. 178–80). They suggest an everyday culture of co-creation, one that not only recognizes the affordances of platforms offered by creators but also values the contributions of consumers. Similarly, considering a text’s rhetorical velocity allows authors to invite collaboration across space and time, and savvy rhetors understand that they can compose texts that encourage the kinds of collaboration that will support, rather than undermine, their rhetorical goals. It is important to note that many of these collaborators, platforms, and capabilities rely on a variety of nonhuman actors; in some cases, these actors are best-fits for an occasion, whereas in others they have been specifically created to support a collaborative environment. The emergent qualities of public consumption and creation, especially in the case of composing for uptake and recomposition, can lead to publics forming around the practice of recomposing, as seems to have been the case for Stardew Valley. In the games industry, rhetorical velocity has become an increasingly indispensable part of how hype begins and is sustained. Take, for instance, the rise of the “let’s play” genre on YouTube, wherein users record themselves playing games and comment on the games while doing so. This style of video is big business: the YouTube user with the most subscribers (64 million) as of this writing, PewDiePie, is primarily a “let’s player.” If PewDiePie takes the time to play through a game on his YouTube channel, it receives a significant boost in exposure (and, assumedly, sales). Similarly, the streaming service Twitch also focuses on gameplay and narration, and has millions of users. The goal is to make games a shared spectacle. Thus, game developers like Barone seem to have found themselves trying to compose games that not only have compelling mechanics, but that easily lend themselves to commentary and screenshots. Likewise, they seem to be trying to create pacing that encourages or facilitates recording and sharing videos of gameplay. That is, they create games not only for the primary audience of players, but which can be recomposed through live streaming 130

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and reaction, thereby also persuading secondary and tertiary audiences of spectators, in the hopes that those secondary and tertiary audiences will (through purchasing the game) become part of the primary audience. Stardew Valley’s publisher, ChuckleFish, followed current marketing strategies by providing the occasional hour-long stream of the game before release (and it is a relatively popular game on both YouTube and Twitch). For the most part, however—especially before finding a publisher—Barone’s marketing for Stardew Valley was unusually slow and methodical, and shows a clear understanding of rhetorical velocity. Shortly after the game’s release, it was covered in the college newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun—not a typical venue for discussion of video games—with writer Amy Lin (2016) discussing her own personal experience with the game. “As a long-time Harvest Moon fan, I stumbled across the website for Stardew Valley two years ago (in 2014) and immediately decided that I desperately needed to play this game,” she writes. Lin goes on to describe her continuing connection to the game, pointing to how Barone utilized his site to slowly, but predictably, produce updates on his progress: “Once a month an update on the game would appear on his website. I idly checked the Stardew Valley site every month for that very reason, and I was probably not alone in my keenness to read the latest news about the game as well as my growing curiosity about the maker.” Barone’s strategy in his updates—including screenshots and video, keeping his text updates brief and fan-centered—demonstrate that he was actively considering how this information could be circulated and recomposed by others. Additionally, Barone maintained a continuing personal presence in several places on the social media platform Reddit. Posting under the user name ConcernedApe, Barone has been actively commenting on and discussing development of Stardew Valley since September 2012, including conversations surrounding the art style and specific other features of the game. In a response in the Harvestmoon subreddit,3 for instance, Barone notes, I’m not really a big fan of the portraits [of the non-player characters in Stardew Valley] either. . . . I’d like to replace them with hand drawn portraits eventually but I don’t have the skills or money to pay an artist yet. Also, in response to everyone’s feedback I’m spending time improving the look of the landscapes .  .  . the trailer shows the old graphics but the screenshots on my website show the changes I made. Are those still bad looking? If so, I’m happy to hear any suggestions on how to improve them. 131

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Essentially, Barone treated development of Stardew Valley as a collaborative community project, including the fans from essentially the beginning of the process. (It is worth noting that, according to Stardew Valley’s credits screen, Barone never hired an outside artist to update the portraits he mentions, although they have changed since early builds; the credits merely state that the game was “Created by ConcernedApe.”) Of course, each of these interactions serves at least two purposes: they provide a channel for Barone to receive feedback, and they also raise the profile of the game within ongoing conversations online and encourage other users to contribute their perspectives and discuss the game elsewhere. In other words, Barone’s presence on Reddit provided a two-way channel directly between (potential) players and the game developer—at best a difficult proposition for many independent developers, not to mention major studios. In the same sense, then, the tagline “created by ConcernedApe” is not strictly true, since Barone’s reliance on community development points to a more deeply collaborative process. That is, it is not to say that Barone’s reliance on these strategies is somehow equitable—after all, Barone was the one that financially benefited. (On the other hand, Barone was responsible for implementing the ideas he crowdsourced.) We can simultaneously recognize that this collaboration was productive for Stardew Valley’s development (and an increasingly more common occurrence) while also calling into question the underlying practices of unpaid, crowdsourced labor—from fans, from the moderators of various subreddits, and from the nonhuman agents responsible for facilitating their work. Importantly, this sort of direct interface with fans would be impossible without the platforms Barone utilized in his efforts to create and extend the potential audience for Stardew Valley. That is, without the existing infrastructure and mechanics of Reddit, the digital distribution (and showcasing) of Steam Greenlight, or the ease of access for video of YouTube as objects in themselves, Barone would have been unable to acquire the level of immediate and specific feedback he did; additionally, his potential audience would have remained unaware of the game. Barone’s usage of Reddit, in particular, is noteworthy because he largely relied on showing up in threads others posted about the game (or which were links to trailers or articles about it) rather than submitting links to his own property. He worked to position himself as an otherwise normal user of the platform, albeit one with a specific level of credibility and investment in Stardew Valley. This deliberate move to use Reddit as just another user, to take part in the conversation and to treat it as conversation, is 132

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a savvy move by Barone. As a platform, Reddit is structured to appeal to a “wisdom of the crowd” (Surowiecki, 2005) (or, in less positive cases, mob rule) mentality: posts are ranked by their approval by users through upvoting and downvoting, and while examples abound of personalities attempting to manipulate, undermine, or control the conversation, most of these attempts are met with resistance by users.4 Recognizing how his message would be taken up and deftly contributing to a larger tide of users on the site, Barone managed to leverage the platform as a space that worked for Stardew Valley’s benefit. Through his approach to social media conversations, Barone was able to both market to a preexisting audience’s needs and also create an audience through his utilization of the platform as a sort of co-marketer. That is, by remaining a “normal” member of the Reddit community and creating a persona of genuinely engaging with both fans and critics (rather than being perceived as exploitive or publicity-hungry), although still making effective use of the platform for self-promotion, Barone was able to generate buzz for Stardew Valley and to energize other users to perform some of the marketing for him. These users, through digital “word of mouth,” were able to create and capture an audience well before the game was released. Reddit is a particularly interesting example of a nonhuman actor at work. Despite being supposedly composed of users and user preferences, Reddit is an infrastructure that facilitates certain kinds of communication— some more easily than others. The voting mechanism, the algorithm that structures how votes are weighted, and the presence of “power users” on the platform all complicate the reality of Reddit, which presents itself as a sort of democratized forum for ideas. That is, while Reddit (and individual subreddits) does have the potential to foster community, discussion, and participation, the interface and logic of the site helps to structure those activities. A link that is upvoted within the first few minutes after submission tends to draw more attention, and therefore more upvotes, for instance; similarly, early downvotes tend to bury links and comments. (Much has been written about parsing and manipulating Reddit’s vote algorithm; see, for example, Couts, 2012.) The result is that the site itself curates discussion in specific ways that tend to reinforce already prevailing ideas and opinions, especially in larger subreddits.5 The interface can also be gamed effectively— recognizing the right time to post, the right length of comments, or which rising posts and/or comments present the most opportunity to reach the largest number of users is not only predictable, but potentially profitable (see, for example, He, et al., 2016). 133

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Regardless of the degree to which Barone may have been aware of the specifics of these strategies, he was able to effectively use the platform to disseminate information about Stardew Valley, create a well-received public persona for himself, and maintain relevance within Reddit. Ultimately, then, Barone’s success in marketing Stardew Valley is as much a consequence of his collaborating effectively with the (human) cultural norms and (nonhuman) infrastructures in place as it is his particular personality or his ability to highlight the game’s features.

Stardew Valley as an Actor: Remix, Genre, Nostalgia, and Constraints That is not to say, however, that particular aspects of the game itself had no bearing on Stardew Valley’s eventual sales figures. On the contrary, Barone’s conversational presence on Reddit and his apparent regard for the opinions of other fans of the farming life-sim genre were instrumental in determining some of Stardew Valley’s features, and so those features are in many ways direct responses to the work done by and through that space. Likewise, Barone sampled ideas, mechanics, and approaches common to the genre, but additionally modified or extended them through both his own creative process and feedback from users (and beta testers). In addition, Barone faced his own challenges in terms of knowledge and comfort. In other words, it was necessary for Barone to manage a productive partnership between several competing factors (all of which involved collaboration with nonhuman actors): the lineage of the genre, his potential customers, and his own abilities, to name a few. French sociologist and object-oriented fellow traveler Bruno Latour refers to these emergent, adhoc relationships as actor-networks (and his work focuses on ANT). Like Harman and Bryant, Latour does not make a distinction between human and nonhuman actors, instead describing the work of “actants” (essentially, “objects,” either human or nonhuman) seeking to empower themselves as crafting alliances: “An actant needs faithful allies who . . . carry out all the functions that are defined for them, and come to aid without hesitation when they are summoned. The search for ideal allies occupies the space and time of those who wish to be stronger than others” (Latour, 1993, p. 199). That is, productive networks require collaboration between like-minded actors, and these like-minded actors each summon their particular strengths to accomplish the goals of the network. (Barone’s usage of Reddit could 134

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likewise be read in this fashion.) For Barone, this productive network of collaborations and relationships included remixing previous elements of the farming life-sim as a genre. While the gameplay and tone of Stardew Valley share much with the Harvest Moon series, the differences are noteworthy not merely as extensions of the genre but as attempts to sample and improve on them. Stardew Valley is, for instance, considerably more open-ended than installments in the Harvest Moon franchise. First, the game is more nonlinear: whereas Harvest Moon games typically have players progress from one type of crop to another, then to livestock, Stardew Valley allows players to grow or not grow whatever they wish. Additionally, players are given more fine control in the design and layout of their farms, more depth in interacting with non-player characters (NPCs), and unlimited time to play, as compared to the usual deadlines in Harvest Moon games. Each of these changes is a response to either Barone’s or a fan’s desires for a farming life-sim, and together they function as what is essentially an opportunity for Barone to rewrite the experiences of earlier Harvest Moon games to be more satisfying. While Stardew Valley almost certainly has fans new to the genre, many players point to the specific iterations and improvements of Stardew Valley as reasons they became interested in the game. Barone seems to have leveraged the memories and feelings of those who had played—and sometimes become disenchanted by—Harvest Moon. Admittedly, he himself has gone on record (in a Reddit thread) as having precisely those feelings: “I want to make it clear that I don’t intend on simply cloning Harvest Moon. I’m a big fan of Harvest Moon, but I always wished there were more games in the style of the first few. Stardew Valley is my attempt at reliving that old style, but at the same time adding to it and changing any annoying or boring aspects of the original games” (Snes, Back to Nature). These iterations and extensions of the Harvest Moon formula took considerable time and energy, complicated by Barone’s status as lone creator: Stardew Valley’s faced its share of delays and setbacks during development. Despite the ways in which I have discussed Barone’s ability to leverage human and nonhuman actors in every step of the process, there is no doubt that the game’s development timeline suffered on account of Barone being the only one actually working with the code and assets. Consider that development on Stardew Valley began in 2012, fully four years before its release; most major studio releases usually spend something 135

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closer to two or three years in development. However, as indie game developer Anna Anthropy (2012) points out, “It is, in fact, much harder to keep the idea behind the game coherent when the designer is managing a game of many people who are each working on one aspect of the game separately. . . . It’s hard to have a strong singular vision when the process of creation is spread thin” (pp. 102–3). While I would complicate Anthropy’s claim (since I believe all creative work is inherently collaborative), it still stands to reason that Stardew Valley could have been a very different game if Eric Barone had been beholden to others with a financial interest in his work. Major studio development (in games, film, and other media) is often heavily structured by risk; a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars (not uncommon for major film or game releases) usually demands a predictable return on investment. Whether founded or not, major game studios frequently do seem to have particular ideas about the proclivities and interests of people most likely to be interested in video games. This often means catering to the broadest and most predictable consumers of games, traditionally young, cisgender, heterosexual, white men. As a consequence, queer relationships have only relatively recently begun to be included in mainstream titles. However, one way in which Barone was able to capitalize on his relative freedom to make the game he wanted was in the game’s romantic relationships. Unlike its spiritual ancestor Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley allows players to engage in same-sex relationships. The games industry has a rocky relationship (to put it mildly) with anything outside heteronormativity— see, for example, the backlash surrounding same-sex romance and female player characters in Bioware’s Mass Effect (2008–12) or Dragon Age (2010– 16) series, the inclusion of homosexuality in Fallout: New Vegas (Bethesda Softworks, 2010), or the sense of betrayal some players expressed at the revelation of Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment, 2016) character Tracer being a lesbian. In other words, while the industry has taken some steps toward inclusive and diverse representation, studios do seem to see these moves as politically divisive and risky. Barone, in contrast, had no need to be nervous about including same-sex romance options in Stardew Valley. In fact, Barone addressed this choice directly in an “ask me anything” thread shortly before the release of the Nintendo Switch port of the game: It made sense to me, in an open-ended game like Stardew Valley, to allow players to really choose their own path in this new life. I wanted it to be a world of possibilities and potential for everyone. I also thought it would be more interesting and special if I didn’t just shoehorn same136

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sex relationship into the game, but acknowledge it and make it part of the storyline in it’s [sic] own small way. I think it’s an attention to detail that people appreciate. I always tried to address real issues, if possible, in Stardew Valley. (“I’m ConcernedApe,” 2017) In other words, Barone’s freedom to listen to the base of players he actively wanted to court—those who would understand and appreciate a less directive approach than in the Harvest Moon series—also allowed him to include narrative content without worrying about potential financial or political blowback. The game itself, alongside Barone’s approach to its initial planning and the context of its creation, gave rise to a paradigm wherein themes that would otherwise be controversial (for the games industry, at least) could be explored freely. Fundamentally, the underlying premise and structure of Stardew Valley enabled Barone’s decisions to provide options that would have been much more difficult to include in a more traditionally developed game. In other words, Barone collaborated with and managed the affordances of a ready fan base, and especially the way that the particular genre expectations of the farming sim worked as an object to solidify and render that fan base intelligible; he was able to recognize the ways in which his restrictions as a programmer aligned with the expectations of his audience, but those expectations were in place due to the characteristics of the genre itself. While Stardew Valley benefited from its freedom, it paradoxically also benefited from several constraints. For instance, Barone’s choices of tools for creating the game were nearly all best-fits. In his “ask me anything,” he admits that his decision to program the game in C# using the XNA framework was a poor decision based on availability and familiarity with Java (which has similarities to C#). Similarly, he used sounds from freesound.org for sound effects, synthesized the music himself (“one note at a time”), and created each of the art assets as pixel art due to ease of animation. Serendipitously, because of technical limitations and barriers in Barone’s skillset, he created a game that closely maps onto the visual and auditory style of early Harvest Moon games. That is, he collaborated with his constraints as objects in their own right, helping them to become productive elements of a network dedicated to releasing a game that captured the feeling of those earlier games. As much as Barone’s aesthetic decisions were deliberate, they were also made in response to his skillset and available resources. Although Barone’s deftness in navigating his technical hurdles is noteworthy, this sort of innovation—and in particular, innovation stemming 137

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from nonhuman structures—is not unheard of. In Racing the Beam, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost (2009) discuss slightly more extreme constraints as the foundation of technical innovation and creative thinking, pointing to the 128 bytes of available RAM in the Atari VCS. Bogost and Montfort detail the ways in which programmers had to draw backgrounds, generate randomness, and otherwise imagine workarounds, especially to port arcade games onto the home console. As they put it, “Technical innovations are often understood as the creation of new technology—new materials, new chip designs, new algorithms. But technical innovation can also mean using existing technical constraints in new ways, something that produces interesting results when combined with creative goals” (53). Barone’s own technical (and financial) limitations led to his decisions to utilize pixel art, free sounds, music created note-by-note, and a programming language he taught himself as necessary. However, he was able to successfully navigate and ally these resources into one of the best-selling independent games of all time. Ultimately, according to Barone, the success of Stardew Valley is traceable to its emergence as an entity with its own emotional resonance: It’s way more about the ideas and the vision than about what tools you use. . . . You’re absolutely right about not needing to be an expert coder. I’ll admit that the code behind Stardew Valley is super scrappy in many aspects. And I’d bet that many of the most popular indie games are also very sloppy under the hood. In the end, people are going to judge your game by the “experience.” .  .  . The art, music, writing is so much more important to that than having the most efficient, bug-free engine. Take Morrowind, for example . . . it’s buggy, there’s all kinds of problems with it, but it’s still beloved and many people think it’s the best Elder Scrolls game of all time. It’s because the world is imaginative, immersive, with great music and lore. (“I’m ConcernedApe,” 2017) Each of the individual parts of the game is important, but not important enough to overshadow the larger whole which emerges from their interaction and is more than the sum of its parts. Barone’s development of Stardew Valley managed to yoke together “scrappy” code, simple art assets, and hobbyist music, creating an engaging world and compelling gameplay that is a product of its limitations, rather than an attempt to rise above them. 138

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Conclusion Ultimately, the key takeaway from Stardew Valley’s development is the importance of recognizing that nonhuman objects are not merely passive tools or background scenery waiting for human presence to spring to life. I have argued here that Stardew Valley’s success is in no small part traceable to Barone’s ability to effectively leverage the various nonhuman elements involved in development and marketing his game. As new materialist rhetorician Laurie Gries (2015) (relying on Latour) contends, we can benefit from “understanding nonhumans as full-fledged actors in collectives that neither have mastery over us nor are mastered by us” (p. 73). Gries refers to this concept as “rhetorical actancy,” as opposed to the traditional notion of rhetorical agency, arguing that traditional modes of analysis “cannot capture this rhetorical becoming in which both humans and our material counterparts are transforming and transformed” (p. 78). In the future, developers (and those of us who study games) may wish to focus more attention on these moments of transformation—on the platforms, conduits, and methods used in the development and marketing processes, specifically by recognizing ways in which they can be allies in the larger projects of game creation and reception. Barone, in particular, demonstrates that by paying attention to and effectively coordinating with humans and nonhumans alike, it is possible to establish satisfying and productive relationships, which can then result in more satisfying and successful gaming experiences.

Notes 1 I provide the Metacritic scores of these games not to suggest an objective measure of quality but rather to demonstrate the critical (and, often, commercial) success of the series. While Metacritic is not without its problems (not the least of which is that it elides dissenting voices by aggregating review scores into a singular number), it is currently an industry standard in terms of general assessment of reviewer opinions. 2 Similar approaches are common in other independent efforts, especially in cases like Minecraft or Terraria, where word of mouth and public support of a fanbase resulted in success similar to Stardew Valley. Barone would likely have been aware of the success of these games, and followed a similar pattern in his approaches to those developers. 3 A “subreddit” is essentially a smaller forum within the larger Reddit site, where users post links related to specific topics.

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Indie Games in the Digital Age 4 Actor Woody Harrelson’s spectacularly ill-considered “ask me anything” for the film Rampart is often referenced by Reddit users as such an example. Harrelson seemed to have no idea—self-explanatory label notwithstanding—that an “ask me anything” was an opportunity to connect with fans rather than the traditional press junket appearance. While users asked about his personal life, other roles, scandals he had been involved in, and so on, Harrelson encouraged users to “focus on the film, people.” The Reddit user base was generally unhappy, feeling as though Harrelson’s “ask me anything” was especially mercenary (even for a publicity appearance). 5 Much has been written about Reddit’s tendency toward reinforcing hegemonic culture. For a game studies perspective that also relies on Latour’s ANT approach, see Adrienne Massanari (2013).

Works Cited Anthropy, A. (2012). Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press, 2012. Barone, E. (n.d.). “Stardew Valley—Farming RPG.” Retrieved August 3, 2018, from Stardew Valley—Farming RPG website: http://stardewvalley.weebly.com/. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bogost, I. (2012). Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bryant, L. R. (2011). The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library. Couts, A. (2012, December 29). “How to get a link on the front page of Reddit.” Digital Trends. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.dig​italt​rends​.com/​how-t​o/how​-toget-a-​link-​ on-the-front-page-of-reddit/. DeVoss, D. N., & Ridolfo, J. (2009, January 15). “Composing for recomposition: Rhetorical velocity and delivery.” Retrieved from http:​//kai​ros.t​echno​rheto​ric.n​ et/13​.2/to​poi/r​idolf​o_dev​oss/i​ntro.​html. Gries, L. (2015). Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Harman, G. (2005). Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago, IL: Open Court. He, J., Ostendorf, M., He, X., Chen, J., Gao, J., Li, L., & Deng, L. (2016). “Deep reinforcement learning with a combinatorial action space for predicting popular Reddit threads.” In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Austin, Texas. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.acl​web. o​rg/an​tholo​gy/D1​6-118​9. I’m ConcernedApe, creator of Stardew Valley. (2017). “Ask me anything!” Retrieved August 3, 2018 from https​://ww​w.red​dit.c​om/r/​ninte​ndo/c​ommen​ts/75​ag0g/​ im_co​ncern​edape​_crea​tor_ of_stardew:valley_ask_me/. 140

This Is How a Garden Grows Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York, NY: New York University Press. Latour, B. (1993). The Pasteurization of France (A. Sheridan & J. Law, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Lin, A. (2016, February 23). “Stardew Valley: Pushing the boundaries of farming RPGs.” Cornell Daily Sun. Retrieved from https​://co​rnell​sun.c​om/20​16/02​/23/s​ tarde​w- valle​y-pus​hing-​the-b​ounda​ries-​of-fa​rming​-rpgs​/. Massanari, A. (2013). “Playful participatory culture: Learning from Reddit.” First Monday. Retrieved from https​://fi​rstmo​nday.​org/o​js/in​dex.p​hp/sp​ir/ar​ticle​/ view​/8787.​ Montfort, N., & Bogost, I. (2009). Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. “Stardew Valley is what looks like an indie Harvest Moon for PC and they’re on Steam Greenlight. I’m pretty excited about this, anyone else with me?” (2012). Retrieved August 3, 2018 from https​://ww​w.red​dit.c​om/r/​harve​stmoo​n/com​ ments​/zmi9​i/sta​rdew:​valle​y_is_​what_​l ooks_like_an_indie/. Surowiecki, J. (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds. New York, NY: Anchor.

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CHAPTER 7

THE MAKING OF ESCAPE ROOM IN A BOX

Cynthia Wang

Introduction Escape rooms—games set in a physical space, usually a locked room, where participants have a set amount of time to solve puzzles and “escape”—have been increasingly popular since the early 2010s (French and Shaw, 2015), seeing an explosion of growth in recent years. In early 2016, two stay-athome moms, Juliana Patel and Ariel Rubin, both of whom are avid fans of escape rooms, decided to create their own version of an escape room game—complete with puzzles and locks—that people could play at home. Their game, Escape Room in a Box: The Werewolf Experiment, launched as a Kickstarter project, and received over $135,000 in pledges, far outstripping their initial goal of $19,500. Because of their success, they started their own game company the Wild Optimists, and branched out to creating customized puzzle games for both private clients and mainstream media corporations. Additionally, the major game company, Mattel, licensed both the Escape Room in a Box: The Werewolf Experiment game and the trademark, contracting with Patel and Rubin to design additional games as a part of an Escape Room in a Box (ERIAB) game series. Through the narrative of the creation of ERIAB, this chapter explores some interesting themes that emerged from this process. Digital media on the Internet has allowed for social, political, and economic reconfigurations that have impacted production processes in game-making. In the case of Escape Room in a Box: The Werewolf Experiment, the first game of the ERIAB series, I examine how the creators, Patel and Rubin, leveraged their social networks in the digital environment to finance the game through crowdsourced funding, which opened up space for two moms to enter into a scene that has traditionally been reserved for men. I also explore the ways in which Patel’s and Rubin’s identity as female game creators and as mothers interrelate with their experience in the game creation space, how

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their presence in this space opens up an avenue for us to understand the existing gendered dynamics within the gaming industry, and how Patel and Rubin negotiate their own identities as women and mothers in this space. Finally, I consider how their relationship with a major game company Mattel increases the visibility and economic viability of their independently created game (and subsequently increasing the visibility of two successful female game designers to rupture the norm of games and game-making as maledominated spaces), creating a space for symbiotic game creation in which indie processes start to inform traditional processes of game-making. I sat down with Patel and Rubin in fall of 2018 to chat with them about their journey. Patel and Rubin started conceptualizing ERIAB through their love of playing escape rooms. But one often had to travel to escape rooms, and the rooms were generally only open at night, not to mention that escape rooms would cost $20–30 per person. Because they were both mothers with young children, and enjoyed game nights at home, they thought about how it might be possible to do an escape room at home, something that would mimic the at-home game nights they enjoyed so much, while also combining their love for puzzles and escape rooms, all for a more economical price. They started looking into the feasibility of making a board game escape room that could be played at home, and thus, ERIAB was born.

Crowdfunding the Game, Disrupting the System, and Surprises As neither Patel nor Rubin had ready-made connections within the traditional game-making industry, they turned to Kickstarter to fund their project. Kickstarter is a crowdfunding site which started in 2009, as a way for people who may not have access to a large amount of capital from one source that would help fund their projects to ask many people to donate a small amount in order to meet their funding goal. For example, if a musician needs $10,000 to make an album, it is difficult to get one source to fund $10,000, but it is much more feasible to get five hundred fans and/or friends to donate $20 each. Those who donate are called “backers.” Oftentimes, these are not as much simple donations as they are presale transactions. If a backer pledges $20 for the musician to make the album, then they would also receive a copy of the final album when it is released. In Patel and Rubin’s case, they asked for $19,500 to create a version of their game, which would fund the production of around 250 units of the game. If a backer pledged at least $55, then they would receive a copy of the game. The full $19,500 was 143

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fully funded in fourteen hours, with a total of over $135,000 raised over the course of the campaign, seven times their expected funding, which caused them to rethink their overall production process, while also boosting the game’s popularity and visibility. The Internet allows individual fans to invest economically and sometimes contribute creatively in the creation and production of various projects. Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and PledgeMusic provide a platform for project creators, media producers, and instigators of other such endeavors to fundraise through the monetary pledges of family, friends, fans, and other interested groups. This also allows for a modicum of economic power for groups that traditionally have been cut out of the production process (e.g., social minorities, marginalized groups, LGBTQ communities). For example, while Asian American artists have been fairly invisible in mainstream media (Hess, 2016), they have flourished on YouTube (Hao, 2016), an online platform where barriers to publishing are lower than traditional forms of publication (Shirky, 2008). As such, they are also altering the economic landscape of media creation through the generation of monetary funds through YouTube’s ad model. Similarly, the economic power of crowds can be seen through fan support through sites like Patreon, which allow people to contribute small amounts of money to support the work of independent artists and creators. Hence, traditional forms of cultural production, especially who stands to benefit through the creation of media, necessarily shift in light of a digital platform. Patel and Rubin certainly became beneficiaries of these affordances of the Internet. They did not go into this endeavor with the intent to create a business. They did not have a solid fan base. They just wanted to create a fun game for their friends, and Kickstarter would allow them to raise money to make it. In fact, they were worried about whether or not their game would receive funding because, according to Patel, [websites were] saying that you had to have been going to conventions for the past two years and building up your mailing list, and you should have the mailing list to where you know, on Day 1, x number of people will back your game on Day 1. And we had none of that, because every other game you playtested, people are like, this is fun, we’ll buy it, let me know when your Kickstarter starts. Our game, people are like, this is a blast! Thanks for the experience! Like, they pretty much played it, so we didn’t think they would buy. (J. Patel and A. Rubin, personal communication, August 15, 2018) 144

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Their Kickstarter campaign, though, exceeded expectations. According to Patel and Rubin, much of their success can be attributed to the fact that they reached out to game reviewers and invited them to playtest their game in person, or sent them the game itself. These reviewers, who mostly used blogs and YouTube to conduct their reviews, then published articles about the game, which then got posted around social media. This process exemplifies conflicting ideas around the affordances of the Internet. Scholars have long ruminated on the impact of social media and the Internet on cultural production and participation (Jenkins, 2006; Shirky, 2008), power distribution (as it upsets institutional structures; see Dean, 2003; Hindman, 2009), and economic structures (Anderson, 2006; Benkler, 2006). On the one hand, there is the idea that social media is able to “democratize” society by giving power and voice to those who would otherwise be muted, whether it is in the expression of opinions or the creation of content that mainstream production institutions have snubbed, allowing for the emergence and visibility of marginalized voices, counternarratives, and subcultures. As such, Patel and Rubin were able to use social media and resources on the Internet to get in touch with these reviewers to whom they otherwise would have had greater barriers. These reviewers, in turn, took advantage of the affordances of the ease of digital platforms for lowering the barriers to publishing posts (Shirky, 2008) to disseminate their (mostly positive) opinions on ERIAB. At the same time, using Kickstarter successfully to create the (capital) means of production rather than going through more traditional means of game-making, such as proposing a speculative game to a board game-making giant like Mattel or Hasbro, also speaks to the potential to mobilize social networks on digital platforms in service of economically catalyzing a creative project. Such alternate means also circumvents the traditional gatekeepers of corporate gaming giants as the primary purveyors of what games are made, what stories are told, and who gets heard. On the other hand, scholars like Hindman (2009) and Dean (2003) have cautioned against the overly optimistic perspective around the democratizing potential of the Internet, positing that institutionalized power dynamics and social relations remain in place and are perpetuated and reinforced on the Internet. Even as ERIAB has bypassed the need to play within traditional forms of game creation, Patel and Rubin still credit influential game reviewers and bloggers in helping them publicize their game and releasing their reviews on the first day of the Kickstarter campaign, bringing an

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immense amount of attention in the indie board game and escape room networks to the Kickstarter page. And how did they get these reviewers? Rubin: The biggest thing that we did based on the research Juliana did was that we made, quite expensive, we made fifteen prototypes. Patel: Those were really expensive, because reception matters so much. So we could have just sent it to them in a [regular] box or whatever, but we had to get professional boxes made from a company in China, where you look at it, and it looks like a game box. This was the prototype. For the prototype to just get the box, never mind the locks and the keys and the tins and all the other things we put in that were not cheap, each box I believe was $40, for an empty box. And we got fifteen of them. It was insane. Rubin: It was a lot of money, but it was important, because we were firsttime designers. So we didn’t have that much Kickstarter cred—we had backed some projects but not a ton, so we needed those reviews. (J. Patel and A. Rubin, personal communication, August 15, 2018) Patel and Rubin invested substantial economic capital into this endeavor, which is not something that just anyone can do. In addition to economic capital, Patel and Rubin, being stay-at-home moms, were able to leverage their temporal capital, which is not necessarily the amount of free time available, but the amount of time one has under their control to do what they choose (Wang, 2013). Their time was not at the whim of a corporate boss or supervisor. They were investing that time into a project over which they had ownership, and which they deem meaningful. They were able to use that time to contact game reviewers, bloggers, and podcasters, and send them the expensive prototypes. These reviewers were then able to help publicize and boost the visibility of their product. Patel continues: So at the time, there were not that many escape room reviewers out there. We sent one to Room Escape Artist, which has become like, the biggest, best well-known escape room blog out there. We sent it to them, and thank goodness we had the full prototype, because they felt it was going to be terrible. They were like, there’s no way you can take an escape room experience and put it in a box to do at home. They were very upfront about it. So we sent it to them, and they loved it and became one of our biggest champions. We took a risk on people

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like Joel Eddy at Drive Thru [Games]. He pretty much doesn’t do Kickstarters, but he has quite a big following. We just reached out to him, and he was one of those people who was like, oh, I did an escape room while traveling, it was super fun, it was not in my area, I would love to do it. And so he was one of our biggest supporters. So having an influencer like him who has so much cred in the game world play the game and love the game really helped. He posted on the Reddit for board games the day we launched, saying, this game is coming out, I’ve played it, it’s really fun, I’m really excited about it. And we were the #1 boardgame on Reddit because of his post. (J. Patel and A. Rubin, personal communication, August 15, 2018) While these reviewers may not be part of mainstream culture—Drive Thru Games1 is a board game review site that uses YouTube to host videos, and Room Escape Artist,2 put out in blog form and run by a small team of four writers, focuses specifically on escape rooms as the name suggests— they have acquired substantial social or subcultural capital, in that they have achieved a certain status within the escape room and board games subculture, in the way of reputation and followers. The power of gatekeeping itself, traditionally prominent in mainstream culture and plays an important role in connecting creators of popular culture to its audience/consumers (Hirsch, 1972), has not disappeared, but has instead shifted. The reviewers of ERIAB, as with more traditional forms of media, “facilitate and regulate the innovative process . . . [and] may wield great influence over the access of artist and audience to one another” (Hirsch, 1972, p. 640). In the digital era, this power over the process of facilitation given to intermediaries and gatekeepers—in this case, game reviewers—are more dispersed than that in mainstream corporate gaming companies (which concentrated the power needed to enter the industry), allowing for greater potential for indie production and creations to reach greater numbers of potential audiences and consumers with lower barriers to publishing content. It is perhaps most helpful to frame this potential in the affordances of digital media technologies that are bolstered by the Internet. Baym (2010) in particular discusses the ways in which we can think about the affordances of the Internet. She considers how digital platforms have the ability to interact with a great number of people (interactivity), reach people instantaneously and asynchronously (temporal structure), and reach a wide audience that is geographically disparate (reach). Patel and Rubin were able to leverage these affordances and resources to the benefit of ERIAB, and getting the game 147

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out expediently. Time was of the essence in the development of the game. There was the concern that other escape room board games were already in development by more established companies, as Rubin illustrates: We realized very quickly thinking about it that we needed to get it on Kickstarter fast. People gave us advice that we should have a six month lead time. And by the time we realized, we were in our creative process of making it, we were like ok, we need to get it on Kickstarter as quickly as possible, or someone else was going to have this idea. And we were right, because there were a number of toy companies that did have the idea in development. (J. Patel and A. Rubin, personal communication, August 15, 2018) Kickstarter hence allowed for the campaign to be launched and spread quickly, giving Patel and Rubin a slight edge to being first to market despite other similar games in development, illustrating the accelerated speeds (Agger, 2004; Hassan, 2009) at which digital platforms are able to mobilize networks, movements, and creative endeavors in the (re)production of capital. And the fact that their campaign was funded in fourteen hours speaks not only to how quickly information was spread, reaching multitudes of people across vast geographical spaces, but also to the strength of nontraditional communities and networks in the form of bloggers and reviewers, generating much interest and interaction among gamers and potential Kickstarter backers. Interestingly, actual physical space provided some complications to the distribution of ERIAB. Because of the fast popularity of the campaign, which spread internationally, Patel and Rubin had to figure out how to ship the game units overseas for backers from other countries. As Rubin puts it, “How are you going to do European shipping, international shipping? Yea, we lost a lot of backers there too” (J. Patel and A. Rubin, personal communication, August 15, 2018). In a way, the physical geographies of space complicated the affordances of the Internet in the goal of distributing physical units of ERIAB, and indeed, in the actual fundraising process. And yet, the affordance of the Internet for reaching huge groups of people was still evident. As Patel states, “The vast majority [of the backers] was American, but a huge portion of our percentage was international [even though] it’s a game in English, and it needs to be in English. There are language-dependent puzzles” (J. Patel and A. Rubin, personal communication, August 15, 2018). Here, Patel notes the potential of the Internet to reach wider audiences from a variety of 148

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different cultures, yet recognizes that there are still limitations to that reach given certain cultural and linguistic specificities. It is worth noting the factors that allowed Patel and Rubin to fully leverage the potential of the Internet to publicize and fundraise. According to Rubin, “Juliana [Patel] did a ton of research” (J. Patel and A. Rubin, personal communication, August 15, 2018) on how to run Kickstarter campaigns, demonstrating that they had the technology and access to be connected to the Internet, the proficiency to use the Internet to find resources (Warschauer, 2003), and the technological literacy (Daker, 2006) to evaluate the information they received. Not only did they have the technological access, they also had the temporal capital to conduct said research and do the legwork for reaching out to reviewers, sending out prototypes, and running a campaign. Additionally, they had the economic capital to make the initial fifteen prototypes of the game to be sent to reviewers even before they started their Kickstarter campaign. These factors, which contribute to their habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), or tacit understanding of how to use the resources at their disposal, combined with the affordances of the Internet, maximized their chance of a successful campaign. At the same time, though, they are two female game-makers in a male-dominated industry, and entered into the industry through nontraditional means of crowdsourced funding, while using information available for free online to guide their process. As Patel noted, That’s in the Kickstarter advice if you read the blog! There is everything you need to know if you do the research, like, there’s Jaime Stegmaier, James Mathe, there’s this Facebook group of tabletop games Kickstarter advice. If you do the research, everything you need to know is there, and if you actually follow it, things will go better for you. (personal communication, Patel and Rubin, August 15, 2018) Thanks to the Internet, anything one could want to know about making a game or running a Kickstarter campaign is available online, in ways that would not have been possible previously. And while Patel and Rubin had the habitus—resources, capital, skills, knowledge, and so on—to their benefit, their experience speaks volumes of the potential for the Internet to, at the very least, make space for voices and perspectives outside of what has been traditionally present in the past. Hence, we see how the process of creating and publicizing the ERIAB games has created opportunities for two women

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outside of the traditional mainstream industry who otherwise may have found greater barriers to entry.

Women Game-Makers in a Man’s Playpen The gaming world, from both a producer and a consumer perspective, has been a male-dominated industry, so much so that women becoming more prominent in gaming culture incurred a backlash in which female gamemakers were harassed and attacked on social media under the hashtag #GamerGate. Gamergate, a “movement” that began in 2014, represents the extreme in the normalization of gaming as a domain for boys and men to the exclusion of women. Participants in Gamergate attacked and threatened women players, commenters, and producers, revealing a misogynistic perspective toward women that is endemic to mainstream gaming cultures, both in video games and in board/non-digital games. Gamergate, though, is representative of a pushback to change. Those like Chess see Gamergate as “not only responding to the emergence of women players but is also evidence of the fading dominance of what is often considered the primary [while, straight, male] audience of video games” (Chess, 2017, Preface, Section 2, para. 4). Indeed, we have seen an increase of positive representation around women, and potentially queer women, within games themselves. For example, in Naughty Dog’s zombie apocalypse masterpiece, The Last of Us, the main character, Ellie is explicitly queer. The trailer for the sequel, The Last of Us 2, released in June 2018, shows Ellie in an intimate moment with another woman. Likewise, in Bioware’s Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, the player can play either as a male or female character and have either straight or queer romances. And these two examples are from mainstream, traditional video game companies. Indie games have found even more latitude to embrace narratives outside of the straight male protagonist/creator norm, which has been discussed at length elsewhere in this collection. Within the ERIAB game itself, Patel and Rubin deliberately designed the main character, a mad scientist werewolf named Dr. Cynthia Gnaw (Doc Gnaw), as an explicitly female character, pushing back against both gendered assumptions around stereotypically male gamers and scientists. Within scholarship, many scholars have wrestled with how to alternately frame gaming outside of its misogynist, male-centered perspectives. Shira Chess’s (2017) work grapples with how, even as space is made for women as imagined consumers and players—and indeed have “time management 150

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games” like Diner Dash that cater to women gamers, women players are constructed as theoretical figures that both “invit[e] in women audiences yet keep[s] them at bay” (Chess, 2017, Introduction, “Now We’re Knitting . . .,” para. 11) Framing gender and sexuality in games in similarly complex perspectives is Bonnie Ruberg (2018), who acknowledges that “video games are and have long been important sites of queer expression” (Ruberg, 2018, p. 545) despite the fact that “heteronormative content remains standard in most game genres, [and] homophobic language is commonplace in online gaming” (Ruberg, 2018, p. 545). Along similar lines, Adrienne Shaw and Bonnie Ruberg (2017) posit that queer game studies is an important perspective on gaming in “destabilizing assumptions [by offering] a new way of seeing video games” (Introduction, para. 2). Additionally, the production side of gaming is still predominantly the realm of male game designers—74 percent are male according to the 2017 International Game Developers Association survey that was released in 2018 (Weststar et al., 2018, p. 11). Given the normatively male-centric model of games culture, the presence of two successful female designers who eschew traditional models of game-making while also making headway into collaboration within these traditional forms represents a queering and destabilizing of the presumed patriarchal norm. Therefore, in this case, queering games can be considered not just about the representation of queer characters and individuals within gaming, but also about deviating from the heteronormative gendered frameworks and assumptions around game-making and game playing. Hence, Patel’s and Rubin’s experiences at the intersection of being female gamers, game designers, and mothers present an interesting addition to these conversations. They negotiate their identities both in their presentation as female game-makers in gaming industry spaces and communities and through the way they navigate the domestic space and time as mothers and wives who are also successful game designers running their own company. Being female game creators in a male-dominated industry comes with its own set of challenges, particularly as Patel and Rubin’s presence is often seen as a rupture to the patriarchal norm of those spaces. In an interview they did with Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls blog, “both women agreed that there is a certain sense of imposter syndrome with their new endeavor. [Patel] said, ‘I think it is a very female thing of being like, “I don’t know if I’m the person that can do this”’” (Ayoub, 2016). Imposter syndrome, or “imposter phenomenon,” is an internalized belief prevalent particularly among high achieving women who feel they are not as intelligent and accomplished as others believe them to be (Clance and Imes, 1978). Within their self-related 151

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narrative of their journey, Patel and Rubin demonstrate considerable selfreflexivity by recognizing the norms of the industry, understanding their unique position within the gendered dynamics of gaming even as they continually do work that ruptures that gendered norm. Their feeling of being “imposters” within the game design culture is undoubtedly fueled by experiences at conventions where they have encountered people who simply did not believe that two women could possibly have been the game designers. They have been asked if they were marketers or social media directors for the game, with people subconsciously assigning them to a more feminized, subordinate role, assuming that they were the assistants for a male designer. Arguably, the amplification and visibility of their work as female game designers has been bolstered by interviews on blogs and podcasts, nontraditional indie media outlets whose reach has been greatly helped by lowered barriers to Internet publishing. Since the Kickstarter for ERIAB was launched, Patel and Rubin have had many opportunities for interviews on blogs and podcasts. In addition to the Galentine’s Day interview mentioned earlier, the two have also been featured on the board game media network Punchboard Media in an article that is part of a “Women of Board Gaming” series (Buscemi, 2017), and a Board Game Design Lab podcast [Board Game Design Lab, n.d.] in which they are also described as “busy moms”), and other such indie-produced gaming community based outlets. Much like the game reviewers mentioned earlier who bolstered the popularity of their Kickstarter campaign, not only do these outlets serve as gatekeepers and opinion leaders (Burt, 1999) in increasing the visibility of these game-makers but the emphasis of their identity as women and as mothers also signifies a recognition, as tacit and subconscious as it may be, that the game-making realm is largely male-centric. Calling attention to their identities potentially amplifies representation for women gamers and game designers, and increases the space for discussion and discourse around women in gaming cultures. As emphasized earlier, in addition to being as female game designers, Patel and Rubin are also mothers. While their job as game developers is not a 9-to-5 job in the most traditional sense, it is a full-time, dedicated job. Hence, they negotiate, as many mothers do, a juggling of what has become income-generating work and child-rearing responsibilities that are often unevenly placed on women. In our conversation, it was evident that Patel in particular internalizes the expectation that she has primary responsibilities of child-rearing and domestic work as they talk about how they distributed their time during the Kickstarter campaign. Rubin states, “At first, this was a 152

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fun project that we were going to do for 3 months. . . . Initially, we put in a lot more time [into gamemaking] . . . like during the Kickstarter, our husbands to taking over everything” (J. Patel and A. Rubin, personal communication, August 15, 2018). Patel continues: Like, we can kill ourselves for 3 months. And then when we saw that it is going to actually be a thing, we can’t kill ourselves forever. At some point we’re going to have to clean our house, watch the children, and that’s when it’s like, this is going to be a job we’re doing, so let’s figure out when we’re going to devote those hours. (J. Patel and A. Rubin, personal communication, August 15, 2018) Arlie Hochschild famously coins this expectation on women to take on the lion’s share of child-rearing and household responsibilities as the “second shift” (Hochschild and Machung, 1989). While Patel and Rubin both have supportive husbands who do their fair share in domestic chores, Patel acknowledges that she and Rubin are the “primary caretakers of our children. We pick them up every day from school and all that” (J. Patel and A. Rubin, personal communication, August 15, 2018). So when it came to deciding where to focus their company, they decided to license the game to “devote [more time] to designing. We were looking for that balance.” This balance, for them, was about devoting their time to game design, rather than worrying about game manufacturing, for which other companies, like Mattel, have ready-made infrastructures. And fortuitously, they do seem to have found a balance with their company the Wild Optimists. While they spend the majority of their work-time child-free and concentrating on their career, they have the flexibility to occasionally attend to mother duties while in work mode, embodying both identities of mother and game creator simultaneously. Indeed, the Instagram account for the Wild Optimists (@ thewildoptimists) features a number of posts and photos of Patel and Rubin with their kids, visually representing a melding of these two identities. In this way, even as they perform the “second shift” as mothers, the affordances of the Internet which led to their successful crowdfunded project and the subsequent viability of a game design career in their own company have given them the temporal flexibility and temporal capital to negotiate both roles in ways that complicate traditional capitalist frameworks. Even as Patel recognizes the gendered expectations of her as a mother, which follows both Hochschild’s analysis on traditional capitalist frameworks of unpaid domestic labor, she and Rubin, I would argue, are able to exercise increased 153

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levels of temporal capital (ironically sometimes working more!) and set aside time for mothering duties at their discretion. While meaningful labor, as mothering is often said to be, is still labor, Patel and Rubin function under a process of greater agency and control over their time and activities they deem meaningful and over which they claim ownership, resisting the Marxist notion of alienated labor in service of a higher institutional power. Additionally, their visibility as female designers and as mothers are amplified through digital platforms and gaming media outlets, providing a nonnormative representation within game design spheres, illustrating a rupture of both gender and capitalist normative frameworks as they embark on alternate paths of cultural production.

Negotiating between Indie and Traditional Models of Game-Making Since 2016, Patel and Rubin’s game-making endeavors have evolved into collaborating with more traditional forms of game-making while still maintaining an indie status, and running the Wild Optimists. The collaboration with Mattel came about fairly early on, when the gaming corporation noticed their Kickstarter success—Mattel’s head of games was a Kickstarter backer for ERIAB—and took on the manufacturing and distribution of subsequent versions of ERIAB, including the second in the ERIAB series, Escape Room in a Box: Flashback, released in the summer of 2019. Patel and Rubin are contracted for additional games through Mattel, making ERIAB into an ongoing series, mimicking physical escape rooms, like 60 Out, Maze Rooms, and Escape Room LA, which have multiple rooms devised to encourage repeat customers and a steady stream of capital. As such, they have been able to leverage the infrastructure of traditional processes of game-making while continuing an indie ethos. According to Patel and Rubin, traditional game-makers keep a close eye on indie games and game reviewers to keep up to date on popular new indie games. While processes like these may be interpreted as somewhat appropriative, with traditional mainstream game companies scooping up the fruits of indie labor (see Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter, 2009; Ruberg, 2019), in the case of ERIAB, the collaboration with a mainstream company not only has greatly boosted the visibility and popularity of the game itself but has also created a space for increased representation for two female game-makers who continue to create both for a major mainstream gaming company and their own independently owned 154

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and run design company. This symbiosis between a traditional mainstream game company (Mattel), an alternate form of funding (indie Kickstarter campaign), and an indie process of game creation (Patel and Rubin’s journey) was arguably driven by the proliferation of community support and the accessibility of information in the Internet. Given Patel’s and Rubin’s sense that mainstream companies have an interest in the goings-on within indie gaming communities, it is possible that, at least in some circles, we are seeing alternate forms of game production heavily influencing the kinds of style, structure, and content that makes it into traditional models of gamemaking and distribution, creating the potential for greater diversity in games, wider range of stories told, and increased opportunities for different types of creators and gamers to participate in gaming cultures and communities. In more recent months, Patel and Rubin have slowly transitioned into recognition in more mainstream circles as well. A great example of this is the Wild Optimists’ recent partnership with Sony Pictures for their new Escape Room movie. To promote the film, Sony commissioned Patel and Rubin to create an at-home escape room game, similar to their flagship ERIAB series, with a whole set of new puzzles (Heimbuch, 2019) that comes in an enclosed box. In May 2019, the nationwide Sunday newspaper magazine, Parade, featured the two creators in an article, “Two Girlbosses Explain Why You Should Make Time to Play—And How They Do It” (Pajer, 2019), and in June 2019, an interview with Patel and Rubin was featured on SYFY Wire (Armstrong, 2019). Also in June 2019, they released their second licensed game with Mattel, Escape Room in a Box: Flashback, featuring more puzzles by Doc Gnaw. In both their partnership with Mattel and with Sony, we can see the influence of independent creators on the landscape of traditional media and game creation. It also compels the question of whether traditional, corporate models of game-making can be shattered, and indie processes sustained. The Wild Optimists present an interesting hybrid, where the company itself is independent to mainstream gaming companies, with a docket of projects that include both freelance indie design work and collaborations with larger entertainment corporations.

Conclusion What does ERIAB tell us about the affordances of digital platforms to make space for alternate models of indie game-making? In the specific case of ERIAB, we can see that digital platforms and social networks have allowed 155

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Patel and Rubin to create a game outside of mainstream, traditional models of game-making, circumventing corporate game-making processes, and shifting gatekeepers to a more participatory realm. We also see that the process was helped by Patel’s and Rubin’s social position and habitus in coming from a place of having economic, social, and temporal capital to make initial investments that would increase their chances of a successful Kickstarter campaign. Finally, bolstered in part by their partnership with Mattel, Patel and Rubin arguably expanded the spaces for female gamers and game-makers to be represented in the media and in the gaming community. As Patel and Rubin repeatedly told me, ERIAB’s success, and the subsequent success of their creators in the mainstream realm was unexpected. We should be cautious to not generalize Patel’s and Rubin’s experience as an overly optimistic narrative about the potential for indie game-making on digital platforms to provide viable, sustainable alternatives to traditional models of game-making. Indeed, their journey shows us that mainstream game-making still wields great amounts of power in the creation of games, as do traditional concepts of gatekeeping and curation seen in game review sites. And yet, we can be somewhat optimistic in that their success was helped in part by networks of gaming communities that emerged outside of traditional outlets, supporting them, and giving them a voice and platform for their creative works, in large part because they developed a great game in a unique form at a time when escape rooms as a genre were gaining popular. Ultimately, the hope is that the presence and popularity of these Wild Optimists, whether in the indie realm, in mainstream outlets, or as a hybrid of both, brings about a shift toward embracing different ways in which games are played and made, as well as those who have the potential to create games.

Notes 1 https://drivethruvideos.com/. 2 https://roomescapeartist.com/about/.

Works Cited Agger, B. (2004). Speeding Up Fast Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Anderson, C. (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Westport, CT: Hyperion. 156

The Making of Escape Room in a Box Armstrong, V. (2019, June 4). “Nerdy jobs: Meet the designers who create at-home escape rooms and other puzzle experiences.” SYFY WIRE. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.syf​y.com​/syfy​wire/​nerdy​-jobs​-meet​-the-​desig​ners-​who-c​reate​-athome-​escap​e-roo​ms-an​d-oth​er-pu​zzle-​exper​ience​s. Ayoub, C. (2016, February 13). “A galentine’s day adventure: Escape Room in a Box! Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls.” Retrieved from https://amysmartgirls.com/a- galen​ tines​-day-​adven​ture-​escap​e-roo​m-in-​a-box​-c636​51103​d30. Baym, N. K. (2010). Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge, England: Polity. Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Board Game Design Lab. (n.d.). “Designing escape room games with Juliana Patel and Ariel Rubin.” In Board Game Design Lab [Podcast]. Retrieved from http:​//www​.boar​dgame​desig​nlab.​com/d​esign​ing-e​scape​- room-​games​-with​-juli​ ana-p​atel-​and-a​riel-​rubin​/. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Burt, R. S. (1999). “The social capital of opinion leaders.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 566, 37–54. Buscemi, E. (2017, September 6). “In Focus—Interview with Juliana Patel and Ariel Rubin.” Punchboard Media. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.pun​chboa​rdmed​ia.co​ m/hom​e/201​7/9/6​/punc​hboar​d-med​ia-in​-focu​s- inter​view-​with-​julia​na-pa​tel-a​ nd-ar​iel-r​ubin. Chess, S. (2017). Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). “The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention.” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–47. Daker, J. R. (Ed.). (2006). Defining Technological Literacy: Towards an Epistemological Framework. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Dean, J. (2003). “Why the net is not a public sphere.” Constellations, 10(1), 95–112. Dyer-Witheford N., & De Peuter, G. (2009). Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. French, S., & Shaw, J. M. (2015, July 21). “The unbelievably lucrative business of escape rooms.” MarketWatch. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.mar​ketwa​tch.c​om/st​ ory/t​he-we​ird-n​ew-wo​rld-o​f-esc​ape-r​oom- businesses-2015-07-20. Hao, K. (2016, October 13). “YouTube has made Asian-Americans impossible for Hollywood to ignore.” How We Get To Next. Retrieved from https​://ho​wwege​ ttone​xt.co​m/you​tube-​has-m​ade-a​sian-​ameri​cans-​impos​sible​-for-​ hollywood-toignore-be9c110e2be. Hassan, R. (2009). Empires of Speed: Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society. Boston, MA: Brill. Heimbuch, J. (2019, April 9). “Sony Pictures sent us an ESCAPE ROOM to celebrate the film’s digital release.” HorrorBuzz. Retrieved from https​://ho​rrorb​ uzz.c​om/20​19/04​/09/s​ony-p​ictur​es-se​nt-us​-an-e​scape​-room​-to- celebrate-thefilms-digital-release/. 157

Indie Games in the Digital Age Hess, A. (2016, May 25). “Asian-American actors are fighting for visibility. They will not be ignored.” The New York Times. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​ com/2​016/0​5/29/​movie​s/asi​an-am​erica​n-act​ors-a​re-fi​ghtin​g- for-v​isibi​lity-​they-​ will-​not-b​e-ign​ored.​html. Hindman, M. (2009). The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hirsch, P. M. (1972). “Processing fads and fashions: An organization-set analysis of cultural industry systems.” American Journal of Sociology, 77(4), 639–659. https://doi.org/10.1086/225192. Hochschild, A., & Machung, A. (1989). The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home. New York, NY: Penguin Books Ltd. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, NY: New York University Press. Pajer, N. (2019, May 22). “Two girlbosses explain why you should make time to play—and how they do it.” Parade. Retrieved from https​://pa​rade.​com/8​82978​/ nico​lepaj​er/ho​w-to-​have-​fun/. Ruberg, B. (2018). “Queerness and video games.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 24(4), 543–55. Ruberg, B. (2019). “The precarious labor of queer indie game-making: Who benefits from making video games ‘better’?.” Television & New Media. https​://do​ i.org​/10.1​177/1​52747​64198​51090​. Ruberg, B., & Shaw, A. (Eds.). (2017). Queer Game Studies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York, NY: The Penguin Press. Wang, C. (2013). “A slice of time: An exploration of temporal capital and its relationships to economics, culture, and society in a technological and digital age.” Gnovis: Georgetown University’s Journal of Communication, Culture & Technology, 13(2T). Warschauer, M. (2003). Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Weststar, J., O’Meara, V., & Legault, M.-J. (2018). “Developer satisfaction survey 2017: Summary report.” International Game Developers Association. Retrieved from https​://cd​n.yma​ws.co​m/www​.igda​.org/​resou​rce/r​esmgr​/2017​_DSS_​/!IGD​ A_DSS​_ 2017_SummaryReport.pdf. Wild Optimists (@thewildoptimists) Instagram photos and videos. (n.d.). Retrieved June 1, 2019 from https​://ww​w.ins​tagra​m.com​/thew​ildop​timis​ts/.

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PART III INDIE GAMES TEXTS

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CHAPTER 8 THE HUNT FOR QUEER SPACES: MAINSTREAM INDIE GAMES, REPRESENTATION, AND LIMITED WORLDS

Cody Mejeur

The most exciting aspects of indie games are the opportunities they present for experimenting with forms in video games, and it’s no surprise that almost all of the most innovative and imaginative games have been produced by indie studios and developers. To name only a few, indie games such as Journey (thatgamecompany, 2012) have shown us what noncompetitive games of collaboration and exploration can look like; SOMA (Frictional Games, 2015) has demonstrated how games can explore complex philosophical concepts; and No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016) has pushed the limits of what we can do and imagine with procedurally generated content. These trends have led many scholars to consider indie games as an avantgarde; Hartmut Koenitz (2017), for example, has described indie games, particularly walking simulators (a genre about exploring and experiencing a particular narrative situation and environment), as a forward-thinking and experimental “next step in the evolution of narrative-focused video games.” As Bonnie Ruberg (2019b) notes, many other scholars, such as Alexander Galloway (2006), Mary Flanagan (2013), Brian Schrank (2014), and John Sharp (2015), have similarly theorized a video games avant-garde, but discussion of intersectional topics of race, gender, or sexuality in the formation of that avant-garde remains underexamined. Instead, the focus of these studies has remained predominantly on how indie, avant-garde games challenge existing standards in aesthetics and mechanics, and interfaces by imagining new ways of playing and being in game spaces. Queer indie games—games that feature queer characters and experiences, are made by queer developers, or are explicitly for queer players—are pushing the indie games avant-garde further by uniting experimentation with form and experimentation with representation, identity, and collectivity, all from

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queer perspectives. In other words, queer games do more than imagine new forms; they also imagine how those forms are gendered and sexed, and how forms might do the critical work of destabilizing heteronormative ideologies in games and beyond. Elsewhere in this collection, Bonnie Ruberg refers to these games as the “queer games avant-garde,” and notes how they challenge the exclusionary standards of video games and gaming cultures that often prioritize the experiences of straight white men. Some of these games have garnered critical acclaim and widespread recognition in games journalism and scholarship. The most prominent example is likely Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013), a game in the walking simulator genre that tasks players with exploring a family home and piecing together the family members’ narratives, one of which is a teenage lesbian coming-out story. The game was widely praised (and won BAFTA and VGX awards) for its narrative, environment, and inclusion of a queer experience, and reviews and articles about the game have been featured in many publications from The Mary Sue to Polygon to NPR (Chambers, 2013; Grant, 2014; Mullis, 2013). Gone Home has often been used in games journalism to argue that video games are getting more mature, inclusive, and better with representation. There is some truth to this argument: there are more queer representations in games today than there were years ago, and some queer indie games have become popular and financially successful (Greer, 2018).1 Yet there are many reasons why this narrative of things getting better for queer representation and queer games should give us pause, and this chapter argues that it is especially important to take stock of the limitations and challenges that remain as some queer games gain more visibility. If we have a queer games avant-garde, what does that avant-garde look like? Among the new forms and worlds that are emerging in it, what are the common themes and trends? Which narratives and experiences are being envisioned and privileged, and which are being silenced, elided, or marginalized? This chapter uses three queer games as case studies for starting to answer these questions: Gone Home, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (2014, The Astronauts), and Fragments of Him (2016, Sassybot). Each of these games gained mainstream popularity, journalistic coverage, and awards: beyond Gone Home’s noted earlier, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter won a BAFTA Games Award and was reviewed in Polygon, Kotaku, and The Guardian, and Fragments of Him won a People’s Choice Award and was reviewed in Polygon, Destructoid, and Killscreen (Frank, 2016; McEwan, 2014). Each also has a slightly different relationship to the queer games community. Gone Home has queer content and was developed in consultation with 162

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queer folks about their lived experiences but was not developed by queer folks themselves. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter has queer content but does not appear to have been developed by or in consultation with queer folks (at least based on what has been publicized). Fragments of Him has queer content and was developed at least in part from the developer’s own queer experiences. Taken together, these games paint a similar (and similarly limited) picture of the queer experiences that are most represented in popular indie games. In each game, the queer characters are depicted as dealing with rejection, grief, and loss caused by heteronormative family and friends. It would be reductive to say that each of these games do not have other moments as well—moments of hope, love, and joy—yet in each game the queer characters’ overall stories are defined by marginalization and even tragedy. By limiting queer experiences to negativity and hardship, these games play into a common narrative of queer difficulty in coming out and living openly in homophobic and transphobic society. They often do so in order to elicit an affective response from the player, such as empathy, compassion, or even pity. Restricting queer characters to particular tropes and narratives in this way is similar to popular culture representations of other marginalized peoples. For example, Gemma Sou (2018) discussed how games depicting refugee experiences frequently rely on tropes that are “orientalising and dehumanising portrayals of refugees as victims, which rely on grand emotional discourses that evoke sentimentalities of pity and compassion for suffering others” (p. 510). Likewise, Kishonna Gray (2018) noted how black characters in games are almost always portrayed either as “individuals who are trying to survive in a (white man’s) world with goals no different from those of their white counterparts” or as “ghettoized, with emphases on crime, drug abuse, and materialism” (pp. 62–63). For LGBTQ characters and characters from other marginalized communities, representation usually means a portrayal limited to the stereotypes that are most visible in larger social and cultural discourse. It is further conspicuous that these stereotypes rarely overlap—for example, each of the mainstream queer indie games here centers white queer experience, wherein queer stereotypes are prominent but racialized stereotypes are not. Of course, compounding stereotypes does little more than perpetuate more stereotypes, but popular queer indie games’ apparent unwillingness to engage racism and white supremacy as well as homophobia and sexism is yet another example of the “siloing” of identity in games that dictates that one can be either a person of color or queer, but never both (Shaw, 2018, p. 76). 163

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The problem with this trend in representation in prominent queer indie games is not that these games are representing the very real difficulties and hardships that are a part of everyday life for many queer folks. As Jack Halberstam (2011) argued, such experiences are often part of a queer negativity—a failing to meet heteronormative expectations that can lead to rejecting such norms and opening up opportunities for alternatives (p. 96). However mainstream queer indie games often dwell in the difficulty and hardship of queer lives and foreclose on other possibilities, making the dominant narratives of queerness those of tragedy, death, and heartbreak. In other words, such games ultimately define queer characters by their experiences of oppression in normative systems, and in doing so they limit the social imaginary of what queer folks can be, do, and live. Further, because of these games’ relative popularity with players outside of the LGBTQ community, these dominant narratives can come to define queer experiences for cisgendered and heteronormative players. In effect, mainstream queer indie games perform a constrained version of queer negativity for audiences, one in which the queer character is the unfortunate failure or the pitiable outcast but is not allowed to be anything else. Instead of leading to other potential queer realities with different ways of being and loving, this queer negativity becomes a trap for queer characters that allows players to feel good when they (rarely) escape it or feel sad when they suffer or die in it. In the end, heteronormativity is reinscribed because all that queerness can be is difficulty and hardship in a normative system. Queer characters are made beautiful in their suffering, and their futures and their better places are almost always elsewhere and out of play. The solution to this popular narrative is not necessarily about being able to identify with queer characters in these games or needing more or better characters to identify with—many players already identify with existing queer characters, limited though they often are. As Adrienne Shaw (2014) argued, identity is complex and one does not need to identify with a representation in order to find it meaningful (p. 93). Rather, it is crucial to recognize that games place us, as Aubrey Anable (2018) put it, “into particular and unique affective relations to history, technology, and each other” (Conclusion, para. 1). In recent years, popular queer games often do this by putting players in historical and contemporary queer experiences of marginalization and trauma. At times, they may even be capable of making players feel queer negativity, some of what Whitney Pow (2018) described as “the tenuous experience of frustration, impossibility, and uncertainty: the experience of being a queer body and subject in the 164

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world” (p. 44). Yet these feelings are only part of queer experiences, and, as the case studies in this chapter demonstrate, popular queer games often minimize the equally important feelings of queer power, hope, and joy. Thankfully, there are already queer games challenging and resisting this trend, and I want to clarify here which games I refer to when discussing the problematic elements of popular queer indie games. Specifically, there are many queer game developers who are making games for themselves and their communities that imagine queer spaces and ways of being that exist beyond the confines of heteronormative cultures. These developers range from veterans with multiple games to “hobbyists and non-programmers making their first games” (Anthropy, 2012, Chapter 1, Section 2, para. 3). For example, the title of this chapter is an allusion to Anna Anthropy’s game, The Hunt for the Gay Planet, which began as a spoof of Bioware’s decision in Star Wars: The Old Republic to make LGB romances available on one planet in their new expansion in 2013 (Hernandez, 2013). The game tasks players with searching for a “secret paradise planet,” “a glittering world where women walk arm-in-arm with women,” called “Lesbionica.” Robert Yang has made games such as The Tearoom, Cobra Club HD, and Stick Shift, each of which directly represent different types and acts of gay male sexuality. Both of these developers, and many more, have created games that express queer experiences beyond heteronormative expectations, and their works embody the sort of queer imagining that this chapter argues for. These indie games that are developed by and/or for LGBTQ folks, rather than broader mainstream audiences, point to the radical potential for indie games to disrupt and subvert common social and cultural assumptions that limit queerness to stereotypical forms. The queer games that this chapter critiques are mainstream queer indie games—the games like Gone Home, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and Fragments of Him that have gained considerable attention from games media and success in reaching a broad audience, but often at the expense of imagining queer realities beyond difficulty. Mainstream queer indie games are part of the larger trend of the increasing visibility of indie games due to better access to publishing and distribution platforms, and they are typically made by larger indie companies and teams rather than individual designers (Lien, 2013). These are the queer indie games that sell the most by appealing to players beyond the LGBTQ community, and they get taken up the most in popular discourse, often as examples of improving representation and providing emotional (even relatable!) queer stories in games. They rely on narratives of queer rejection and hardship and performing those experiences 165

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in ways that are recognizable, palatable, and marketable to cisgendered and straight audiences. Stuart Richards identifies a similar trend in queer “Indiewood films,” indie films such as Brokeback Mountain (Lee, 2005), Milk (Van Sant, 2008), and The Imitation Game (Tyldum, 2014) that are picked up and marketed by major studios to large audiences, usually as art films. Richards describes how these films with LGBT themes “are set in the past and conjure up a sense of nostalgia. . . . This past, however, is often an adverse environment for these characters. By making these narratives accessible to mainstream audiences, this nostalgia places ‘homosexuality in the conservative Utopia of these challenged contexts’” (Richards, 2016, p. 25). Gone Home, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Fragments of Him, and similar games operate in much the same way in indie games: they provide mainstream audiences with an approachable opportunity to play queer difficulty and tragedy, feel a sense of empathy, sadness, and perhaps injustice, and then move on. The queer games covered in this chapter and Indiewood films with LGBTQ content have similar cultural functions and market strategies, but the difference between them is mainstream queer indie games are often not fully accepted as games in the first place. For example, Gone Home, Vanishing, and Fragments of Him are all walking simulators, the game genre previously mentioned. The term walking simulator emerged after Gone Home’s release in 2013 as a pejorative for narrative-based games that focus on exploring an environment, piecing together stories, and often having a particular affective experience, rather than on combat, accruing points, or complex mechanics. As Melissa Kagan (2017) explained, walking simulators angered a particular demographic of predominantly male, hardcore gamers (also the primary demographic involved with the #GamerGate harassment campaign) who vehemently argued that, “A walking sim isn’t just a bad game; it’s a nongame and, worse, one that duplicitously pretends to be a game” (p. 289). The games are seen by as shifty, untrustworthy invaders; the latest tools of feminist scholars and critics coming to change games or take them away. Thus, while games like Gone Home mainstream queerness to some extent, they still run afoul of gatekeeping practices that seek to exclude any challenges to the status quo of gaming cultures—a status quo built to privilege straightness, maleness, whiteness, and able-bodiedness. Kagan pointed out that this happens in large part because walking simulators are “part of a long tradition of gendered wandering, of coding certain kinds of exploration as manly and others as (unacceptably) feminine” (p. 278). Ruberg (2019a) went on to describe how walking simulators have been linked to 166

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the queer figure of the flaneur, a person who wanders or meanders in ways that have historically been culturally marked as feminine (p. 2). Players in walking simulators wander through the environment without a set goal such as fighting, scoring points, or even moving to a predetermined destination, and in doing so they participate in the sort of “aimless dandyism” of the flaneur whose movement and activity fails to perform masculine values of speed, intent, and mastery (p. 6). Thus, the dismissal of walking simulators as games is not just a quibble about the definition of a game or mismatched expectations; it is fundamentally a rejection of specific forms of play that are coded as feminine and considered lesser. As walking simulators, the games discussed in this chapter limit the types of queer experiences that many gamers encounter in games, but they also do crucial work in challenging the standard definitions and expectations of what gets to be a game and who gets to count in gaming cultures and game studies. Mainstream queer indie games occupy a liminal space between radical queer potential and popular, normative narratives, and this means they offer both immense possibility and severe limitation. On the one hand, indie games provide spaces for more queer representation that can counter and disrupt representation in AAA games and increase awareness of queer experiences through digital platforms like Steam that reach millions of players around the world. Indie games can be sites for what Edmond Chang (2017) described as “queergaming”: “a provocation, a call to games, a horizon of possibilities” that presents “possibilities for noncompetitive, nonproductive, nonjudgmental play” (pp. 15, 17). The radical queer potential of queergaming means making games and telling stories that destabilize what types of play and whose voices matter, and to some extent mainstream queer indie games are doing this work. On the other hand, the representation that the increased access and popularity of mainstream queer indie games has provided has largely restricted queer folks and our experiences to a familiar narrative of rejection, loss, tragedy, and grief that sells well. The critique offered in this chapter is not meant to ultimately resolve this tension, as queerness itself exists in constant tension with normativity (Warner, 1993, p. xxvi). Nor is the point that games should not represent queer hardship and difficulty—they absolutely should, as these things are still very real parts of many queer folks’ lived experiences. Rather, the goal of assessing representation in our current cultural moment with the growth of queer indie games is to find where and how queerness is defined and limited in games. It is only by teasing out the narrative boundaries that continue to constrain LGBTQ experiences in popular culture that we can 167

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break them down and better realize the potential to imagine and play with queer realities in indie games.

Homes That Are Gone Gone Home is arguably the most well-known and popular queer game to date. In the game, players play as Katie Greenbriar, a college student from an upper-middle-class white family returning home from overseas to find no one home. Players are tasked with exploring the house and finding out where Katie’s sister, Samantha, and her parents are, and what has happened at the family home while she has been away. By interacting with objects scattered around the house ranging from notes to recordings to a Christmas duck, the player discovers that Katie’s parents have an unstable marriage, and that Sam has struggled to adjust to a new home and has a romantic relationship with Lonnie DeSoto, a girl from school. Due in part to its narrative and mechanics, Gone Home became a contentious point in the toxic #GamerGate harassment campaign that began in 2014, the year after its release. #GamerGate began with groups of gamers targeting and harassing Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and other critics and developers based on their perceived involvement with a supposed feminist conspiracy to destroy games and gamer identity, including alleged unethical practices they used to garner media attention and positive reviews (Chess and Shaw, 2015, p. 212). At the height of the frenzied conspiracy theories that #GamerGate produced about so-called ethics in journalism, some gamers claimed that Gone Home’s critical success was the result of personal connections and insider deals between the game’s developers and reviewers (Kagan, 2017, p. 288). The issue, of course, was not whether such shady dealings actually existed, but rather that a narrative-driven game that eschewed many of the most prominent elements of mainstream games and featured queer content became so popular. In these regards, the game is well deserving of its praise. However there remains an issue with the form that queer representation in Gone Home takes, and ultimately with the queer reality the game constructs for the player. Namely, as much as the game’s narrative is about Sam’s coming-out story and her relationship with Lonnie, a Chicana girl, it is also about Sam’s absence from the predominantly white, straight, upper-middle-class game space, and that space is not a space that welcomes or fully supports her. She has moved on to find better spaces and opportunities elsewhere with 168

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Lonnie, and her story is instead told by the objects she left behind and the disembodied narration that plays when the player interacts with them. Sam is relegated to being the ghost in this haunted house—the specter of past emotions and experiences indexed in the artifacts that linger and may never be reclaimed. In this, Gone Home presents an opportunity to dwell in a tense and problematic question: What does it mean to represent a queer experience in the absence of the person who had and lived it? One way to answer this question is by considering how the game structures queer experience with particular feelings. As Anable (2018) argued, “Video games—their images, sounds, stories, mechanics, and interfaces—can be read and interpreted as giving shape and form to particular feelings” (Conclusion, para. 3). Gone Home’s spaces of absence and its abandoned objects give shape to feelings of loss and longing, and ultimately mean that the queer experience as absence is defined by hardship and sorrow. To be sure, there is love and hope in particular objects too, but those loves and hopes are located elsewhere, outside of the game space and outside of play. The tension between Sam’s absence and her omnipresence in the form of objects and artifacts is representative of the uneasy and difficult relationships LGBTQ folks often have with home—home here being the traditional, heteronormative family structure and the spaces it occupies. By setting the game in a home, naming it Gone Home, and portraying that home as a space of absence and loss, the developers of Gone Home capture how homes are sites of rejection for many queer folks, and places where they cannot be (either at all or in full). Pavlounis (2016) described how this reality defines Sam as a character: “Sam’s narrative remains one of disorientation, of coming to terms with a world—and a home—that does not allow her to move through it fluidly” (p. 587). The unwelcoming and even oppressive nature of the home is evident from the first moments of the game, when it draws on horror tropes in order to make the player feel uneasy and give them the sense that something is wrong at the Greenbriar home. On the front porch, the player hears wind, rain, and thunder outside, making it clear that the setting is the quintessential dark and stormy night of a gothic horror story. The foyer of the home—the fact the house has a foyer is another marker of both gothic tropes and the Greenbriars’ class—is dark when the player enters, and the lights flicker ominously. As the player explores the rooms of the house, they are often only able to see a portion of the room, such as the living room that is illuminated only by the TV broadcasting a foreboding “Severe Weather Warning” message. By limiting the player’s vision, the game generates fear and anxiety over what 169

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might be lurking unseen in the dark corners of the house (Chien, 2007/2008, p. 64). And, of course, there are secrets, violences, and wounds hiding in the house—they just do not take the forms of literal, physical monsters or murderers. From its early moments, Gone Home constructs an environment and experience akin to queer experiences of home as “oppressively alienating and unsafe” (Pow, 2018, p. 44). It is this space that forces Sam to leave and seek better spaces elsewhere. While the home in Gone Home starts as a place of unease, anxiety, and rejection, it changes over the course of the game as the player explores and discovers more of the house. As the player encounters more of the rooms in the house, it becomes clear that it is not filled with supernatural horrors, murderers, or any of the other common antagonists. The house is just a house—there is no one home, but there are many experiences and stories in it for the player to piece together. Pavlounis (2016) pointed out that this shift in tone and atmosphere marks the player’s (and Katie’s) progressive mastery of the game space; as they play, the player organizes the story fragments they interact with into a complete linear narrative. He argued this effects a “straightening” on the game’s narrative, an “organized unqueering” that works to “to negate or ‘correct’ the possibility of queer temporality and spatiality that the game might otherwise enable” (p. 585). In other words, the further the game progresses, the straighter its form gets. Whereas the beginning of the game allows the player to wander through many objects and possible interpretations of the play space, enacting a queerness that deviates from “straight lines of movement,” the further the player gets in the game the more those possibilities are reduced to one “correct,” straight, linear narrative (Ruberg, 2019a, p. 4). To relate this point to the beginning of the game, the game goes from an oppressive atmosphere of horror and rejection to an increasingly normative form defined by the player’s mastery and familiarity with the play space and the story it contains. In both situations, Gone Home’s space is not one for Sam or her queer experiences—any possibility of her continuing to exist in that space is foreclosed on, and her narrative remains fundamentally limited by home and its heteronormative expectations. Gone Home presents a troubled situation of both opportunity and profound limitation on multiple levels for queer characters, players, and developers. Specifically, it exhibits what Pow (2018) called the “tenuous experience of belonging and estrangement from home” that queer folks deal with constantly in heteronormative cultures (p. 44). I argue that this experience of attachment and estrangement, of identification and 170

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disidentification, can manifest as a form of cruel optimism, as defined by Lauren Berlant (2011): “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (p. 1). One can see this in Gone Home’s narrative: for Sam, home is an origin, both of identity and past experiences that define who she is and of rejection and trauma. It is a cruel optimism in the sense that it sustains her and supposedly provides a space of familial belonging, even as it denies her feelings for Lonnie and undermines her ability to be and explore who she is. Beyond the characters within the game, Gone Home is also a case study in how the desire to belong and find a home in gaming cultures can be a cruel optimism for queer players. It can be desirable for queer games to gain greater visibility, recognition, and success. But the mainstreaming of queer games, at least in the current trend of popular queer indie games, can also perpetuate limited and even harmful depictions of queerness. A similar cruel optimism can exist for queer game developers, for whom video games have immense potential as a creative and expressive art form, but whose communities and cultures are often inherently exclusionary. As scholars such as Cote and Mejeur (2017) and Nakamura (2017) have noted, the cultural construct of gamer identity is founded on the distinction between who counts as a gamer and who does not, and often women, persons of color, and queer folks find themselves excluded by the normative myth that gamers are straight white men. Ultimately, Gone Home is representative of where queer folks often find themselves in gaming spaces: present absence. By this I mean the curious form of only getting to be present in indirect, partial, and incomplete ways, of having to exist in absences and silences socially or self-enforced. Gayle Rubin (2011) described these experiences as the “mystified” and “oblique angles” by which gender and sexuality are often represented (p. 138). Present absence takes on multiple meanings in different contexts. For example, it describes how queer players often have to hide or diminish their gender, sexuality, or race in order to pass and fit in with gaming communities. In popular queer indie games, including Gone Home, it captures how queer hopes and futures and realities are always elsewhere, and present only in their absence in past and current realities. Another form of present absence is how queer characters are coded as LGBTQ in some games, but their identities must remain hidden and limited—they can be present only in certain acceptable, stereotypical (and often white) ways, and any objectionable (i.e., too queer) part of who they are is absented and shoved off-screen. This form is evident in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, to which I now turn. 171

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Present Vanishings I have a guilty confession: I am not even sure The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (hereafter referred to as Vanishing) counts as a queer game. Vanishing tells the story of Ethan Carter, an adolescent boy who creates his own stories and fantasy worlds based on the few books and magazines of genre fiction that he has. The player plays as Paul Prospero, a paranormal detective who received a letter from Ethan and has come to investigate his disappearance. As the story unfolds, the player discovers that Ethan’s white, working-class family views his imaginative nature and his tendency to daydream as strange and effeminate, and they ridicule him for it and call him a “faggot” at a critical moment in the game. The reason I semi-facetiously say that I am not sure if Vanishing counts as a queer game is that Ethan himself never claims any particular queer identity or desire in the game; rather it is written onto him by his homophobic and heteronormative family members. I believe it is important that any analysis of the game not repeat that violence by assuming or forcing an identity onto Ethan (even if he is a fictional character). Nevertheless, it is clear that the game codes Ethan and his storyworlds as queer. As Sara Ahmed (2006) wrote in Queer Phenomenology, “To make things queer is certainly to disturb the order of things” (p. 161). Ethan excels at disturbing the order of things. He disturbs the order of his family by not fitting into their expectations of a rugged and toxic masculinity. He disturbs the order of storyworlds by mashing and melding them together— Paul Prospero’s story, for example, intersects with the stories of an astronaut going to the moon, of a witch living in the woods, and of miners uncovering the tomb of a dark god. And, through his stories, he disturbs the order of his home, Red Creek Valley, by awakening “The Sleeper,” a malevolent, Cthulhulike figure who personifies Ethan’s feeling that his family is out to get him. As queer folks know well, there can be fatal consequences for these sorts of disturbances, and there are for Ethan: in the scene where his family calls him a faggot, an accidental fire quite literally forces Ethan into a closet where he dies. In all of these disturbances, the game codes Ethan and its worlds as queer, even if it never openly or explicitly acknowledges that queerness. By coding Ethan in this way, the game performs a contemporary version of queer invisibility that scholars such as Larry Gross and Martin Meeker identify as pervasive in media prior to the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian characters in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in which queer characters cannot be openly (and certainly not unapologetically) queer or can only appear in certain limited roles, such as dandies and villains (Gross, 172

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2001, p. 56; Meeker, 2006). Coding and queer invisibility in Vanishing and similar games can be understood as a form of present absence, a way of not only making queer characters and experiences present but also effacing or vanishing that presence. In some cases, this can take a pernicious form of diminishing and hiding queerness in order to make it more acceptable to heteronormative players and gaming cultures. Other games, such as Vanishing, use it to represent the very real queer experiences of passing, of having expectations and assumptions forced onto oneself, and of not being able to openly express one’s own identity and experience. In contrast to Gone Home, which locates its queer worlds and possibilities decidedly off-screen and outside of the game space, Vanishing regularly makes those worlds present by allowing the player to explore Ethan’s fantasies and imagined realities. By piecing together clues and objects in the game, the player activates and travels through portals between Ethan’s storyworlds. These portals signify entering a new storyworld, each with its own rules and fantastic potentials, but they also represent how those worlds fray and bleed together. At the end of each story, Paul Prospero (and the player) are pulled back to Ethan’s reality, usually to one of his family members ridiculing him or attacking him for his imagination and his reliance on fantasy—his unmanly, feminine (and thus, lesser) behavior. The juxtaposition of Ethan’s fabulous worlds with his painful realities reveals how the two are inextricably bound together: the stories are his escape, and their fantastical nature matters because they provide him with places different and better that he can go to. Envisioning queer spaces and queer realities can do this for queer players, which is why it is so important that the dominant narrative of queer experiences in popular queer indie games is not just one of rejection, hardship, and tragedy. Unfortunately, Vanishing still falls into this trend. While the game creates other worlds for Ethan and the player, it constantly forecloses on them as well, and with Ethan’s death at the end of the game the teleology of the game’s narrative is tragedy. There are only glimpses of queer realities that are never allowed to fully manifest, while the reality of heteronormative expectations and toxic masculinities is constantly reinscribed and still reigns at the end of the game. Vanishing offers an opportunity to carefully consider what gets to count as a queer game. Are queer games only those with overt queer content? Must queer games be made by queer folks? Do queer games have to have a certain intentionality to them, such that their developers intend for them to be queer and to be played and read as such? My goal here is not to provide 173

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definitive answers to these questions but rather to trouble these distinctions somewhat. I argue it is a mistake to not count games like Vanishing for their queer elements, even if they are not often labeled as queer. In other words, games that are not obviously queer in terms of their narratives, characters, and representations can still be queer games, as Jordan Wood (2017) demonstrated with The Binding of Isaac (2011, Edmund McMillen)—a game without a queer narrative that still enacts queer “temporal and spatial configurations” (p. 224). Content that is masked or coded as queer can still be very queer content, and the fact that the content relies on close analysis and interpretation does not diminish its ability to do the queer work of destabilizing norms. Lisa Nakamura (2016) noted the value of such games in her interpretation of Journey (2012, thatgamecompany), which she argues does important social justice work by focusing on nonviolent collaboration and including representations that invoke Middle Eastern clothing and disability (the game’s avatars do not have arms). However, Journey did not face the backlash from #GamerGate that other games more overtly connected with social justice agendas did, which leads Nakamura to claim that the game “shows us that games that underplay or even conceal their social justice agendas pass under the radar of gaming’s most destructive players” (p. 43). Games like Vanishing can do similar work by introducing players to queer experiences and content while avoiding some of the harassment that continues to happen in games. That sounds like a compromise because it is, but it can nevertheless contribute to queer games’ ability to affect players and create more opportunities for queer representation. As with Gone Home, Vanishing reveals the position of queer indie games in relationship to mainstream games, and queer developers and players’ relationships to heteronormative gaming cultures. Specifically, Vanishing exemplifies how queer indie games that become popular and garner attention from gaming media must conform to a narrative of queer suffering and hardship, or code their queer content so it is not obviously queer. Further, they must center the experiences and stories of white queer characters, while often completely ignoring or excluding those of queer folks of color. Thus, mainstream queer indie games get to be queer but only in ways that are constrained and recognizable (or just invisible) in popular culture, and the realities they imagine must always remain subordinate to both whiteness and heteronormativity. A similar conformity is often expected of queer players and developers who are forced to hide or diminish their gender or sexuality in order to avoid harassment. In all of these ways, gaming cultures and even mainstream queer indie games perpetuate the issues of queer 174

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invisibility and stereotyping that Gross (2001) articulated almost twenty years ago with film and television in the twentieth century. The present absence of queer folks and their experiences remains a pernicious trend across media, even as LGBTQ representation increases. Yet queer lives are more complex and varied than most representations portray or gaming cultures allow for, as the last game, Fragments of Him, suggests.

Fragments of Ourselves One benefit of popular queer indie games focusing predominantly on suffering, hardship, and tragedy is the opportunity the games provide to reflect on queer experiences of loss and grief, and Fragments of Him is an excellent example of this. The game tells the story of Will, a bisexual man who dies in a car crash early in the game, and Sarah (his friend and exgirlfriend), Harry (Will’s boyfriend), and Mary (Will’s grandmother)—all white characters—as they remember their times with Will and mourn his death. One of the major narratives in the game is Mary’s inability to accept Will’s sexuality, including several years when they are estranged because of it. Even when they reconnect later after Will cares for Mary following a fall, she still cannot support Will’s love for Harry. The game does not portray much of this from Will’s perspective, and it remains unclear how he felt about the way Mary behaves toward him. It is clear that Will still values his relationship with Mary, as he comments at one point, “Tea solves everything, if you believe my Grandma.” However, the affectionate tone of this statement is quickly followed by “Grandma would have told me to man up.” The juxtaposition of these two sentiments demonstrates the tension between love and judgment that the game constantly navigates in Will and Mary’s relationship—a tension that is only resolved with Will’s untimely death, which erases the problem that his sexuality poses for Mary. While Fragments of Him is ultimately limited by the tragedy at the center of its narrative, it complicates queer representation by constantly portraying the many ways in which Will’s sexuality is not the only thing that defines him. After Will and Mary reconnect toward the end of her story, she comments that she can never approve of his sexuality, but she also got “distracted by one part of him,” missing in the process the kind, strong man he grew up to be. This is effectively only a partial acceptance of who Will is, but it is one that acknowledges how gender and sexuality are only two parts (if significant parts) 175

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of who someone is. Gender and sexuality are fragments of who Will was, and they combine with other fragments of memory and identity that gave each character a different understanding of and love for him. The player gradually uncovers and pieces together more of these fragments as the game progresses by interacting with objects in the environment, and their understanding of Will evolves as each fragment falls into place in each story. The game’s mechanics operationalize an understanding of identity that is shifting, disjointed, and even queer: as Wood (2017) pointed out, queer experiences actively resist “heteronormative logics of wholeness and stable embodiment” (p. 224). In this sense, no character in the game is limited to just being a token or a type. They grow and evolve, as Sarah does as her relationship with Will develops from acquaintances to lovers to old friends, and their identities are never only their genders or sexualities. The living, dynamic, and complicated portrayal of identity in Fragments of Him thus contributes to challenging the simplistic view that identities such as race, gender, and sexuality are “discrete and stable categories,” and instead models how a playful approach to identity as moving and adaptable fragments could change the ways we understand representation and gameplay (Shaw, 2014), p. 15). As one considers the fragments of identity in Fragments of Him’s narrative or even in our own experiences, however, a crucial question is which fragments get represented more—which fragments get the most play, are the most privileged, or seem the most important? In particular, the fragments of queer identity in this game are quite familiar because they fall into the same trends of representation present in Gone Home and Vanishing. While Fragments of Him includes a portrayal of queer love in its game space, that love is always framed by Will’s death as a love that is lost, a love without a future. In this sense, the fragment of identity that gets the most representation for queer folks in popular indie games is still defined by tragedy, grief, and loss. This fragment is a literal manifestation of Lee Edelman’s (2004) famous statement: “There are no queers in that future as there can be no future for queers” (p. 29). Edelman used this idea to reject heteronormative teleologies and reproductive futurities that have been used to exclude and control queer peoples, but the trends of queer representation in popular indie games demonstrate that the denial of future possibility can be just as much of a trap for queer potentials. The narrative of queer suffering and hardship becomes a way for mainstream audiences to limit and control queer experience, denying it a future and keeping it contained to the past and the present. An ever-present fragment of identity that gets no acknowledgment in Fragments of Him, Vanishing, or Gone Home is race, which in these games 176

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means whiteness. All of these popular queer indie games focus exclusively on the experiences of queer white folks, without explicitly considering how race structures those experiences or how they might be different for queer folks of color. This is a significant problem because in their silence on race (intentional or otherwise), these games contribute to perpetuating the idea that whiteness is not a racialized identity, but rather an expected norm. Further, the games perpetuate the siloing of identity in games in that they are recognized as games about gender and sexuality, but supposedly not about race (Shaw, 2018, p. 77). The point here is not that the games should shoehorn in some dialogue about race in order to check an identity box, but rather that the current possibilities of queer representation in popular indie games are limited to a particular experience of queerness and whiteness. The queer realities that indie games imagine are almost always white realities, where persons of color are supporting characters if they are even present. Failing to recognize that continues to support white supremacy precisely when, as TreaAndrea Russworm (2018) argued, game studies should take seriously the role it must play in critiquing dominant ideologies (p. 75). Game studies scholars must take up these critiques, and specifically draw attention to whiteness in games as a dominant ideology that often goes unquestioned.

Your Queer Spaces Are in Another Castle! As these brief case studies demonstrate, mainstream queer indie games are doing the crucial work of representing queer experiences in games, but they often do so by limiting queerness to a narrative of pain, rejection, and death that is recognizable and approachable for cisgendered, heteronormative players. In these narratives, queer characters, spaces, and futures are shoved off-screen, out of play, and out of the realm of possibility. The point here is not that these games are wrong, or even that they engage in bad representation. To the contrary, these are the games that feature queer content in an industry that often minimizes that content (if it includes it at all), and their developers, such as Steve Gaynor in Gone Home, are doing the labor of consulting with queer folks whose experiences they are trying to represent (Pavlounis, 2016, p. 589). Rather, the point is to highlight the common themes and representations in mainstream queer indie games that are our current trends. These games reflect where we are right now culturally; where queer indie games stand at the margins of the games industry; where they sometimes become popular and reach a broad audience; and where 177

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they aim to better represent the LGBTQ community but only do so in part. They reveal that the cultural imaginary of what it means to live and play as a queer person is almost entirely limited by past and current realities of marginalization, oppression, and exclusion, and is further limited to predominantly white experiences of these things. Games industries and communities need these stories because they can bring attention to the homophobic and heteronormative systems that gaming cultures perpetuate in everything from excluding queer characters to bullying queer players. Indeed, one of the greatest advantages of making queer experiences more visible and accessible through mainstream queer indie games is that it can raise cultural awareness of the various ways LGBTQ folks continue to be marginalized and silenced in games and elsewhere. Yet queer lives are also so much more than suffering, hardship, and tragedy. To be sure, all of the games in this chapter have moments of queer beauty, love, and joy. For example, there are the moments that Merritt Kopas (2017) wrote about in Gone Home: its “riot grrl romance,” its “zines,” and “girl-band gigs” and dying your girlfriend’s hair (p. 148). However, all of these moments are hauntings in the game’s space; they are things that happened there before that have been forced elsewhere now. And it is that elsewhere that queer indie games should continue to hunt for—the queer spaces, possibilities, and realities that we can imagine and make present in games through play. It might be that those realities will not be found in mainstream queer indie games, where what queerness is and can be is limited by popular narratives and assumptions about queer experiences. It might also be that the queer realities we construct in indie games should not be accessible to the broader public. As Elizabeth LaPensée (2018) has said of indigenous indie games, not everything is for everyone, and sometimes games should remain in and for a given community. In this sense, the difference between mainstream queer indie games and other indie games is who they are for, and the smaller games that queer players and developers make for ourselves could be the places to look for queer realities beyond the hegemony of heteronormativity. Accessible online platforms like Twine and Ren’Py, which are free and require minimal coding knowledge, can help us create our own games and tell our own stories, regardless of what sells or what others expect of us (Anthropy, 2012). At the same time, it is still worth engaging with and critiquing mainstream queer indie games because they are so tied to popular conceptions of queer experiences. If we do not challenge the common narratives of mainstream queer indie games, then they will remain limited to portrayals of difficulty and death. 178

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I want to close this chapter with several lingering issues with current queer indie games and a hope for their immense potential. The first issue is that current queer indie games that gain mainstream popularity largely limit queerness to “narrow definitions of gender and sexuality” that can actually form barriers for queer play and expression (Richard, 2016, p. 85). Queer gender and sexuality in these games are always limited by heteronormative systems, and as a result are defined by suffering, hardship, and loss. The second issue is related to the first: the trend of relying on queer tragedy is especially problematic because it takes on a form of performing queer struggles for the benefit and entertainment of largely cisgendered and straight player audiences. This is effectively a form of identity tourism, allowing players to play in a queer experience, perhaps have an affective relationship to that experience, and then move on (Nakamura, 2002, p. 55; Pavlounis, 2016, p. 588). In this sense, queer indie games that conform to a narrative of tragedy can allow players to exploit queer experiences for their own purposes, effectively engaging with queerness while keeping it at arm’s length and negating any potential for change. Finally, queer representation in popular queer indie games is further constrained by its almost exclusive focus on the experiences of cisgendered white queer persons. The largely unquestioned predominance of whiteness and cisgenderedness in queer representation in games erases the experiences of trans and queer folks of color and forecloses on opportunities for intersectional and anti-racist imaginings of queerness in games (Nakamura, 2016, p. 38). What I argue for, then, is more queer games that imagine and make present queer realities that are not defined by tragedy, loss, and rejection. These games should not replace or diminish games that portray queer experiences of toxic and oppressive systems, rather they should add to them. The immense potential of queer indie games (including mainstream queer indie games) is that they could contribute to altering media representations of queerness and expanding the popular imaginary of what it means to be queer. In doing so, they could give new perspective “for what might be possible, how identities might be constructed, and what worlds we might live in” (Shaw, 2014, pp. 3–4). In order to realize this potential, we need queer games that create other worlds and realities where queerness is not restrained and diminished by heteronormative expectations. We need queer games that emphasize queer joy and life and beauty and power, things that are often born of hardship and difficulty in our actual worlds but that do not always need to be defined by them in our virtual ones. Queer game developers making games for themselves and their own communities, 179

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including developers such as Robert Yang, Mattie Brice, Dietrich “Squinky” Squinkifer, and so many others, are doing this work already, and often without the recognition or compensation they deserve. As Bonnie Ruberg notes in her chapter in this collection, indie game-making is “financially precarious work, made more so for queer folks and others who are often already in positions of social and economic disadvantage.” These developers, and those starting to make their own queer games in recent years, need our support. Support for queer indie games could take the financial forms of becoming a patron on Patreon or buying queer games on itch.io, or community forms of playing and spreading the word about queer games that do not get mainstream journalistic coverage.2 Ultimately, what I hope for queer indie games is what Anna Anthropy (2012) described: “What I want from videogames is a plurality of voices. I want games to come from a wider set of experiences and present a wider range of perspectives” (Chapter 1, Section 2, para. 4). Indie games can provide a space for such a plurality to emerge because tools like Twine and platforms like itch.io open game development up to folks who do not have specialized training or the resources of large companies and studios. In indie games different queer voices can tell their own stories and be heard, and in that indie games can play a role in critiquing and changing dominant, mainstream cultures. Yet this transformative potential will never be realized if the only narrative of queerness with purchase in mainstream queer indie games and the popular cultural imaginary is one of tragedy and hardship. In indie games and beyond, let us continue the hunt for queer spaces—spaces where queer folks can live, and love, and play.

Notes 1 For more information about queer representation and content in games through the years, see the LGBTQ Video Game Archive (https://lgbtqgamearchive. com/). Several visualizations of the Archive have been made, including Queer Intersections, http://queerintersections.cmejeur.org/, and Visualizing the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, https​://s-​utsch​.gith​ub.io​/lgbt​q-gam​es-re​prese​ nt/#t​itle.​See also Utsch et al. (2017). 2 Patreon is a platform that allows creators and artists to fund their work with subscription-based services, paying monthly or by video, game, or other text. Itch.io is a website for hosting, selling, and downloading indie games. A great place to start supporting queer indie games is on itch.io with games with the queer tag: https://itch.io/games/tag-queer.

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Works Cited Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anable, A. (2018). Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Anthropy, A. (2012). Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form (Seven Stories Press 1st ed). New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Berlant, L. G. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chambers, B. (2013, August 16). “Gone Home is the story exploration game you’ve been waiting for.” The Mary Sue. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.the​marys​ue.co​m/ gon​e-hom​e-rev​iew/. Chang, E. (2017). “Queergaming.” In A. Shaw and B. Ruberg (Eds.), Queer Game Studies (pp. 15–24). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chess, S., & Shaw, A. (2015). “A conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about #GamerGate and embrace hegemonic masculinity.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 59(1), 208–20. Chien, I. (2007). “Playing undead.” Film Quarterly, 61(2). Cote, A. C., & Mejeur, C. (2017). “Gamers, gender, and cruel optimism: The limits of social identity constructs in The Guild.” Feminist Media Studies, 18(6), 963–78. Edelman, L. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Flanagan, M. (2013). Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Frank, A. (2016, March 15). “How indie game creators tell tough stories—and why Destiny should, too.” Polygon. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.pol​ygon.​com/2​016/ 3​/15/1​12256​14/fr​agmen​ts-of​-him-​previ​ew-gd​c- 2016. Galloway, A. R. (2006). Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Grant, C. (2014, January 15). “Polygon’s 2013 Game of the Year: Gone Home.” Polygon. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.pol​ygon.​com/2​014/1​/15/5​31156​8/gam​ e-of-​the-y​ear- 2013-gone-home. Gray, K. L. (2018). “Power in the visual: Examining narratives of controlling black bodies in contemporary gaming.” The Velvet Light Trap, 81, 62–66. Greer, S. (2018, May 15). “Queer representation in games isn’t good enough, but it is getting better.” Gamesradar. Retrieved from https://www.gamesradar.com/ queer- repre​senta​tion-​in-ga​mes-i​snt-g​ood-e​nough​-but-​it-is​-gett​ing-b​etter​/. Gross, L. P. (2001). Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Indie Games in the Digital Age Hernandez, P. (2013, January 15). “In this game, you search for the ‘gay planet.’ No, not that one. A Different Gay Planet.” Kotaku. Retrieved from https​://ko​taku.​ com/5​97629​4/now​-ther​e-is-​a-who​le-ga​me-ab​out-a​-gay-​plane​t. Kagan, M. (2017). “Walking simulators, #GamerGate, and the gender of wandering.” In J. P. Eburne and B. Schreier (Eds.), The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons (pp. 275–300). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Koenitz, H. (2017, July). “Beyond ‘walking simulators’ games as the narrative avantgarde.” Presented at the Digital Games Research Association Conference 2017, Melbourne, Australia. Kopas, M. (2017). “On Gone Home.” In B. Ruberg and A. Shaw (Eds.), Queer Game Studies (pp. 145–52). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. LaPensée, E. (2018). “Self-determined indigenous games.” In J. Sayers (Ed.), Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (pp. 128–37). New York, NY: Routledge. Lien, T. (2013, October 4). “How indie games went mainstream.” Polygon. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.pol​ygon.​com/2​013/1​0/4/4​76814​8/the​-next​-gene​ratio​n-of-​ indie​s. McEwen, K. (2014, October 7). “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter review—a spellbinding, sinister mystery.” The Guardian. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.the​guard​ ian.c​om/te​chnol​ogy/2​014/o​ct/07​/the-​vanis​hing-​of-et​han- carte​r-rev​iew-a​-spel​ l-bin​ding-​sinis​ter-m​yster​y. Meeker, M. (2006). Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s–1970s. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mullis, S. (2013, December 26). “A game with heart, Gone Home is a bold step in storytelling.” NPR. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.npr​.org/​secti​ons/a​lltec​hcons​ idere​d/201​3/12/​22/25​63453​75/a-​game-​ with-​heart​-gone​-home​-is-a​-bold​step​-in-s​toryt​ellin​g. Nakamura, L. (2002). Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York, NY: Routledge. Nakamura, L. (2016). “‘Putting our hearts into it’: Gaming’s many social justice warriors and the quest for accessible games.” In Y. B. Kafai, G. T. Richard, and B. M. Tynes (Eds.), Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs in Gaming (pp. 35–47). Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press. Nakamura, L. (2017). Afterword: Racism, sexism, and gaming’s cruel optimism. In T. M. Russworm & J. Malkowski (Eds.), Gaming representation: Race, gender, and sexuality in video games (pp. 245–50). Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Pavlounis, D. (2016). “Straightening up the archive: Queer historiography, queer play, and the archival politics of Gone Home.” Television & New Media, 17(7), 579–94. Pow, W. (2018). “Reaching toward home: Software interface as Queer orientation in the Video game curtain.” The Velvet Light Trap, 81(1): 43–56. https://muse.jhu. edu/article/686903. Richard, G. T. (2016). “At the intersections of play: Intersecting and diverging experiences across gender, identity, race, and sexuality in game culture.” 182

The Hunt for Queer Spaces In Y. B. Kafai, G. T. Richard, and B. M. Tynes (Eds.), Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs in Gaming (pp. 71–91). Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press. Richards, S. (2016). “Overcoming the stigma: The queer denial of Indiewood.” Journal of Film and Video, 68(1), 19. Ruberg, B. (2019a). “Straight paths through queer walking simulators: Wandering on rails and speedrunning in Gone Home.” Games and Culture. https://doi. org/10.1177/1555412019826746. Ruberg, B. (2019b). The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game-Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rubin, G. (2011). “Thinking sex.” In Deviations: A Gayle Rubin reader (pp. 137–81). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Russworm, T. M. (2018). “A call to action for video game studies in an age of reanimated white supremacy.” The Velvet Light Trap, 81, 73–76. Schrank, B. (2014). Avant-Garde Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sharp, J. (2015). Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shaw, A. (2014). Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Shaw, A. (2018). “Are we there yet? The politics and practice of intersectional game studies.” The Velvet Light Trap, 81, 76–80. Shaw, A., & Friesem, E. (2016). “Where is the queerness in games?: Types of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer content in digital games.” International Journal of Communication, 10, 13. Sou, G. (2018). “Trivial pursuits? Serious (video) games and the media representation of refugees.” Third World Quarterly, 39(3), 510–26. Utsch, S., Braganca, L. C., Ramos, P., Caldeira, P., & Tenorio, J. (2017). “Queer Identities in Video Games: Data Visualization for a Quantitative Analysis of Representation.” Presented at the SBGames 2017. Warner, M. (1993). Fear of a queer planet: Queer politics and social theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wood, J. (2017). “Romancing an empire, becoming Isaac: The queer possibilities of Jade Empire and The Binding of Isaac.” In J. Malkowski and T. M. Russworm (Eds.), Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games (pp. 212–26). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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CHAPTER 9 INDIE IN THE UNDERGROUND

Aaron Trammell

Introduction In the sixth season of The Guild, a web series about a group of friends adventuring in a MMORPG, the main character Codex (played by Felicia Day) is hired by the company that produces the online role-playing game (known as “The Game”) which she and her friends are loyally devoted to.1 The season’s dramatic arc revolves around a leaked expansion pack for The Game that is so heavily criticized by the fans of the game that its creator, Floyd Petrovsky, suffers a mental breakdown. In the climactic final scene Petrovsky confronts a crowd of angry gamers that has gathered in protest around his office and instead of being met with derision they shower him with accolades for his efforts in developing something they all love so deeply. The season six finale of The Guild captures perfect the idiosyncratic nature of role-playing fandom where group affinities are constructed through objects of consumer culture like The Game. Not only is some sense of subcultural identity evoked through this affinity but a clear relationship with media producers is articulated as well. The fans talk and Petrovsky is forced to listen—the act of listening here is seen as causing his mental breakdown. This deep and reciprocal sense of dialogue between the fans of role-playing games and media producers is typical as it characterizes the shared dynamics of culture, economics, and creativity in the production of role-playing games. These dynamics become comical in The Guild’s narrative as all those who are employed by Petrovsky share Codex’s zeal for The Game. The shared enthusiasm of all the players is so great that one character, Zaboo, poses as an IT guy and works for free in order to gain exclusive access to insider secrets about The Game. The lives and livelihoods of all fans are depicted as being caught up in Petrovsky’s creative output just as Petrovsky’s ability to create, and run a successful business is caught up in the opinions of The Game’s fans. Hence, the

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content of role-playing games is inextricably linked to the cultures of the fans which play them. To understand the culture of role-playing games, we must contend with the interdependence of fans and producers. This means thinking through a set of reciprocal and dialectical conversations held between the two groups. These discussions take place between and among designers and members of the fan community and are fundamental to the tight-knit communities of practice that surround role-playing games. Often the lines separating designer and player or producer and fan in these conversations are so spurious that little value can be had in distinguishing between them. Designers often play the games they design and players often take on key roles in producing a sense of dialogue around role-playing games on both a micro and a macro scale. Because of these blurred distinctions, it is important to turn toward scholarship on subcultures and fan studies in order to make better sense of the practices of development which occur in these communities of practice. The two terms, “subculture” and “fan,” are related. Subcultures and subcultural practices are often defined against a set of mainstream cultural practices. Relatedly, fans are often defined within the logic of media consumption. In communities of role-playing games, each term holds connotations of the other. Fans of role-playing games are, in a sense, defined by their subcultural practices of participation and the subculture itself is defined by its fannish interest and devotion to role-playing games. The relatedness of the two terms lends a sense of urgency to the need to develop a framework for thinking through the cultural and economic impact of their unique confluence around role-playing games. The close-knit interrelationship between subculture and fans leads me to contend that the case study presented in this chapter, Pathfinder Role Playing Game (2009), is counterintuitively made “indie” not by its independence from the mainstream role-playing game industry, but instead by a heightened dependence to it and to the fan cultures that support it. Tellingly, the term “indie” presumes that all games exist within a false binary between corporate interests and grassroots communities. Success for indie game developers requires tuning in to the cultural zeitgeist and developing games that speak to the implicit values that are shared between and among fans. In other words, we can relocate a revolutionary tendency within indie games if we consider the term shorthand not for independence but for interdependence. This chapter draws on fan studies and work on subculture to re-ontologize indie games as a potentially revolutionary cultural project rooted in fan labor. 185

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The Roots of Fan Studies Fans are a particular sort of audience that recognize their own agency in structuring media products. In this sense, fans co-construct the media they consume and by extension actively work to construct the web of power relationships that they are embedded within. I argue that the close-knit interdependence of fan consumption and game production in indie games is what distinguishes them from mainstream titles where this sense of interdependence is less apparent. Following Jack Bratich’s (2005) call for more empirical scholarship on how active audiences might come to recognize their own productive power (p. 260), this chapter considers the concept of the “fan” within a lineage of work in audience and fan studies. Audiences in communication studies have historically been configured as acting always already in reaction to the media that they are subject to. This premise of argumentation is troubling because it minimizes the sense of agency audiences can take when confronted with problematic cultural discourses such as racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. If audiences are to be understood as having a sense of agency in these discussions, it is important to understand them as more than merely reactive; hence, active audiences. A concern for active audiences within audience studies has, in fact, emerged (at least in part) from a discourse with roots in critical theory, cultural studies, and sociology that have been predominantly concerned with the relationships of spaces, bodies, and power within capitalist economies. Famously concerned with what they perceived as a return to barbarism and anti-enlightenment in Nazi-occupied Germany, members of the Frankfurt School leveraged Marxist theory to critique popular media and mediated spaces of consumption. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno’s (1972) treatise, “The Culture Industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, incisively painted a dystopic picture of media production and consumption. Media producers (namely, the film industry) were accused of producing a mass opiate of sorts, a middling cultural product that enticed viewers into complacency and apathy, thus encouraging a blind sort of consumerism. Other Frankfurt School theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas would also concern themselves with these problems of consumption. Generally construing audiences as somewhat passive, obedient consumers, Benjamin (1986) and Habermas (1991) also ascribed a discursive agency to the processes and practices of media production (as opposed to consumption). Defaulting to Marxist theory to justify these 186

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arguments, power is, arguably, possessed by a set of wealthy elites (who control the means of production) who essentially distribute propaganda (movies, photographs, print, advertisements) that encourage a false consciousness in consumers. In the related discipline of sociology Henri Lefebvre (1992a, b) had also articulated many concerns about the architectural design of spaces of consumption. He argued that capitalism was an economic system so totalizing that it could be perceived in every facet of everyday life, but that the capitalist system also produced spaces that encouraged consumption. These totalizing views of capitalism, however, continue a pattern that dismisses audience agency in lieu of discussions of producer-level power. Deviating from this pattern Michel de Certeau (1988) sought to locate spaces of resistance where audience agency could be observed challenging the ubiquity of capitalism. In doing so, Certeau takes steps to articulate the importance of audience agency in these studies, and mounts examples such as la perroque (working for yourself, while on the bosses’ clock), to explain the myriad tactics that workers take when resisting the capitalist system. Certeau’s work was highly influential for John Fiske who worked to juxtapose a discussion of popular culture atop Certeau’s theories of resistance and space. Fiske (2010) wrote, “[This book] sees popular culture as a site of struggle, but, while accepting the power of the forces of dominance, it focuses rather upon the popular tactics by which these forces are coped with, are evaded, or are resisted” (p. 18). Sites of struggle, for Fiske, help us to locate key moments when a dominant ideology is challenged and forced to reassess its strategy and values. These moments of reflection, although rarely revolutionary, are necessary for meaningful social and economic change. Henry Jenkins (2008) has continued this line of inquiry, specifically pinpointing moments of struggle between media producers and media fans in an effort to consider moments where fan tactics have led to successful shifts in the ideologies of production, and the moments when these endeavors have not been wholly successful. Returning to the themes that ground this discussion, a Frankfurt School understanding of audience power focuses on the ways that audiences are dependent on the mainstream industry for a sense of identity. In contrast, theorists in fan studies like Certeau, Fiske, and Jenkins focus on the agency of audiences, and their often-deliberate decision to work with and alongside media industries. I argue that this constitutes an interdependent relationship and that this sense of interdependence is central to the definition of indie games that I am advancing. 187

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Subcultural Spaces A subculture is an autonomously regulating community that possesses both a distinct communication network and a common set of interests. Although some have suggested that subcultures may share a common set of ideological values, I remain unconvinced of this point. The politics of alternative culture, particularly when distributed over a vast geographic network, as Stephen Duncombe (1997) discusses, often consists of a variety of people for whom politics come second to community. The affective work of building and maintaining community is the primary aspect that defines subculture, even though these communities are often organized across political axes.2 Similar to the punk rock zine publishing subculture that Duncombe examines, this chapter looks also to the ways that indie role-playing games are also a subculture. Publishing subcultures resist dominant ideologies by doing little to censor their participants. While an institution like Random House is a clear regulator of all the books that are published under their label, anyone can publish and distribute a zine—there is very little regulation. Mia Consalvo (2009), when discussing gamers, prefers the term “cultural capital” over subculture (pp. 3–4), arguing that in gaming communities, the accumulation of products and knowledge serve to ideologically bind individuals who may exist in geographically disparate communities. Key to this distinction is a complex physical infrastructure of newsletters, message boards, review sites, and hobby magazines, which pull the community together. Even though gamers may not know each other, they are likely subscribing to magazines, and lurking on common message boards. Patrick Kinkade and Michael Katovich (2009) also report on this phenomenon in their ethnography of Magic: The Gathering players. But, they term it “ethereal culture,” a nod to the ways in which these cultural attitudes are often indebted to an invisible cultural network. Other related work about alternative publishing cultures has been compiled by William Bainbridge (1983), and Fredric Wertham (1973). Both authors discuss the ways in which science fiction and fantasy hobbyists communicated fictions to one another in the early to mid-twentieth century. APAs, in this sense, were concrete physical infrastructures that served to bond and unite fans. Fanzines were sent to a central editor who would compile submissions into a set of zines and then redistribute them to disparate network of fans. Although these studies do not explicitly refer to these fans as a subculture, both Fine (1981) and Duncombe (1997) have 188

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suggested that these science fiction and fantasy networks are the historical predecessors of the communities that they researched. Key to the question of subculture, then, is the question of infrastructure. Once a common communication infrastructure can be identified, key actors can be located within that infrastructure. These key actors can then be seen as constructing a common discourse, and within that discourse hegemonic polarities can be identified. Although these hegemonic poles will vary in each instance, they inform and explain the points of resistance that Hebdige assumed were universal to all subculture. Considering subculture from this perspective prevents the researcher from, proverbially, putting the cart before the horse; assuming a conclusion that does not follow the material evidence accumulated through research. Not all subcultures will act like those Hebdige (1979) noted in postwar Britain; some may subscribe to radically different values. Many, however, do autonomously collect themselves and geek-out to similar things. In this regard they are unified by a common love and therefore, fandom.

“Opponents Wanted”: Early Subcultures of Role-Play Tabletop role-playing games have long held a close relationship in fan communities. In this sense, even at their most popular, role-playing games are always indie as they require a close-knit and interdependent relationship to the communities that enjoy them. For example, Dungeons & Dragons today is created by a small subdivision of Wizards of the Coast (the company that now owns the Dungeons & Dragons IP) with less than fifty people working within it. And Dungeons & Dragons is about as big as role-playing games get. Role-playing games have always been linked to the fan communities that play them. Dungeons & Dragons grew from a dense tradition of fan correspondence around the game Diplomacy. When Diplomacy was released in the early 1960s, its publisher Avalon Hill recognized that most owners of the game lacked six other friends who would play the game with them. In order to address this problem, they created a column in their magazine, The Avalon Hill General, entitled “Opponents Wanted.” The column operated much like the personals in a newspaper in that players would post their name, address, and games they were interested in playing and await correspondence from others across the country (Trammell, 2015). 189

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“Opponents Wanted” was a massive success. The initiative yielded a thriving culture of Diplomacy players. Between the years of 1963 and 1992 over 500 discreet fanzines were published. Although some fanzines were only released in short runs of one to ten issues, others such as John Boardman’s Graustark ran for over 600 issues (Meinel, 1992).3 The Hoosier Archive at the Ray Browne Popular Culture Library in Bowling Green, Ohio, houses the world’s largest collection of Diplomacy zines. In this collection there are over 17,000 discreet zines which together utilize 17 cubic feet of storage (Bowling Green State University Libraries, n.d.). The “Opponents Wanted” column was a blueprint for the cultural dynamics that define fandom in role-playing games. First is the active practice of cultivation through which Avalon Hill took steps to engineer a culture of play-through-mail gameplay. These efforts lay the infrastructure for an emerging class of grassroots gamers to find one another and build community despite geographic obstacles. The Avalon Hill “Opponents Wanted” column was the critical moment where hobby interest in the game Diplomacy became an alibi for geeking out over games across America. This emerging grassroots culture then took an active role in participating in the cultural life of game design, and, in fact, many game designers like Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and Greg Costikyan were actively engaged in this community, even publishing their own fanzines. In this second sense, the play-by-mail Diplomacy network yielded a sense of community engagement and creativity that was instrumental in the design of Dungeons & Dragons and the other tabletop role-playing games that would follow shortly thereafter. Key in this short anecdote are the dynamics of labor, creativity, and compensation that persist throughout. The “Opponents Wanted” column of the Avalon Hill General was structured as a top-down initiative intended to drive interest in their products. At this basic level, the labor the company put into their brand management was minimal—they opened up a space in their magazine to foster a sense of discourse between fans. Important in this narrative, however, is that unlike the fan discourse and corporate regulation that Jenkins (2008) has identified around franchises like Harry Potter, the complete lack of regulation around postal Diplomacy yielded a veritable explosion of creativity within the community. Fans had many conversations about postal Diplomacy strategy, modifications, narrative, and more.4 The conversations that fans had around postal diplomacy were reciprocal; they rewarded fans who were interested in developing a greater community around the game. As variants of the game appeared, the fan community grew around and developed them. Though there was a reciprocal sense of 190

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community that was developed through Diplomacy fanzines, there was little sense of economic reciprocity. Each fanzine that supported a Diplomacy game required money of its players to help afford basic production costs and, in doing so, help make ends meet. Play-by-mail postal Diplomacy, at its inception, epitomized the topdown-meets-grassroots dynamics typical to discussions of fan culture, but over time grew to be such an active site of autonomous creativity that discussions between fans in the domain of postal discourse rarely boomeranged back to Avalon Hill. The ethic of tight-knit fan participation that defined the postal diplomacy scene was the very same ethic that would later define the early playtests and development of Dungeons & Dragons. As a matter of fact, TSR Hobbies (the company that first published Dungeons & Dragons) eventually employed many fans who were active in Gygax’s circles of postal Diplomacyplayers.

Resistance and Activism in Role-Playing Subculture Considering role-playing fandoms in light of the “Opponents Wanted” column in the Avalon Hill General helps to show how fans of role-playing games have long been entangled within the top-down initiatives of the companies that develop role-playing games. Because of this entanglement, there is a sense that companies are always interested in the activities of role-playing fans. Today, role-playing fans take a variety of forms and occupy a variety of spaces, from web forums to hobby stores. And while all of these forums of fan culture are unique and interesting in their own ways, an important question must be contended with: To what degree are these cultures and communities engaged in meaningful forms of expression and resistance? Part of fan studies’ legacy as construed by thinkers such as John Fiske and Henry Jenkins is optimism about the power of grassroots communities to provoke social change from both within and outside the industry. Having already established the deep historical embeddedness of fan culture within the role-playing industry, this section will consider how fan interactions around Pathfinder Roleplaying Game helped to shape Dungeons & Dragons: Fifth Edition. Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder developed as an alternative to Dungeons & Dragons: Fourth Edition. Critically panned by many fans, there are many reasons that fourth edition failed to sell and received a mixed critical 191

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reception. One simple theory is that it followed too quickly after the release of the prior supplement. Another theory is that fans were upset by how character classes had been retooled to better reflect the ways that digital MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft structure narrative balance. Regardless of the reason, fourth edition was a critical failure, and many fans migrated to the Pathfinder system to better support their gaming interests. The Pathfinder system began as a fan modification of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e. The third edition of Dungeons & Dragons had been released under the “Open Gaming License,” which, similar to creative commons, gave interested developers carte blanche to reproduce and modify game mechanics that had been developed within third edition. Pathfinder was one of the many fan spin-offs of third edition Dungeons & Dragons that resulted from the Open Game License. Importantly, its popularity was so great that it had rivaled Dungeons & Dragons in sales during 2011, 2012, and 2013.5 As a modification of the systems developed for Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder stands as an example of how the fan modifications to Dungeons & Dragons helped to resist the processes of productions which epitomize mainstream role-playing game development. The fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons was short-lived. Fifth edition was published only six years after its initial release in 2008. Thus, fifth edition was in development long before its eventual publication in 2014. To understand fifth edition as anything less than a response to the success of Pathfinder and the general disenfranchisement of fans around the systems of fourth edition would be an incredible mistake. The developers of fifth edition tried to make their development process as open as possible. They publicly released articles about their process, curated a team of specialists to consult on the game’s development, and even allowed the edition to enter a mode of open beta testing, similar to that realized by Pathfinder, where fans were allowed to play the game in advance. The development of fifth-edition Dungeons & Dragons shows how the economic and aesthetic values of fans were taken into account as the game developed. Not only was Wizards of the Coast forced to take into account the interests of fans as they developed fifth edition, but they also adopted some of the developmental practices of fans moving into this new edition of the game. Still, the question of interdependence lingers. Although it is clear that fans were unsatisfied with fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons, did the changes implemented in fifth edition speak to the community? Did they serve the needs of the consumers who would buy the game? 192

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One of the rule changes that had been implemented in Dungeons & Dragons: Fifth Edition was to allow for gender fluidity between characters. Quite unlike some of the games earliest moments where character statistics were related to the gender choices which players made, characters in fifth edition are allowed to represent any gender they like. From the rulebook: You can play a male or female character without gaining any special benefits or hindrances. Think about how your character does or does not conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender, and sexual behavior. For example, a male drow cleric defies the traditional gender divisions of drow society, which could be a reason for your character to leave that society and come to the surface. You don’t need to be confined to the binary notions of sex and gender. The elf god Corellon Larethian is often seen as androgynous or hermaphroditic, for example, and some elves in the multiverse are made in Corellon’s image. You can also play a female character who presents herself as a man, a man who feels trapped in a female body, or a bearded female dwarf who hates being mistaken for a male. Likewise, your character’s sexual orientation is for you to decide. (Wizards RPG Team, 2014) This rules shift clearly has a progressive ethic to it, erasing binaries that essentialize character gender to this or that within the rules. The fifth-edition approach to gender is wholly radical considering its context. The new rules assert that not only does gender difference not exist within the mathematics of systems like Dungeons & Dragons, but that gender is also a fluid concept within which characters might use a variety of nonbinary gender identities to help accentuate the plot. The catalyst for this radical revision to how character gender had been construed previously in role-playing games came from activism around LGBTQ issues at gaming conventions such as Gen Con. In an interview with The Mary Sue, fifth-edition designers Jeremy Crawford and Mike Mearls discuss how fan discourse led them to pursue radical tropes of game design: TMS: In particular, I heard a Gen Con panel helped inspire the wording. Can you tell us a bit more about that? JC: The Gen Con panel, Queer as a Three-Sided Die, started a few years ago and was organized by my friend Steve Kenson, with whom I worked

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on several RPG books before coming to Wizards of the Coast. I’ve also participated in LGBT panels at PAX and Emerald City Comicon. The panels have all been well-attended and have been filled with enthusiastic D&D players eager to see the game fully embrace them. Each of the panels has driven home that D&D is loved by people of many different types, and that the game has long been a place to explore identities and to try on different ways of seeing things. MM: In 2013, Jeremy and I talked about the Gen Con panel over lunch the following week, and I was struck at how the community was surprised that someone from Wizards of the Coast was able to attend. I had always felt that we were a fairly progressive company, but it drove home that people can’t read our minds. Our intentions don’t mean anything unless we reflect them in our work and our actions (Trice, 2014). Because of fan work in grassroots communities around issues of LGBTQ inclusiveness in game design, the designers of Dungeons & Dragons were compelled to accommodate the needs of the fans playing the game. Although it is concerning that the designers of Dungeons & Dragons would only take into account the needs of LGBTQIA individuals after they saw the potential for profit. The game would have remained less inclusive had it not been for activism in grassroots fan communities, clearly pointing out that consumption and production in role-playing communities is a reciprocal process wherein aspects of games that fans value must be taken into account by designers, or fans will simply find other places to spend their money. Within this space there is a radical potential for social change within otherwise rigid systems of capital. Pathfinder had a role to play in the shifting representations of sex and gender in role-playing games as well. The editor-in-chief at Paizo publishing compiled a list of fifty LGBTQ characters within the Pathfinder system and related media (Schneider, 2014). This list, although compiled in 2014 has references dating back to 2007 and 2008 where the system had first represented characters such as Cyrdark Drokkus and Sir Jasper Korvaski, or Kyra and Merisiel, in gay relationships. These early representations had sparked discussion on the Paizo web forums about the politics of these relationships. Fans were concerned by the tendency to represent women but not men in gay relationships in Pathfinder (Sceptenar, 2008). This concern was clearly 194

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heard by the developers at Paizo, which increased the amount of LGBTQ representations in their games and participated in panels such as Gen Con’s (2012) “Queer as a Three-Sided Die” panel at which Jeremy Crawford spoke. In this sense, when Pathfinder grew to contest the market share in roleplaying games that Dungeons & Dragons had once held, they brought with them a burgeoning group of fans interested in the politics of diversity and inclusivity, who had finally had a representational space opened up for them within the open-license politics of Pathfinder. There is a sense that the dynamics of these social, cultural, and economic shifts have been honed by the licensing decisions of both Paizo and Wizards of the Coast. It was because of the freedom allowed by the Wizards of the Coast decision to apply an open license to third edition that the traditionally heteronormative representational space of role-playing games was able to be modified to allow for a more fluid sense of representation—contingent on the interests of the fans publishing any given system. These unique new representations yielded some of the early figures, such as Kyra and Merisiel in Pathfinder, that would have been deemed a risk to profitability when fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released. But, in part due to the unanticipated failure of fourth edition and in part due to the runaway success of Pathfinder, these early figures were able to become topics of interest in a burgeoning sphere of fan discussion around sexuality in games. Through the new representational spaces allowed by the open-license system, new voices were able to be heard, and the status quo of representation in role-playing games was challenged.

The Dynamics of Reciprocity in Indie Games The dialogue between player community and designers is an apt metaphor for how fans of role-playing games and producers of role-playing games are interdependent. This interdependence is most clear when practiced on a subcultural level—like with Pathfinder or Diplomacy—but still present in indie games on the whole when the game itself anchors the community. This chapter has argued that indie games are the result of an interdependent relationship between communities of players and the media industry. Fans of role-playing games constitute a subculture, and that this subculture has the potential to intersect with other subcultures, such as the LGBTQIA+ community, in order to provoke a progressive sense of change in roleplaying games. In order to make this argument, this chapter first described a 195

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set of theoretical positions that have considered the dynamics of fan culture as one that is fundamentally about the reciprocal relationship between media producers and media consumers. Then, I offered the historical example of the “Opponents Wanted” column in the Avalon Hill General to showcase how this relationship has been a historical element of role-playing fandom since the 1960s. After having established the deep historical roots of the reciprocity between producer and consumer in role-playing games, this chapter explored an example where fans were able to challenge the heteronormative representational space of Dungeons & Dragons through discourse on the Paizo message boards and grassroots convention circuit. Considering these elements of reciprocity helps us to understand how the fan cultures of indie role-playing games are inextricably connected to the design decisions made by the producers of role-playing games. Additionally, we can see from the examples in this chapter how regulatory decisions, like open licensing structures, that allow for fans to produce, sell, and distribute derivative systems can help to foster creative engagement with products like Dungeons & Dragons, and in doing so engage more directly with the needs of consumers. If role-playing games are to support the heterogeneous needs of grassroots communities and cultures, they must be adaptable in a way that lets players tinker with the rules, mechanics, and iconography of the game. This chapter has offered one example that shows how the politics of fans have had a revolutionary impact on the designers of Dungeons & Dragons. It is meant to offer a method for critically engaging the potential impact of fans on the indie role-playing industry.

Notes 1 The Game is a parody of World of Warcraft (2004), and The Company is a parody of Blizzard Entertainment. 2 José Esteban Muñoz’s (2013) essay “‘Gimme Gimme This . . . Gimme Gimme That’: Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons” makes a similar argument. Muñoz likens punk communities to queer communities and explains how the affective relationships of kin in both do more to structure the subculture than the politics they express. 3 For a graphic visualization depicting the growth of Diplomacy fanzines over time please visit aarontrammell.com. 4 Some of these modifications, like Mordor versus the World saw fans attempting to integrate fantasy mechanics into postal diplomacy in ways that would be highly influential in the history of Dungeons & Dragons. 196

Indie in the Underground 5 This set of statistics has been cribbed from the Pathfinder Wikipedia page that cites a set of statistics from icv2.com a site about the business of geek culture (Pathfinder Role Playing Game, n.d.).

Works Cited Bainbridge, W. (1983). The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study. Malabar, FL: Kreiger Publishing Company. Benjamin, W. (1986). “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” In Illuminations. New York, NY: Schocken Books. Bowling Green State University Libraries. (n.d.) SPCOLL38: Hoosier Archives. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.bgs​u.edu​/libr​ary/p​cl/Co​llect​ions/​hoosi​er.ht​ml. Bratich, J. Z. (2005). “Amassing the multitude: Revisiting early audience studies.” Communication Theory, 15(3), 242–65. Certeau, M. (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Consalvo, M. (2009). Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Duncombe, S. (1997). Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. New York, NY: Verso Books. Fine, G. (1981). Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fiske, J. (2010). Understanding Popular Culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Habermas, J. (1991). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London, England: Methuen. Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T. (1972). Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York, NY: Continuum. Jenkins, H. (2008). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, NY: NYU Press. Kinkade, P. T., & Katovich, M. A. (2009). “Beyond place: On being a regular in an ethereal culture.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 38(1), 3–24. Lefevre, A. (1992a). Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Framework. New York, NY: MLA. Lefevre, A. (1992b). Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. New York, NY: Routledge. Meinel, J. (1992). Meinel’s Encyclopedia of Postal Diplomacy Zines. Anchorage, AK: Great White Publications. Muñoz, J. E. (2013). “Gimme gimme this . . . Gimme gimme that: annihilation and innovation in the punk rock commons.” Social/Text, 116, 95–110. “Pathfinder Role Playing Game.” (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https​://en​. wiki​pedia​.org/​wiki/​Pathf​i nder​_Role​playi​ng_Ga​me. Sceptenar. (2008). “Homosexuality in Golorion.” Retrieved from http:​//pai​zo.co​m/ thr​eads/​rzs2i​8wy&p​age=1​?Homo​sexua​lity-​in-Go​lario​n. 197

Indie Games in the Digital Age Schneider, F. W. (2014, July). “50  LGBTQ characters in the Pathfinder RPG. F. Wesley Schneider.” Retrieved from http:​//wes​schne​ider.​tumbl​r.com​/post​/9327​ 75992​46/50​-lgbt​q-cha​racte​rs-in​-the-​ pathfinder-rpg. Trammell, A. (2015). “The ludic imagination: A history of role-playing games, politics, and simulation in cold-war America, 1954–1984.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Trice, M. (2014, July). “The Mary Sue exclusive interview: Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford on acknowledging sexuality and gender diversity in D&D.” The Mary Sue. Retrieved from http:​//www​.them​arysu​e.com​/sexu​ality​-and-​gende​r-div​ersit​ y- dungeons-and-dragons-next/. Wertham, F. (1973). The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Wizards RPG Team. (2014). Player’s Handbook. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast.

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CHAPTER 10 PAPER CODE AND DIGITAL GOODS: THE ECONOMIC VALUES OF TYPE-IN MARKET GAMES

Patrick Davison

Introduction Sometimes the newest computer games came printed on paper as lines and lines of code. It was 1972 when a group of countercultural computing enthusiasts living in Palo Alto, California, began publishing a newsletter called The People’s Computer Company (PCC)—a motley assortment of articles, illustrations, advertisements, and letters discussing how to use these exciting new machines called computers. The newsletter’s managing editor, Bob Albrecht, had previously worked as a technology educator, teaching classes in remedial FORTRAN (Levy, 1984), and the PCC was his tool to get computers (and the ability to program them) into the hands of “the people.” In every issue, sandwiched among tutorials on how to buy mainframe computers or create musical tones using assembly code was a wide array of computer games. Games were everywhere in the PCC. The authors of the newsletter discussed their favorite games; they reproduced the printouts of new games they had played, and they printed letters from other enthusiastic game players. They advertised the sale of new games designed by themselves and others, available for purchase on paper data-storage tapes. Most notably, each issue included full “listings” of code for different games, all of them written in BASIC. This type of game—what I call the type-in game (Davison, 2016)—was one of the primary formats of “indie” gaming in 1970s America. The PCC therefore organized its reading public into an early national gaming scene, where readers programmed, played, and adapted the same games. So, what was this early gaming scene like? What were its cultural logics, and what kind of games got made and played? The answers, at first glance, offer a curious contradiction. Culturally, this indie gaming scene was heavily influenced by both the countercultural politics of the 1960s (Turner, 2008)

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and the so-called hacker ethic that emerged from early centers of computing (Levy, 1984). This particular group of counterculture figures was part of (or connected to) what Turner has called the “new communalists.” This was a loose social network that not only espoused anti-war and anti-corporate sentiments but also pursued an ideal of intentional communal living. For many new communalists, especially those influenced by independent publication The Whole Earth Catalog, the digital computer was a key component in imagining independence from mainstream culture. These values guided not just the PCC’s content but also its hybrid economic model. Journalist John Markoff (2005) describes it thus: “The PCC model was a simple one—part hobbyist, part political counterculture. You made the software available for free, and anyone could do anything they wanted with it. If they wanted to make money on it, that was just great” (262). Indeed, the newsletter was created largely by volunteers and filled with donated code written by readers, students, and others. At the same time, one of the popular genres of game distributed by the PCC was the economic simulation game. Games like MARKET, TRADER, and HAMURABI put players in the positions of CEOs, intergalactic merchants, or ancient emperors and asked them to achieve economic dominance through the calculated management of resources. Such games often incentivized strategies of harsh arbitrage and relied on simulated economic models that were rational, uncompromising, and imperial. In fact, HAMURABI, in which players take on the management of a city-state in ancient Babylon, has been previously historicized by games scholars Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter who use it as an illustration of how games themselves “nominate “empire” as a theme” (2009, p. xix). In the opening pages of Games of Empire, they draw a line of influence from HAMURABI as an important strategy game of the “freeware culture” of the early 1970s all the way to the war and empire simulators of contemporary games.1 How do we make sense, then, of this seeming contradiction—of an indie gaming scene led by countercultural “longhairs” (Dyer-Witheford and Peuter, 2009, p. 6), fueled by curious school children, and organized by informal, collaged newsletters that created and popularized games of calculating (sometimes imperial) economic dominance? Why did a group of people who opposed corporate exploitation, government dominance, and imperial war enshrine games which simulated those exact things? To answer this question, I examine the archives and historical context of the PCC with special attention to the economic simulation games that appeared 200

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in its pages. I juxtapose the attitudes toward economics and property that guided the PCC with the games they developed, advertised, and played. I closely examine three such games in order to describe exactly what types of economic simulations they were. The answers to the these questions hinge on the historically specific relationship between education and simulations following the 1960s. Albrecht made it clear that his main goal with the PCC was to teach everyday people the inner workings of computers. When he started the PCC there was a new but vibrant field of educational simulation development—one that saw simulations (both on computers and off them) as unique teaching tools (VanSickle, 1986). Not only was this field funded directly by the National Science Foundation (NSF), but many of the private supporters were corporations and practitioners of commercial professional development (Cohen and Rhenman, 1961). Nonetheless, for Albrecht these already existing simulations, whatever their conceptual focus, were invaluable tools for teaching the practice of programming. In this way, the combination of progressive social theories with conservative economic simulations in the pages of the PCC are an early manifestation of what critics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron would later identify as “The Californian Ideology.” Written in 1995, the two argue that the promiscuous combination of “the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies” was accomplished through “a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of new information technologies” (n.p.). And this is precisely what we see with the PCC. Albrecht’s intense focus on getting computers and computer literacy in the hands of everyday people, as a means for improving society as a whole, was what justified using any and every educational simulation available—even those that naturalized the logics of the free market, of colonial extraction, of slave labor. I read this as a telling precursor to the neoliberal, cyber-utopian turn of the 1990s, when former countercultural technologists became new economic and political allies of libertarian Republicans. Already in the 1970s, putting computer power in the “hands of the people” went hand in hand with the “invisible hand” of the market. The result was a gaming scene were kids and adults alike did indeed have fun playing games and did indeed learn through those games the internal logic of algorithms, subroutines, and dynamic systems. And at the same time, they crushed their economic rivals. They extracted minerals from distant planets. And they gave orders to their Babylonian slaves. In other words, they worked out an idiom of play that would become one of the 201

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most popular genres of computer game. To see the effects of this lineage, one need only look to the contemporary indie gaming scene, where an array of simulations—games like Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Prison Architect— continue to be made and played, continue to teach players about both algorithmic systems and real-world theories of social order.2

The Long (1970s) of Indie Gaming with BASIC In many ways, the PCC organized an early indie gaming scene. Though, referring to this activity as “indie gaming” is an intentional anachronism on my part. That phrase did not circulate during the 1970s, and the commercial gaming companies from which contemporary indies are “independent” did not yet exist. However, this period was marked by several conditions of independence that make it a meaningful historical analog to indie gaming post-2000. Game scholars Chase Bowen Martin and Mark Deuze argue that contemporary indie gaming is associated with “immaterial skills such as being “progressive,” taking risks, or having a deeply personal investment in cultural production” (Martin and Deuze, 2009, p. 288). These characteristics aptly describe the authors of the PCC. They were both politically progressive and excited about progressing the field of computing. They were willing to take risks on new, unproven publications like the PCC, and they, to various degrees, wove the practice of teaching computers into their daily lives. Martin and Deuze further clarify that for most people in the field of digital games, being “indie” signifies both economic and creative independence (Martin and Deuze, 2009, p. 277). In the case of the PCC, their economic independence was not independence from large digital games companies, but rather from the military, corporate, and academic centers that controlled the vast majority of mainframe computing.3 As Markoff (2005) puts it, the late 1960s and early 1970s were when “the potential of computing power” was still only “leaking out to a wider audience.” Historian Joy Lisi Rankin describes this process in great detail, documenting how the co-development of minicomputers (notably, the PDP series of Digital Equipment Corporation [DEC]) and time-sharing techniques allowed numerous communities of “computational citizens” to organize during this period (Rankin, 2018). Indeed, the PCC spent pages and pages offering advice on how individuals or communities might arrange the purchase of their own computer, or at the very least gain access via remote terminal. If such an independent group 202

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could secure their own computer, they would be free to use it as much as they wanted on whatever computer applications they saw fit.4 The game enthusiasts of the PCC also enjoyed creative independence due to the norms around source code and intellectual property that held sway among many computer programmers during this period. Journalist Steven Levy (1984) recorded this as part of the “hacker ethic” that guided many of the early mainframe computer hackers—the idea that programs should be freely shared and altered, rather than sold (Levy, 1984).5 This ethical commitment to the availability of source code was coupled with the material reality of the time period, which was that printed sets of source code, or typeins, were often the most effective means of transmitting programs. These two factors combined to produce an environment where game production and consumption could proceed through experimentation and adaptation. The circulation of source code was therefore a crucial foundation of this period of indie gaming. There were several programming languages in use at this time, but the code used by the PCC was BASIC. BASIC was the invention of John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, two computer scientists at Dartmouth (Time, 2014; Rankin, 2018). They originally designed BASIC as a human-readable alternative to the more arcane computer languages available at the time (languages like FORTRAN or Assembly) that could be used to teach programming to students—a perfect complement to the PCC’s educational mission. By the end of the 1970s, several companies had begun selling personal microcomputers, and the shape of indie gaming shifted in response. Most notably, BASIC fractured into what Time magazine has called “a lingua franca,” as each device—the Altair, the TRS-80, the Commodore 64, and so on—all came with their own slightly tweaked version of the language. This only deepened the usefulness of type-in games—players would often have to massage the syntax of specific functions to make a game work on their local machine.6 Therefore the prevalence of type-ins and the ubiquity of BASIC helped maintain the 1970s” indie gaming scene as a site of experimentation, linked by printed-paper copies of code flitting between users, publications, and organizations.7 The games I focus on in this chapter circulated as type-ins during the early 1970s, though many were subsequently published and republished in commercial bundles of games that were sold well into the 1980s. However, the bulk of this activity was tapering off by (at least) 1984. PC magazine was launched in 1981, with the founder announcing they would never print source code; three years later, the first Apple Macintosh was released with no 203

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BASIC installed (Time, 2014). Therefore, from BASIC’s creation in 1964 to its absence from the killer personal computer in 1984, we can consider these two decades the long-1970s of BASIC indie gaming. And in the middle of this period, the PCC began publishing.

The Economics of the PCC The PCC was a publication with a complicated, hybrid economic identity. It was first produced as a volunteer project, then spawned its own nonprofit organization, and eventually also spun out a for-profit company which ran a local computer center alongside the continued publication of the newsletter. The newsletter itself was sold for a relatively low price—$5 for five or six issues across a year, back issues sold for less than a dollar each—and the PCC also advertised a number of books sold by the publishers. Among these economic details, we can identify three different logics pulling against each other: the strict information-should-be-free stance of the hacker ethic, an informal embrace of reciprocity and communitybuilding that was characteristic of the counterculture, and a traditional intellectual property approach that saw copyright and distribution deals as the legitimate means to control and fund creative production. In particular, we can see that the negotiations around code and text as forms of economically valuable intellectual property were central to maintaining the PCC as a viable publication. In many places these negotiations were never fully resolved—code worked simultaneously as the product of collective effort and as a commodity that could be advertised and sold. Visually, the PCC was a beautiful, uneven collage of a document. Every issue was assembled from diverse parts—a riot of different typefaces, text culled from countless books and authors, and many, many drawings of dragons. The ubiquity of dragons in the pages of the PCC has not received much attention. The newsletter has been discussed in a number of computing histories (Levy, 1984; Markoff, 2005; Turner, 2008; Rankin, 2018), and many of these focus on the idiosyncrasies of Albrecht, PCC’s primary editor, author, and spokesperson. Other historians discuss his long hair and casual dress, his energy for teaching kids to use computers, and his obsession with Greek folk dancing. But none of them mention his preoccupation with dragons and the way the mythical creature became a de facto mascot for the PCC—with readers addressing letters to “the dragon,” or referring to each other as “fellow dragons.” 204

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Albrecht’s fascination with dragons helps explain why his own history of the PCC (Albrecht et al., 1975) was written in the adapted language of a fantastic fairytale: “Once upon a time there was a dragon,” he began. Over two pages he explained how he became fascinated with teaching kids to use computers. He explained how he moved to California, met Lois Jennings and Stewart Brand, and worked with them and Richard Raymond (whom he called “the limpid wizard”) to found the Portola Institute. The Portola Institute was where Jennings and Brand would later publish The Whole Earth Catalog, and it was also where Albrecht joined with a number of colleagues to start a technical writing company called Dymax: Alas for our heroes, lacking the wise counsel of the limpid wizard, they soon fell into evil ways, sullied their mouths with foul words, like “fair return” and even . . . profit. But the vilest of their perversions was a dark conspiracy by which they created a Thing. This wicked deed performed by hours of muttering over mighty spells called articles of incorporation, produced a creature recognizable at law as a person, though unnatural, which endures even to this day. (p. 2) This “Thing,” the Dymax company, was the publisher of the first issues of PCC starting in 1972. The following year, the team created a new nonprofit organization (“this time a Good Thing”) called the PCC to take over printing the newsletter and running the nascent computer center that they had begun in the Dymax office space. This computer center was the physical base of the PCC and came about through an unlikely turn of events. At the time, Val Skalabrin, a salesman for DEC, had been touring California with a modified PDP8L computer, which he had connected to a “rollaround stand” (Albrecht et al., 1975, p. 2). He would travel to various locations with this apparatus, set it up, and give demonstrations. On one trip, Skalabrin brought the PDP8L to Dymax, where Albrecht used it to let local kids play games. Afterward, when Skalabrin “received the dread news that he had been recalled to the grim castle of Maynard, the capitol of Eduland” he unofficially donated the computer to Dymax. The PCC suddenly had what it needed to host its own computer center. Albrecht eventually struck a deal with DEC to make the transfer of the PDP8L official. And around the same time, Hewlitt-Packard agreed to donate computer time on one of their machines, though Albrecht’s dragonthemed history never explains the terms of this arrangement. From this point 205

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forward, the PCC was able to forward its mission of computer education on two fronts: through the broad distribution of the newsletter and through hosting regular classes and events at the People’s Computer Center. Once the PCC had the donated computers (and computer time) up and running, they operated a storefront where members of the public could come and rent computer time at twenty-five cents an hour (Markoff, 2005).8 This history gives a glimpse into the economic logics of Albrecht and his collaborators” social sphere, the same logics which guided the management of the PCC. For one, the language of Albrecht’s history is steeped in a characteristic ambivalence about corporate activity. His language—“evil . . . sullied . . . foul”—performs his distaste with starting his own company, even as he did, indeed, start one. Albrecht echoed this ambivalence when discussing the success of the Brands’s Whole Earth Catalog. He wrote that Stewart and Lois “cleared over a million in green stuff ” but that they also “became disenchanted with wizardry” (Albrecht et al., 1975, p. 3). The PCC also had a complicated relationship to intellectual property. Many of the group of programmers that became contributors to the PCC were early devotees of the “hacker ethic” (Levy, 1984) that was precursor to the “free software” movement of the 1980s. According to this tradition, applying intellectual property rights to source code was unethical. At the same time, as Turner (2008) observes, one of the reasons behind Albrecht’s continued solvency was that he held the copyright to a book he produced on contract for DEC: My Computer Loves Me (When I Speak BASIC). This book was a casual, user-friendly introduction to programming in BASIC, and it sold well for years after its initial publication. Where the line was between code (which hackers believed should be free) and print (which Albrecht clearly charged for) remained fuzzy throughout this period. After 1973, the newsletter was produced by a nonprofit, and Albrecht explains that most people who worked on it (himself included) were never paid. As Markoff (2005) puts it, “That’s the kind of place the PCC was: hands-on, run in part by volunteers, and in tune with the power-to-thepeople spirit of the late sixties” (p. 31). Still, the organization needed enough income to persist, and so there were subscription costs, back issue order forms, and advertisements for a variety of books. In fact, certain issues of the magazine read almost like a catalog, with entire pages devoted to reviews of new books for sale or lengthy promotional discussions of other companies, computer centers, or technology products. This was (in part) because the PCC solicited contributions from readers and other collaborators to be printed in each issue. 206

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Sometimes this was simple, with generic requests for letters which would be reprinted. Other times it was specific requests for new programs or alterations to programs whose listings could be reproduced. And more official collaborators could produce entire pages of content for a small recompense. The PCC paid “$10 for each page laid out camera ready” (Albrecht et al., 1975, p. 3). This helps explain the newsletter’s frenetic visual style, as pages came in from different sources at different times, with no guarantee of professional layout skills. In other words, the jumbled aesthetics of the PCC was not simply a stylistic choice; it was a consequence of the collaborative labor used to produce it. Program code played a special role in the economics of the PCC. On the one hand, the programs that the PCC claimed as their own were frequently the result of long collaborative development, often with the school children who participated in computing workshops. In Issue 3, for example, the PCC presented TRAP, a variation on a number guessing game. An unidentified author (likely Albrecht) explained that the game was suggested by an elevenyear-old, who also helped write the program (Albrecht et al., 1973). Some games they printed the entire source code for; other games they showed printouts of and advertised a small fee for the purchase of the game on tape. In 1975, the group behind the PCC published their first stand-alone collection of game code, What to Do After You Hit Return (WTDAYHR), which made special mention in the introduction of the diverse contributions of code to the volume: Many of these games are part of our folklore—we have no idea how many people contributed their time and creativity to them. We have undoubtedly left out dozens of credits. If you helped in the development of any of the games, please send your name and we’ll include it in the next printing (we can expand to as many pages as necessary). (People’s Computer Center, 1975, p. vi) The status of code, therefore, as property, was in rather constant flux around PCC. It was the ability to charge for the mediated reproduction of much of this code which helped keep the newsletter in business, even as the programs themselves were being produced through the labor of school children and PCC readers. This ambivalence is made all the more interesting when you consider the economic simulation games that were advertised in the PCC and printed in WTDAYHR, none of which imagined hybrid economies, the role of nonmarket transactions, or communal forms of labor. How do we 207

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account for the prevalence of such games among a group of technologists so entrenched in an ambivalent, hybrid economic culture? On the one hand, the PCC published these games because they were simply already available— some of them close to a decade old by the early 1970s. But on the other hand, the economic values of these games would turn out to be surprisingly compatible with the fantasies of liberal economic freedom that increasingly accompanied personal computing.

Three Economic Simulation Games There were many games published or discussed in the PCC that were based on some type of economic simulation. Here, I analyze three of those: MARKET, TRADER, and HAMURABI. Each of these three was discussed in different issues of the PCC, but all of them were reproduced with a full source code listing in WTDAYHR. Read together, the three games illustrate the type of economic values that became common to the genre. They are based on monopolistic market dominance, the imperial exploitation of developing economies, and the management of human life as an economic resource, respectively. On the one hand, it might seem inconsequential that the group that read and wrote the PCC would play games that were at odds with their real-world political values. After all, many people play games of fantasy or war, violence, or theft, even if they do not fight or steal in their day-to-day lives. However, the circulation of these economic simulation games was happening at the same time as a specific embrace of games as pedagogical tools by Albrecht and his peers. For instance, in Issue 5, Volume 3 of the PCC, published in 1975, there appeared a full-page advertisement for The New Games Newsletter. This newsletter was published by its own nonprofit foundation, which offered their own collection of games: noncomputer games, all of them guided by communal values of collaboration and communication. The advertisement bills the so-called new games as part of a movement, in fact, that brought people together to “celebrate their differences and play with each other” (p. 21). Clearly, there was an awareness among those at the PCC that games transmitted values to their players. There are also subsequent historical grounds for seeing these economic simulation games as more than simple escapism with arbitrary themes. Barbrook and Cameron have identified that a later and significant turn in the Californian Ideology was the belief that computer networks would 208

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“paradoxically involve a return to the economic liberalism of the past” (1995, n.p.). They refer to this as a “retro-utopia,” that paralleled the science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s “filled with space traders, superslick salesman, genius scientists, pirate captains and other rugged individualists” (n.p.). The roles played in the following games then—business executive, space trader, Babylonian king—were part of a larger economic imaginary.

MARKET MARKET was a relatively simple economic simulation discussed in the second issue of the PCC (Albrecht et al., 1972). In MARKET, players acted as two competing “companies,” each of which took turns deciding their production level, advertising budget, and unit price for an imaginary product. After each company entered in these values, the computer processed them through the internal logic of the simulation and reported on changes to profit, market share, cash, inventory, and assets. The companies then entered new rates of production, advertising, and pricing, and the simulation proceeded. The object of the game was to “run your competition into bankruptcy or reach $12 million in assets yourself!” Gameplay progressed through trial and error, with players adopting different strategies—balancing production, advertising, and price—to determine the highest rate of return. These strategies were then complicated by the other player adopting their own strategy. In addition to this direct system of competition the game would randomly trigger a set of events. For instance, one company could be randomly assigned an “embezzlement” event that deducted 200 of their assets. Another event would burn down a company’s warehouse and reimburse them through an “insurance policy” that paid ¾ the original value of the stock. A notable feature of this simulation was that players could not control any aspect of their product’s quality. There was no variable for research and development, nor for production costs. Instead, by focusing on volume, price, and advertising, MARKET emphasized an economic theory based solely on the analysis of consumer behavior in the face of simplified supply and demand. The economic rationale it taught, therefore, was a reactive strategy that attempted to derive as much value as possible from the margins allowed by an abstract purchasing public, rather than attempting to charge a “fair” price relative to the quality of the product. This enshrined the pursuit of maximizing profit and set the elimination of one’s competition as an economic goal. 209

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TRADER TRADER, also known as Star Trader, was a far more complicated economic simulation. It could be played by up to four players and required two separate programs: the actual game and a separate set-up module that produced a simulated “econometric model” used during play. Once the game was set up, players would travel from planet to planet on a procedurally generated “star map,” interact with local populations to buy and sell different commodities at different rates: uranium, metals, gems, software, heavy equipment, and medicine. Play continued for whatever predetermined game length the players set at the outset, and at the end, the player with the most money was declared the winner. In WTDAYHR, the authors provided an in-depth explanation for the econometric model used to simulate the economy of each planet in the game. In this model, each planet was defined along a development axis that goes from “frontier” through “underdeveloped” and “developed” to “cosmopolitan.” Frontier planets always had a surplus of raw materials like uranium and metals, and always had the highest need for refined goods like medicine. Cosmopolitan planets were the opposite, with surpluses of medicine and a need for uranium. In addition, planets changed their position along this axis based on how you interacted with them. If you spent time trading with a planet, it would creep toward cosmopolitan and update its supply and demand. Star Trader’s econometric model and general gameplay are perfect illustrations of Witheford and De Peuter’s (2009) claim that video games are the “paradigmatic media of empire” (p. xv). The players are put in a position where the accumulation of capital is the only goal and the effects on local societies are only second-order effects. The differences between planets—representing different societies—are not pluralistic and specific but all aligned along the same axis. “Underdeveloped” societies are available for the extraction of natural resources, delivered to “cosmopolitan” centers. At the same time, the simulation provides a rosy conclusion to the story of extraction, as the more one trades with an undeveloped planet the more it proceeds evenly and cheerfully toward development. This is a fantasy of empire that ignores the racialized history of deliberate underdevelopment as a European means to dominate the African continent (Rodney, 2018). If there were any doubt about the theories underpinning the game, the graphic presentation of Star Trader in WTDAYHR offers confirmation of this imperial reading. The game is discussed alongside a handful of small 210

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hand-drawn illustrations (most likely done by Albrecht). One of them depicts a dark-skinned man with a large earring, wearing the clothes of a seventeenth-century sailor. Two pages later there is a simple drawing of a ship, not a space ship, but a large sail boat atop a choppy ocean. TRADER might have approximated the aesthetic of Star Trek or Lost in Space, but it also reproduced the historical economic logic of the Dutch East India Company.

HAMURABI The economic simulation in WTDAYHR with the shortest source code listing was called HAMURABI. This program put players in the position of Hammurabi, the historical ruler of Babylon. The program simulated the player’s city according to three quantities: acres of land, bushels of food, and number of subjects. Like MARKET, HAMURABI proceeded through a number of identical rounds, each time asking the player to make decisions and then reporting the results. However, unlike both MARKET and TRADER, HAMURABI was a single-player game. Players of HAMURABI decided four things each round: the number of acres of land they would buy, the number of acres they would sell, how much food they would distribute to feed the people, and how many acres they would plant with new crops. The program would then report how many people starved, how many new people “came to the city,” how many bushels had been destroyed by rats, and the new worth (in bushels) of acres of land. Crucially, as printed in WTDWYHR, HAMURABI had no stated goal. The instructions explained that if you wanted to end the simulation, simply sell all of your remaining acres. Otherwise, players proceeded through round after round, seeing the results of their various resource distribution choices. Instead of an economic competition, HAMURABI was simply an economic simulation. In the hands of the PCC, such a limited and direct simulation was framed as an educational tool as much as a game. More than teaching the player something about economic principles, the PCC authors framed HAMURABI as an exercise in deciphering the algorithmic processes of computer programs—put input in, get output out, construct a mental model of the interior computation. This educational goal of HAMURABI is once again illustrated in its presentation in WTDAYHR. Added in the margins beside the game are a series of hand-written questions: “What causes people to starve?,” “Crop yield varies?,” “Why would anyone come to the city while people 211

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are dying of starvation?” These questions never break the premise of the game as an ancient economy, but they do prompt the reader/player to wonder at the specific mechanisms controlling the “city” behind the scenes. This educational purpose is why HAMURABI did not need an explicit goal. Players were free to tinker with the program until they had figured out the system—until they knew a sure-fire way of maximizing economic growth within the simulated rules—and then sell all their acres and move on. The educational value of HAMURABI, though, was not simply a byproduct of its presentation by the people of the PCC. The 1975 version was an adaptation of a much older program, a far more expansive simulation of a Sumerian economy that had been created around 1965 by a team of experts as part of an NSF-funded project to develop computer-based educational tools. In fact, several of the programs that were circulated by the PCC had similar histories—drawn from an established field of educational simulations that predated the use of computers. It was from this field that many of the economic (and imperial) values of these economic simulation models first came.

Economic Simulations and Education Research I began this chapter by wondering how to account for the prevalence of rational economic simulation games among an indie gaming scene steeped in countercultural values. The answer, in part, turns out to have a lot to do with the sources of those economic simulations. Many of the games that the PCC listed, circulated, or sold were not created by members of the PCC or their readers or students. Instead, many of these games were adapted versions of educational simulations created by organizations funded by both government and commercial entities. The values encoded into these simulations, then, largely came from groups very different from Albrecht and the other PCC countercultural types. In fact, in another bit of contextual commentary within WTDWYHR, the disembodied editorial voice laments this conflict: Most of the simulations written so far involve money, war, and politics.  .  .  . Hopefully, we’ll be able to design non-aggressive simulations. Suggestions would be welcomed—please write. (People’s Computer Center, 1975, p. 69) 212

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Albrecht and his cohorts were clearly ambivalent about the violence, both physical and economic, they were helping to circulate. So where did these simulations first come from? Broadly, the field of educational simulations had existed, independent of computers, since at least the 1940s. Writing in 1961, economists Kalman J. Cohen and Eric Rhenman explain that the first widely known “management game” was created in 1956 by the American Management Association (AMA). Further, they cite the AMA’s own justification for creating a management game based on existing war games: Why not a “war game,” in which teams of executives would make basic decisions of the kind that face every top management—and would see the results immediately? From these questions grew AMA’s Top Management Decision Simulation. After an exploratory visit to the Naval War College, a research group was formed and work began on a game which would eventually become part of an AMA course in decision making. This in turn, it was hoped, might lead to a sort of “war college” for business executives. (Cohen and Rhenman, 1961, p. 135) Between 1956 and 1960, a number of different research groups developed their own variants on management games: IBM, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon. Management simulation games became popular tools in business training and a field of practitioners emerged that saw simulations as uniquely capable of teaching certain lessons. Supply and demand were good in theory, but actually making decisions had to be practiced. Like any field of research, the practitioners of simulation gaming education formed their own organizations. The East Coast War Games Council was founded in 1962, changed its name to the National Gaming Council in 1968, and is still active today as the North American Simulation and Gaming Association (“History—NASAGA,” n.d.). By 1973, the year after the PCC began publishing, we can find a range of opinions on the use of simulation games conveyed at the organization’s twelfth annual symposium—from enthusiastic to skeptical to critical (Moriarty, 1974). Richard A. Schusler, from the University of Kansas, considered the introduction of simulations to the classroom “a promising possibility of breaking [the] restrictive environment of the classroom” (p. 129). He argued that simulations provided the information and “comprehension opportunities” necessary for developing higher cognitive skills. Ron 213

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Stadsklev, from Alabama’s Institute of Higher Education Research and Services, was less optimistic and argued that by 1974, “the term simulation/ game is used to cover a multitude of activities and materials.” “If you want to sell something,” he wrote, “call it a simulation game” (p. 159). But Stuart Cipinko, from the University of Redlands in California, provided the sharpest critique of the use of simulation games in education: It is no accident that simulations and gaming are now the calling-card of “innovative” education; it is no accident that “radical” educators are employing games as teaching tools almost as fast as they can be turned out; it is no accident that the agents of corporate capitalism are incorporating simulations into manager training programs; and it is certainly no accident that substantial government funding is going to those who produce and refine the tools of the trade. (p. 337) Cipinko went on to explain that those using simulations to teach had to acknowledge that simulations were not “value-neutral” and that each one implied a “construction of reality.” Therefore, Cipinko believed that those teachers using simulations needed to “become ethically sensitive as well as technically expert” (p. 339). And two of the three PCC games described above were products of the type of government funding that Cipinko was so critical of: both MARKET and HAMURABI had been produced or inspired by government-funded programs in the 1960s. The history of TRADER is less clear, as seemingly no record exists prior to its supposed creation by Dave Kaufman in 1974. But for the other two, we can find written records quite different from the collaged pages of the PCC. MARKET was initially designed by the Huntington Computer Project, an NSF-funded initiative hosted first by the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and later the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Visich and Braun, 1974). Starting in 1967, the NSF provided funds to research the potential uses of computers for high school education. This project ran for an initial three years, during which time it worked with eighty teachers and more than 3,000 students. After that, the project extended into the “Huntington II” phase, to develop stand-alone teaching and program materials for the application of the first phase of resource. The result of Huntington II was a collection of seventeen computer simulations of different educational topics. They ranged from POLUT, which demonstrated the effects of pollution on bodies of water, to POLICY, which simulated the creation of US domestic policy, to MARKET, which was a “simulation game engaging two companies 214

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in a one-product competition .  .  . developed to give secondary school students a fundamental understanding of the consumer market and the variables which influence the market” (Visich and Braun, 1974, p. 21). In 1972, the Huntington II project contracted DEC to be the publisher of these simulation materials. Each module could be purchased separately as a combination of program tape and a series of booklets for teachers and students. During the 1972/73 school year, DEC sold more than 25,000 copies of these materials. When the PCC first mentioned MARKET it was alongside information about how to order such copies from DEC, rather than by reproducing the code themselves. This is not surprising; after all, DEC was the distributor of Albrecht’s books as well. It was only later, in 1975, that the PCC printed the actual source code of MARKET (and other Huntington simulations) in WTDAYHR.9 HAMURABI has a similar history of institutional creation. In WTDAYHR, the editor described HAMURABI as a “pure-fun game” that could also be used as a “serious classroom learning exercise” (People’s Computer Center, 1975, p. 71). The text also admitted that the game had been “circulating in one form or another for years.” In the 1975 version of a book by PCC contributor David Ahl, 101 BASIC Computer Games, HAMURABI is described as having been floating around DEC for “9 or more years” (p. 128). The game’s original history goes back even further, to a program created in 1962 by the Center for Educational Services and Research of the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in Northern Westchester, New York (Wing, 1966; Wing et al., 1967). This educational board partnered with IBM to create two experimental computer-based simulation games: the Sierra Leone Game and the Sumerian Game. According to games historian Devin Monnens (2012), the latter was the original inspiration for the version of HAMURABI printed in 1975. In the Sumerian Game, players took on the role, not of Hammurabi, but of “the priest-ruler of Lagash,” named Luduga (Wing et al., 1967, p. 13). The Sumerian Game was written to convey a number of specific economic values to the sixth-grade students. These were listed in the final report of the project by the director, Richard L. Wing. One such economic value and its manifestation in the game are efficient allocation of resources benefits society; inefficient allocation reduces the total wealth of a community. If too little grain is saved for planting, Luduga’s people starve to death; the loss of people is a serious loss of an important factory of production—labor. (Wing et al., 1967, p. 18) 215

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In other words, the simulation holds that people’s deaths amount to a loss of production for the state. The BOCES team developed the Sumerian Game as an educational simulation in conjunction with academic experts on economics and ancient Middle East history. It was an elaborate simulation, with multiple phases of economic development—far more elaborate than the BASIC HAMURABI. In addition, students played the Sumerian Game only after receiving a presentation on the society and economics of Mesopotamia, and they sat and typed on a teletype in front of a wall projection of Sumerian-themed images. The Sumerian Game was programmed in around 15,000 lines of FORTRAN code. Years later, programmer Doug Dymet was inspired to create his own version, an extremely compressed version written in FOCAL. Dymet gave this new version the name HAMURABI—and it was this version that David Ahl would later convert to BASIC (Monnens, 2012). The basic economic values of HAMURABI, therefore, were not those of the PCC that distributed the program. Rather, they were inherited from a governmentfunded educational research project begun more than a decade earlier.

Conclusion At the start of this chapter I set out to explain a seeming contradiction in one part of the “indie” gaming scene of 1970s America: how a publication founded on countercultural principles of community and free information could so consistently promote a genre of game about economic domination. The history of these games shows, however, that they were likely chosen by the PCC not because of their underlying economic values but because of their simple availability, given that these simulations-turned-games had been produced by an already established field of educational experimentation. It is also quite possible that the PCC did, in fact, organize “non-aggressive” versions of these economic games. Albrecht makes repeated appeals for readers to produce such variations. But because it was the original versions of the games that were printed, they form the available historical record— one that admittedly shows us a single angle on this gaming scene, while leaving out countless others. Again, viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the seeming contradiction I saw between the counterculture of the PCC and the exploitative economic models of their games might not actually be that contradictory. Fred Turner has captured how the countercultural activity of the 1960s and 1970s formed 216

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the basis for an eventual turn to cyber-libertarianism in the 1990s and after. That is, the freedom associated with computers and networks slipped from a model of collective organization to one of neoliberal individualism. Connected to this history, the PCC’s embrace of games that enshrined rational economic models seems less like a disjuncture that must be explained and more like an early sign of larger trends—where an enthusiasm for computers and a fantasy of economic independence justified the reproduction of an economic status quo. Today, the pressure to use games to teach a new generation of computer users has diffused, but the question remains: What values are being encoded in our most popular indie games? To what degree do indie games truly stand as independent from the conventional theories of how to value and organize society?

Notes 1 The two also reference empire as “an apparatus whose two pillars are the military and the market” (p. xiv). This chapter focuses on the economic half of that formulation. 2 For more on how contemporary simulation games reproduce theories of social order, see Claudia Lo’s (2016) analysis of gender roles in Rimworld. 3 The PCC began before personal microcomputers were broadly available. The earliest commercial microcomputer, the Altair 8800 was released in 1975—with much fanfare in the pages of the PCC. 4 There were plenty of games that had flourished on the institutional mainframes during the 1960s (Levy, 1984), but these were often open secrets, at risk of being condemned as misuses of resources by those in charge of computing budgets. 5 In one passage, Levy uses the early game Spacewar to illustrate this free information commitment (p. 46). A copy of the game was eventually given to computer manufacturer DEC, which would use the program to test their machines. DEC was also the publisher of Bob Albrecht’s books and the distributor for the materials of Huntington simulations. The PCC was therefore clearly connected to a larger milieu that saw source code as something to be kept open and circulating. 6 Time magazine’s BASIC retrospective (2014) reflected on the educational value of this process: Typing in programs from listings was an intellectual exercise rather than mere rote effort, in part because you often ended up adapting them for your computer’s version of Microsoft BASIC. The language had splintered into dialects as the companies that licensed it adapted it for their computers,

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Indie Games in the Digital Age stuffing it into whatever memory was available and improvising functions for machine-specific capabilities such as graphics and sound. 7 For an in-depth discussion of how the culture of creation and experimentation developed on time-sharing networks, independent of type-ins, see Rankin (2018), particularly chapter 3. 8 Markoff (2005) describes this arrangement: The PDP-8 computer that Albrecht had acquired wasn’t a personal computer, but it was, after a fashion, certainly a desktop computer, albeit a bulky one. It had a front panel complete with plastic toggle switches and blinking lights, and it served an array of four terminals that could print out a line at a time on a roll of computer paper. It was possible for anyone to come in off the street and rent computer time on the system to play games or do word processing or program for a nominal twenty-five cents per hour. (p. 260) 9 It’s worth noting that many of the Huntington games did not come with clear explanations of gameplay in the source code, as they were designed to be used alongside the instructional booklets. WTDAYHR printed the source code for these games, as well as directed people to order the supporting materials for DEC.

Works Cited Ahl, D. (1975). 101 BASIC Computer Games. Maynard, MA: Digital Equipment Corporation. Albrecht, B., Brown, J., Le Brun, M., Session, P. L., Finkel, L., Wood, J., & Albrecht, M. J. (1972, December). The People’s Computer Company, Vol. 1, No. 2. Albrecht, B., Brown, J., Sessions, P. L., Finkel, L., Albrecht, M. J., Le Brun, M., . . . Thompson, N. (1973, February). The People’s Computer Company, Vol. 1, No. 3. People’s Computer Co. Albrecht, B., Albrecht, M. J., Britton, L., Britton, K., Felsenstein, L., DeKoven, B., . . . Scarvie, P. (1975, May). The People’s Computer Company, Vol. 3, No. 5. People’s Computer Co. Barbrook, R., & Cameron, A. (1995, September 1). “The Californian ideology.” Retrieved from http:​//www​.meta​mute.​org/e​ditor​ial/a​rticl​es/ca​lifor​nian-​ideol​ogy. Center, P. C. (1975). What to Do After You Hit Return. People’s Computer Co. Cohen, K. J., & Rhenman, E. (1961). “The role of management games in education and research.” Management Science, 7(2), 131–66. Davison, P. (2016, September). “The time and timing of type-Ins: How emulation can reveal “born-textual” games.” Presented at the Extending Play 3, Rutgers University. Dyer-Witheford, N., & Peuter, G. D. (2009). Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Paper Code and Digital Goods History—NASAGA. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://nasaga.org/about-nasaga/history/. Levy, S. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Lo, C. (2016, November 2). “How RimWorld’s code defines strict gender roles.” Retrieved from https​://ww​w.roc​kpape​rshot​gun.c​om/20​16/11​/02/r​imwor​ld-co​ de-an​alysi​s/. Markoff, J. (2005). What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. New York, NY: Penguin. Martin, C. B., & Deuze, M. (2009). “The independent production of culture: A digital games case study.” Games and Culture, 4(3), 276–95. Monnens, D. (2012, February). “The Sumerian game: The strange and untold story of the first simulation game.” Presented at the SW/TX PCA/ACA Conference, Albuquerque, NM. Moriarty, J. E. (Ed.). (1974, June). “Simulation and gaming.” Proceedings of the 12th Annual Symposium National Gaming Council and the 4th Annual Conference International Simulation and Gaming Association. U.S. Department of Commerce. Rankin, J. L. (2018). A People’s History of Computing in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rodney, W. (2018). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. New York, NY: Verso Books. Time. (2014, April 29). “Fifty years of BASIC, the programming language that made computers personal.” Retrieved from http://time.com/69316/basic/. Turner, F. (2008). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (60265th edition). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. VanSickle, R. L. (1986). “A quantitative review of research on instructional simulation gaming: A twenty-year perspective.” Theory and Research in Social Education, XIV(3), 245–64. Visich, M. Jr., & Braun, L. (1974). The Use of Computer Simulations in High School Curricula (No. ED 089 740). New York: State University of New York at Stony Brook. Wing, R. L. (1966). “Two computer-based economics games for sixth graders.” American Behavioral Scientist, 10(3), 31–35. Wing, R. L., Addis, M., Goodman, W., Leonard, J., & McKay, W. (1967). “The production and evaluation of three computer-based economics games for the sixth grade.” Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED014227.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Betsy Brey is a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo (BA and MA, University of Minnesota Duluth) in the Department of English Language and Literature, where she teaches on games, new media, and storytelling. Her research explores the intersections of queerness, narrative structure, and games. She is the editor-in-chief for First Person Scholar and her writing has been featured in The Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, as well as in several book chapters on narrative structure, player experience, and the social and political context of game meaningfulness. M. J. Clarke is an assistant professor of TV, Film and Media Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. His book, Transmedia Television, was published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Press, and his research has appeared in several journals including Games & Culture and Television & New Media. Currently, he is serving as editor of the Journal of Film and Video. Patrick Davison is a media historian and the production and editorial lead for Data & Society in New York. His research focuses on the influence of twentieth-century American experimental practices—in social science, computer networks, and games—on contemporary computer networks. He received his PhD from NYU in 2018 and currently lives in Brooklyn with his partner, child, and dog. Cody Mejeur is Visiting Assistant Professor of Game Studies at University at Buffalo, and recently received their PhD from Michigan State University. Their work uses games to theorize narrative as an embodied and playful process that constructs how we understand ourselves and our realities. They have published on games pedagogy, gender and queerness in games, and the narrative construction of reality. They currently work with the LGBTQ Video Game Archive on preserving and visualizing LGBTQ representation. They also collaborate with the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab at Michigan State University on cognitive humanities research in literature, poetry, and music.

Contributors

Emilie Reed is a writer, researcher, and curator based in Glasgow. She has recently received her PhD from Abertay University with a dissertation on the history of videogame exhibitions in art spaces and curatorial practice. In the process, she worked on exhibition projects with Babycastles, The Blank Arcade, and Edinburgh-based collective We Throw Switches. Her writing has appeared in ToDIGRA, Critical Hits: An Indie Gaming Anthology, and on Rock Paper Shotgun, as well as on her personal site (emreed.net). Bonnie Ruberg, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics and the Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. They are the author of Video Games Have Always Been Queer (2019, New York University Press) and the co-editor of Queer Game Studies (2017, University of Minnesota Press). They received their PhD with certification in New Media and Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and served as a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Interactive Media and Games Division at the University of Southern California. Kevin Rutherford is a lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD in English (Composition and Rhetoric) from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His research interests include nonhuman rhetoric, digital storytelling, and writing pedagogy. He has published on topics such as historical approaches to nonhuman agency in the teaching of writing, the intersection of game studies and writing centers, and the importance of recognizing nonhuman agency in contemporary rhetorical theory. Aaron Trammell is an assistant professor of Informatics at UC Irvine. He graduated from the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information in 2015 and spent a year at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC as a postdoctoral researcher. Aaron’s research looks at the persistence of analog games in today’s digital world. He is interested in how political and social ideology is integrated in the practice of game design and how these perspectives are negotiated within the imaginations of players. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and the Multimedia Editor of Sounding Out! John Vanderhoef is an assistant professor of Film, Television, and Media in the Communications Department at California State University, Dominguez 222

Contributors

Hills. His research interests include indie media, digital labor, and media industries. His book, Passion, Pixels, and Profit, from the University of Michigan Press, explores the influence of romantic individualism and neoliberal ideology on the creative economy of indie game production. He has published work in journals like Television and New Media and in edited collections like Production Studies The Sequel. He is also an avid narrative game-maker and has exhibited digital games at festivals like Slamdance DIG and PixelPop Festival. Cynthia Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. She is interested in the impact of digital communication technologies and social media on social relations, cultural practices, and power dynamics, particularly framed in perspectives of time and temporality. Her work can be found in journals like Social Media + Society and Time & Society. She is also the founder of GlobaltraQs, a digital LGBTQ storytelling map (globaltraqs.com).

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INDEX

AAA developer  78, 88, 108 game production  52 games  167 gaming spheres  77 industry  81 publishers  3–5, 92 studios  54 titles  77, 88 accessible tools  101–5 Activision  3 actor-network theory (ANT)  126 Adorno, Theodore  186 Adventure  8 Adventure Game Toolkit  105 aesthetic style  101–5 agency of audiences  187 Ahmed, Sara  172 aimless dandyism  167 Altair  203 American Management Association (AMA)  213 Anable, Aubrey  164, 169 animatronics  74 Anthropy, Amy  54 Anthropy, Anna  8, 35, 38, 100, 101, 113, 164, 165, 170, 180 “Anti-Booth”  26 Ao Oni (2008)  107 app markets  8 App Store  10 Arvidsson, Adam  23 Atari VCS  138 audiences in communication studies  186 Axiom Urge  66 backers  60, 143 BAFTA Games Award  162 Bainbridge, William  188 Baker, Sean  2 Barbrook, Richard  201 Barone, Eric  124, 126, 128, 130

BASIC indie gaming  203–4, 216 Baym, Nancy  7 ‘bedroom’ coders  99 Benjamin, Walter  186 Benkler, Yochai  7 Berger, John  103 Berlant, Lauren  171 Binding of Isaac (2014)  54, 174 BioShock  22 Bioware  150 Blizzard Entertainment  196 n.1 blogging  2 Blow, Johnathan  101 Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES)  215 Bogost, Ian  128, 138 Bottoms Up: A Historic Gay Bar Tycoon  36 Bourdieu, Pierre  8 boutique indie publishers  19–22 Bratich, Jack  186 Brey, Besty  73, 221 Brice, Mattie  35, 180 Broforce  19, 29, 30 Brokeback Mountain  166 Bryant, Levi  126 Busse, Kristina  62 C# 137 Caldwell, John T.  24, 49 Californian Ideology  201, 208 Cameron, Andy  201 capitalist ideology  11, 64 capitalocentrism  57 capitalocentrism of cultural theory  67 Cards against Humanity  1 Carter, Ethan  172 Cavanagh, Terry  115 Cawthon, Scott  73–4, 81, 87, 89–90, 91 Certeau, Michel de  186 Chang, Edmond  167 Chess, Shira  150 ChuckleFish  131

Index Cipinko, Stuart  214 Clarke, M. J.  1, 11, 48, 221 classism  186 Clickteam Fusion  112 Cobra Club HD  165 Cohen, Mo  35–46 collaborative communities  101–5 Coloring Book  2 commoditization  5 Commodore  64, 203 communicative capital  11 community fan-game communities  86–7 Flatgames  100 indie games  23 LGBTQ  178 queer games  39, 162 streaming  63 ConcernedApe  124, 131, 132 Condis, M.  76 conformity  174 Consalvo, Mia  188 console platform holders  17 console video games  4, 6–7 Construct  2, 104 content  174 Cook, Monte  1 The Cornell Daily Sun  131 Corrigan, T.  77 Cote, A. C.  171 creative independence  203 creative workers  6–7 creepypasta  84 crowdfunding  7, 36, 37, 56, 79, 143–50 cruel optimism  171 crunch time  4 Crypt Run  61 cultivation  25 cultural dynamics  190 cultural functions  166 cultural imaginary  178 cultural labor  53 cultural production  2, 202 Curve Digital  17, 18–19 cyptocurrency  27 Dambuster Studios  18 Davison, Patrick  12, 199, 221 80 Days (2014)  55 Dayshift at Freddy’s  89, 91

Dean, Jodi  11, 145 Dearden, James  56 Deep Silver  18 Deleuze, Gilles  127 Democracy series (2005–2016)  21 Department of Defense  129 de Peuter, Greig  51, 52 Depression Quest (2013)  9 design  12, 17, 55, 104 architectural  187 and creative development  21 culture  152 and distribution  114 indie design work  155 interfere in  32 longer term  38 non-aggressive simulations  212 technologies  80 Destiny (Bungie, 2014)  3 Desura  82 Deuze, Mark  202 developers AAA  78, 88, 108 developers-turned-publishers  21 Game Developers Conference (GDC)  24 Gathering of Developers  22 International Game Developers Association  4 video games  7, 99–103 Devolver Digital  11, 17, 19, 21, 32, 60 antiestablishment performance  22–31 Devolver Digital Big Fancy Press Conference  26 DeVoss, Danielle Nicole  129 The Dialectic  52 Dialectic of Enlightenment  52, 186 Dietrich “Squinky” Squinkifer  180 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)  205 digital labor  3, 64 digital platforms  11 “dilation of economic circles”  53 Diner Dash  150 Disney World  88 donation-based game sales  36 Don’s Adventure  107 Double Fine  20 Dragon Age series  136, 150 Dr. Cynthia Gnaw (Doc Gnaw)  150 Dreamfeel Studio  104, 116

225

Index Drinkbox Studios  55 Drive Thru Games  147 Duncombe, Stephen  188 Dungeons & Dragons  8, 189, 196 Dunn, Kevin  23 Dwarf Fortress  202 Dyer-Witheford, Nick  9, 51, 52 Dymax  205 East Coast War Games Council  213 economic diversity  60 economic simulations and education research  212–16 games  208–9 eco-sustainability  58 Edelman, Lee  176 edgy chic (Devolver)  31 Electronic Arts (EA)  3, 5–6, 20 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3)  25 emotional discourses  163 emotional resonance  138 Empire  51 end-user license agreements  66 Escape Room in a Box: The Werewolf Experiment  1, 12, 142–3, 145 crowdfunding  143–50 indie and traditional models  154–5 women game-makers  150–4 ethical economy  59 ethics in journalism  168 EULA  77 exclusion  178 expectations  164, 173 fair trade commodities  58 fan culture for digital games  73 fandom  75–7, 82, 87, 104 fan games  74 fans and fandoms  75–7 fantasy  92–3 indie fans and YouTube Hams  81–8 Joy of Creation  88–92 politics of payments  77–81 fans  185 fan studies, roots of  186–7 Fanzines  188 Fazbear Entertainment  73, 92 Fez (2012)  55 Final Fantasy series  104, 108 Fine, G.  188

226

Firewatch  9 Fischbach, Mark  82, 83, 86 Fish, Phil  55 Fiske, John  186 Five Nights at Candy’s  89 Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNaF)  11, 73–4, 81, 82, 92 Five Nights at Fuckboys  89 Five Nights at Treasure Island  88 Flanagan, Mary  161 Flatgames  104–5, 115–18 Flat Jams  102 Flower (2009)  60 FNaF fandom  86 FNaF Fan Games on GameJolt  85 Ford, S.  130 FORTRAN  199 Fox, Toby  1, 54, 66 Fragments of Him (2016, Sassybot)  162, 165, 166, 175–7 framing gender in games  151 Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria  73, 84 free-to-download game engines  60 free-to-use game engines  80 Fuchs, Christian  11, 64 Galloway, Alexander  161 gamasutra  49, 62 Game Art movement  107 Gamebitious Digital Entertainment  31 Gamecock  22 game codes  172 game culture  74 game design. See design Game Developers Conference (GDC)  24 game industry  33 GameJolt  38, 73, 84, 87 GameMaker  1, 100 game-making indie and traditional models of  154–5 model of  3 tools  104 traditional processes  143 Game Masters  79 #GamerGate harassment campaign  150, 166, 168, 174 gamer identity  171 games. See also video games industries and communities  178 journalism and scholarship  162

Index Games of Empire (GOE) (2008)  51, 52, 58, 200 game studies scholars  177 gaming business  6 business, economic pressures  4 cultures  171, 174, 178 media  174 texts  8 Gathering of Developers  22 Gawker media group  62 gay male sexuality  165 Gen Con panel  193–4 gender and sexuality  171, 176–7, 179 Genital Jousting (Free (Lives, 2016))  29 Ghost, Mortis  109 Gibson-Graham, J. K.  57–8, 67 Gillmurphy, S.  110, 111 “girl-band gigs”  178 Glorious Trainwrecks  102, 104, 111–15, 113 GOE. See Games of Empire (GOE)  (2008) Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013)  162, 165, 166, 168–71, 176 Good Shepherd  17, 31, 32 Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar, 2013)  3 graphic visualization  196 n.3 Green, J.  130 Greenbriar, Katie  168 Gries, Laurie  139 Gross, Larry  172 Guacamelee (2013)  55 The Guardian  162 Guevara-Villalobos, Orlando  50 The Guild (web series)  184 Gygax, Gary  8 Habermas, Jürgen  186 habitus  149 hackers  51–2 Halberstam, Jack  164 HAMURABI  200, 211–12, 216 Hardt, Michael  58, 59, 64 Harman, Graham  126 Harp, Thomas  66 Harvest Moon (Amccus, 1996) series 123–4, 135, 137 Hasbro  2 hegemonic masculinity in games  28 Helgason, David  65

Help Wanted  90 heteronormative content  151 heteronormative family structure  169 heteronormativity  136, 178 Hibbert, Ryan  9 Hindman, M.  145 His Reddit  87 hobbyists  101 Hochschild, Arlie  153 Homefront  18 homophobia  186 and sexism  163 homosexuality  165 in Fallout: New Vegas  136 Horkheimer, Max  186 horror-game franchise  11 Hotline Miami  19, 29, 30 hunt for queer spaces The Hunt for the Gay Planet  165 Hutcheon, Linda  80 Hyper Light Drifter  63 hypermasculinity iconography  29 representations  30 in video games  28 ideology Californian  201, 208 capitalist  11, 64 masculinity and patriarchal  29 postfeminist  19 retrograde  19 whiteness in games  177 The Imitation Game  166 immaterial labor  58 immaterial production  52 independence in cultural work  9 Independent Games Festival  103 independent gaming  99 indie. See also specific indie entries cinema  18 comic books  18 playing  3 “indie bang bus”  24 indie cultural work, postmortems and  48–52 embracing middleware technologies  63–8 intrinsic motivation  52–8 resocializing transactions  58–63

227

Index IndieDB  82 Indie Fund  22 indie game-makers  3, 17 incorporated marketing brand  18–19 “punk rock”  19 self-theorizations  49, 58 indie games, big-name successes in  100–1 accessible tools  101–5 aesthetic style  101–5 collaborative communities  101–5 Flatgames  115–18 Glorious Trainwrecks  111–15 RPG Maker  105–11 indie gaming  99, 202 BASIC  203–4, 216 creator  11 defined  2 development of  8 dynamics of reciprocity  195–6 legitimacy  5 machinations  19 Pathfinder Role Playing Game (2009)  185 production  51 self-theorizations  53 indie gaming with BASIC (1970s)  202–4 IndieGoGo  7, 44, 143 indiepocalypse  60 Indiewood films  166 initial coin offering (ICO)  27 Instagram influencers  62 institutionalization  10 International Game Developers Association  4, 151 Internet, affordances of  145 internet-enabled connectivity  7, 10 The Isle Is Full of Noises  116 Jacksepticeye  82 Japanese mangaka  52 Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG)  104 Jarret, Kylie  59 Jenkins, Henry  63, 130, 186 Jolly  89 Journey (2012)  9, 60, 161, 174 The Joy of Creation  89 Juul, Jesper  103 Kagan, Melissa  166 Kaos Studios  18

228

Katovich, Michael  188 Kennedy, Doug  20 Keogh, Brendan  100, 119 kick-ender  60 Kickstarter  7, 60–1, 62, 143, 148–9 backers  148 for ERIAB  152 King’s Quest  80 King’s Quest IX  80 Kinkade, Patrick  188 Kirkpatrick, Graeme  105, 107 Kjellberg, Felix  82 Klik n Play  100, 104, 111, 112 Ko-Fi  79 Kopas, Merritt  178 Kotaku  62, 162 Kücklich, J.  77 Kuehn, K.  77 labor  76 Lanning, Lorne  20 LaPensée, Elizabeth  178 The Last of Us  150 The Last of Us  2, 150 Latour, Bruno  126, 127, 134 Lefebvre, Henri  186 Legend of Zelda games  108 Leisure Suit Larry  38, 41 Levy, Steven  203 LGB romances  165 LGBTQ characters  163 community  178 content  166 experiences  167–8 and game  171 issues  193–4 licensed shlock  57 Lin, Amy  131 LISA: The Painful (2014)  107 Liu, Alan  27 Livejournal  76 logics of neoliberalism  33 LOGO programming language  112 Lootboxcoin  27 Love, Christine  35 lovebor  62, 74, 76, 87 Lowrie, Nigel  27 LucasFan  80 Lupe  40

Index McDonald, Joel  54, 55 McGee, Llaura  104, 116 McLoughlin, Seán  82 McMillen, Edward  54 McRobbie, A.  4, 10 Magic: The Gathering  188 Majesco  20 Maniac Mansion  80 marginalization  178 marginalized communities  163 market exchanges  53 strategies  166 MARKET  200, 209–10 Markiplier  82 Markoff, John  200 Martin, Chase Bowen  202 Marx, Karl  11, 53, 64 Marxist theory  58 masculinity  172–3 and patriarchal ideology  29 Mass Effect  136, 150 Mattel  2 Meeker, Martin  172 Mejeur, Cody  12, 161, 171, 221 Metacritic  124 scores  139 n.1 Microsoft  2, 3, 17 Middle Eastern clothing and disability  174 Midnight City (Majesco)  19, 20 Miguel, Don  106, 108 Milk  166 Minecraft  81, 139 n.2 Missing in Action  30 Mittell, Jason  84 Mo Cohen  11 Monkey Island  38 Montfort  138 Montfort, Nick  138 Moore, Michael  85 Mother Russia Bleeds  29 Multimedia Fusion  111, 112 Muñoz, José Esteban  196 n.2 Mutiny  48 My Computer Loves Me (When I Speak BASIC)  206 Nakamura, Lisa  171, 174 narrative-based games  166

National Science Foundation (NSF)  201 Naughty Dog  150 negativity and hardship  163 Negri, Antonio  58, 59, 64 neoclassical economics  52 neoliberalism  17–33 neoliberal romanticism  18, 19 Newman, Michael Z.  9 new media firms  66 Niedenthal, S.  103 Nintendo  2, 3, 17, 23 Nintendo Switch  123 No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016)  161 non-mainstream video game production  99 non-player characters (NPCs)  135 non-programmers  101 non-violent collaboration  174 Norris, Chuck  30 Not a Hero (Roll7, 2015)  29 Numenera  1 object-oriented ontology  125, 126 occupational obsolescence  51 Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath  20 Oddworld Inhabitants  20 OFF  109 One Night at Flumpty’s  89 online games  8 Mutiny and  48 Open Game License  7 “Open Gaming License”  192 “Opponents Wanted”  190, 191 oppression  178 Overmars and Helgason  67 Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment)  136 Papert, Seymour  112 Parker, Felan  114 Parker, Fork  18, 27, 62 participatory culture  51 Patel, Juliana  142–54 Pathfinder Role Playing Game (2009)  185, 191–2, 194 Patreon  44, 79, 144, 180, 180 n.2 Pavlounis, D.  170 PCC. See The People’s Computer Company (PCC) PDP8L computer  205

229

Index Pearson, E.  86 Penner, Jeremy  104 People’s Computer Company, The  12 The People’s Computer Company (PCC)  199 economics of  204–8 Perren, Alisa  9 personal games  80 Peterson, Richard A.  23 Petrovsky, Floyd  184 Peuter, Greig De  9 PewDiePie  82, 130 Platforms. See specific platforms platform theory  64 playbor  51 Play-by-mail postal Diplomacy  191 Playism  17 PlayStation  4, 123 PlayStation Vita  123 PledgeMusic  143 Poehler, Amy  151 point-and-click adventures  40 Polansky, Lana  101 political economy  52 Polygon  62, 162 Polytron  21 Porting  67 Portland Indie Games Squad (PIGSquad)  39–40 Positech  60 postfeminist ideology  19 Postigo, Hector  50, 73, 77, 79 postmortems and indie cultural work  48–52 embracing middleware technologies  63–8 intrinsic motivation  52–8 resocializing transactions  58–63 Pow, Whitney  164, 170 Prison Architect  202 Prospero, Paul  172 Prune (2015)  54, 55, 68 Psychonauts (2005)  20 publishers. See also specific publishers AAA  3–5, 92 boutique indie publishers  19–22 developers-turned-publishers  21 publishing subcultures  188 Pulp Fiction (film)  29

230

queer characters  163, 164 content  174 games  173–4 games avant-garde  35, 162 indie game-making  35–46 indie games  161–2, 179 phenomenology  172 queergaming  167 spaces  177–80 QueerMo Games  36 Queerness and Games Conference [QGCon]  40 Queer Quest  11, 35–46, 36 Queertastrophe  38 Quinn, Zoe  168 Race the Sun (2013)  61 racialized identity  177 Racing the Beam  138 racism  186 rationalization  4, 6 Raw Fury  17 Reddit’s tendency  132, 140 n.5 Reed, Emilie  11, 99, 222 refugees as victims  163 reiteration and sequelization  4 Re-Logic  1 resource partitioning theory  5 retrograde ideology  19 Rey, P.  51 rhetorical actancy  139 rhetorical velocity  125, 128–34 Riccitiello, John  20 Richards, Stuart  166 Ridolfo, Jim  129 Rimworld  202 “riot grrl romance”  178 Rise of the Video Game Zinesters (Anthropy)  8, 35 Ritzer, G.  51 Robinett, Warren  8 Rock, Paper, Shotgun  62 Rohrer, Jason  101 role-playing games  7, 185 Rollers of the Realm  54, 66 romantic individualism  18, 19 romantic neoliberalism  28 Room Escape Artist  147 Ross, Andrew  10

Index RPG Maker  100, 104, 105–11, 116, 119 RPG Maker 2000  106–7 Ruberg, Bonnie  11, 35, 151, 162, 180, 222 Rubin, Ariel  142–54 Rubin, Gayle  171 Ruffino, Paolo  99 Russworm, TreaAndrea  177 Rutherford, Kevin  11, 123, 222 Salter, Anastasia M.  80 same-sex relationships  136 same-sex romance  136 Sarkeesian, Anita  168 Schrank, Brian  116, 161 Schumpeter, Joseph  5 self-administered reality  52 self-aware assessment  8 self-care techniques  45 self-determination  18 self-financing  60 self-motivation  55 self-organized projects  4 self-theorizations  11 semi-autonomy  53, 56 sentimentalities  163 Serenity Forge  17 series Halt and Catch Fire  48 “Severe Weather Warning” message  169–70 sexism  46, 186 sexuality in games  151 Sharp, John  161 Shaw, Adrienne  151, 164 Silicon Valley  4, 19, 22 The Silver Lining  80–1 Simmel, Georg  53–4 Simon, B.  62 Smith, Adam  53 Smith, Anthony  61 social justice work  174 social media  2 society factory  51 software development kits (SDK)  7, 102, 106 solicitation  25 SOMA, (Frictional Games, 2015)  161 Sony  2, 3, 17, 23, 26, 32, 60 Sotamaa, Olli  49 Sou, Gemma  163 Soundcloud  2

Space Funeral  110 specialization of function  53 Spike Video Game Awards  22 Spinks, Andrew  1 spreadable media  125, 129 Sproggiwood  54 Srnicek, Nick  63 Stanfill, Mel  74, 76 Stardew Valley  11, 63, 123–5 as an actor  134–8 rhetorical velocity  128–34 theoretical underpinnings  125–8 Starlicker (2013)  62 Starpoint Gemini  2 (2014)  56 Star Trader. See Trader Star Wars: The Old Republic  165 Steam  7 Steam Greenlight  82, 128, 132 Steel Wool  90 Stick Shift  165 streaming community  63 Streets of Rage  29 Struthers, Nina  26, 27 subcultural identity  184 subcultural spaces  188–9 subculture  184–5 resistance and activism  191–5 of role-play  189–91 roots of fan studies  186–7 subcultural spaces  188–9 Super Columbine Massacre RPG (2005)  107 Super Hexagon  115 Švelch, Jaroslav  114 tabletop role-playing games  189 Tangerine  2 The Tearoom  165 Technobabylon (2015)  56 teenage lesbian  162 Terranova, Tzivana  10 Terraria  1, 139 n.2 That Dragon, Cancer (2016)  9 That Game Company  60 third-party deals  7 Those Nights at Rachel’s  89 THQ  18 TIG source  62 To the Moon (2011)  9, 107 tourism  179

231

Index TRADER  200, 210–11 Trainwrecks, Glorious  119 Trammell, Aaron  12, 184, 222 TRS-80  203 Tumblr  76 Twine  102 Twitch  62 Twitter  76 type-in market games  199–202 economic simulation games  208–9 economic simulations and education research  212–16 HAMURABI  211–12 indie gaming with BASIC (1970s)  202–4 MARKET  209–10 PCC, economics of  204–8 TRADER  210–11 Ubisoft  23, 26 Undertale (2015)  1, 9, 54, 66, 81 Unity  100, 104 users  2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 48–9, 63, 65, 101, 105, 108, 133–4 Vanderhoef, John  11, 17, 222–3 Vanishing  176. See also The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (2014) The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (2014)  162–3, 165, 166, 171–5 Vibrant Matter  127 video games  3, 38, 100–1, 169. See also indie gaming accessible tools  102 board/non-digital games  150 console  4, 6–7 developers  7, 99–103 digital distribution  17 emergence of  105 feminist politics in  30 hegemonic masculinity in  28 hypermasculinity in  28 medium of  35 narrative-focused  161 “paradigmatic media of empire”  210 piracy  114 production  4

232

queer  46 third-party deals  7 violence and sexual excess  29 vocation  54 Vox Media Group  62 Wada, Yasuhiro  123 walking simulators  166–7 Wang, Cynthia  1, 10, 142, 223 Want  12 Web 2.0  10, 75 Wertham, Fredric  188 What to Do After You Hit Return (WTDAYHR)  207 whiteness and cisgenderedness  179 in games ideology  177 Whitson, J.  62 The Whole Earth Catalog  200, 205 Wild Optimists  156 Wilson, Mike  22 Wing, Richard L.  215 Wizard Lizard  61 women game-makers  150–4 “Women of Board Gaming” series  152 Wood, Jordan  174 Woody Harrelson  140 n.4 “work as play”  4 worker factory takeovers  58 World of Explore Pro Edition  115 World of Warcraft (2004)  196 n.1 WTDAYHR. See What to Do After You Hit Return (WTDAYHR) Xbox One  123 XNA framework  137 Yang, Robert  165, 180 YouTube  62, 73, 76, 87 ad model  144 culture  74 let’s play genre  130 YouTuber BigBug  83 YouTubers  62, 86 Yume Nikki (2004)  107 zinesters  35