COLUMN: 'The Amateur': Amateur vs Indie
February 4, 2008 4:07 PM |
[Andrew Doull is an IT manager from New Zealand who spent the last 5 and a half years working in the United Kingdom. He's just emigrated to Sydney, Australia, and spends his free time developing Unangband, a rogue-like game, and blogging at Ascii Dreams. He writes an irregular column for GameSetWatch.]
The gaming press is conflating two trends in game development into a single category that they label the Independent Game. The first is commercial oriented, casual, independently produced games by people attempting to make a living from writing and designing games without committing to a publisher. These I'm happy to call Indie Games, and they operate much in the same way that the independent labels in the music industry, or independent studios in Hollywood.
The second is subversive, modded, copycat, patched together from pre-built parts, non-commercial or anti-commercial. Amateur game development is done by people who are scratching an itch, who can't not write computer games, who want to see their ideas in pixel form ahead of trying to generate a return.
It might be because their favourite game or game genre has been abandoned as a commercial enterprise. Or because they have an idea so out there, so unachievable, so unplayable that no attempt to commercialise the game could possibly succeed. Or just because the creators have no expectation of, or actively avoid financial reward. Amateur games are in the same head space as fan made movies, ad free blogging and jamming in the garage with your friends.
I've tolerated the crowning of Dwarf Fortress as indie game par excellence in the popular press, on the assumption that it'd encourage people to look long and hard at the amateur game development scene and discover the other hidden treasures. But what is happening instead is that the gaming press is stealing amateur game successes and claiming them for their own. With no disrespect to indie game developers, I want to claim some of these amateur games back.
In my musings below, I'll identify a number of indie game characteristics, and contrast them with amateur games to make my point that these are very much two different mediums. Not every amateur game will have all these features - there is very much a continuum in game development between three corners of a triangle: Commercial, Independent and Amateur. The relationship between commercial and independent games appears to be evolving into the relationship of big brother and little brother. If this is the case, and the development of digital distribution models such as Xbox Live and game-based web portals such as Pop Cap suggest it is, then the amateur game is the guy standing outside the window without his pants on.
Indies graduated from the university Comp Sci department; Amateurs graduated from Earth B
The sure sign of an indie game is that it required maths, physics or engineering skills beyond that taught in high school algebra. Generally an indie game will have an 'innovative' central mechanic that has been developed by rapid prototyping in a class project - perhaps with an accompanying dissertation - or over a weekend in a code jam. The indie game interface is usually clean and well-considered, and has gone through multiple iterations guided by user testing, with earlier code being thrown away and test cases written if the developers have had time and opportunity.
The indie game user interface is well thought out with the minimum different commands interacting in interesting ways. An indie game may leverage existing game libraries, such as SDL, an open physics engine, and a scripting environment like Lua. Art assets will be scalable and in SVGL and/or transparent 24 bit PNGs generated by someone with more than a passing familiarity to Photoshop and colour palettes. You know you are playing a good indie game because the game design attunes you to the way the developers think and the constant feelings of delight you discover looking at every new screen of play.
An amateur game will typically appear to have required the patient coding of an autistic savant who has encyclopedic knowledge of 13th century Russian genealogy but no understanding of type safety or other elementary computer science concepts. This is not always the case: but if the amateur game developer has any computer science training you can be sure that they will have implemented their own hand-written script parser with lots of unnecessary syntactic decoration, preferably featuring upper case type, full colons and square brackets. A classic indication of an amateur game is using a game maker tool of some kind, such as Neverwinter Nights, Adventure Construction Set or RPG Maker.
Amateur developers rapidly add features without considering their impact and loath to throw them away. This results of lots of code cruft, half-implemented features, spaghetti code and bugs. The amateur game user interface is obtuse, with a vertical learning curve and commands and command interactions that defy logic until you experiment enough with them. An amateur coder may have heard of testing before release if you're lucky, but any test cases that they'll have written will be hopelessly out of date. Amateur art assets will be in ANSI and 16 colour pixel art, if the game uses graphics at all. You can tell if you play a good amateur game because you are constantly worried you're going to end up thinking like the developer and the mild feeling of insanity left behind when you look up from the game.
Indies rely on word of mouth publicity and playing the media game; Amateurs publicly complain that they should have written the game in C# when they picked C instead and may not have played their own game.
The Indie game developer will have a portfolio of games and game design concepts that they can show any commercial publisher who inquires. They'll use smart guerrilla marketing with an appointed community manager (unpaid) and forum moderators to wrangle the herd who are following the game design blogs. They'll have read Kieron Gillen's 'How to Use and Abuse the Gaming Press' and be developing contacts on Kotaku and Joystiq to get the game mentioned at least once per week. They'll subscribe to game development magazines.
Amateur game developers are likely to have books full of game designs but nothing implemented - if they are disciplined enough to code consistently, they'll have directories full of partially implemented games but nothing released - if they are confident enough to release they'll have to do lists full of partially implemented features but nothing completed to their satisfaction.
Instead of building a community, an amateur will start with insecurity. This will result in a complete coding paralysis, a bizarre step beyond procrastination which appears to be a uniquely amateur game developer phenomena. This often takes the form of publicly berating themselves for not producing anything, threatening to rewrite the code in a completely different language, refactoring the code more frequently than writing new code and consistently shifting intentions to different projects without starting any of them.
Amateur game developers have a lot to learn from indie game developers in this regard. Luckily, some have. Events like the Interactive Fiction Competition and the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge provide incentives to just get coding done, in return for community recognition and praise.
The other downside to the amateur developer, is that once they start coding, they are less likely to stop and play the game. This is because playing the game in a partial state becomes painful, and limited to only minimal testing of new features to sanity check the code. As a result, many bugs lurk beyond the confines of simple play, and many game balance issues and exploits exist to be resolved. It becomes an unwritten contract between the amateur developer and the community built up around the game that the developer releases and the community tests.
Indies release when they're ready for a private beta; Amateurs release when the game compiles
The greatest strength of the amateur developer is the community and feedback that builds up when they (finally) release a prototype of the game. This occurs through some kind of unholy osmosis in which like-minded individuals are attracted to a flawed product with a seed of potential and a whole lot of hand waving.
In these early, delicate stages, even just one email from a brave tester can spur the amateur to new heights of creativity. Expect amateur developers to promise the world and deliver a 80x24 console screen for the first few years of development. Then you'll realise they've delivered a world and hidden it behind the amber glow of the self-same console screen.
Indies are planning on releasing on Xbox Live as soon as the game is certified; Amateurs are planning on releasing on AmigaDOS as soon as the game is open source.
The corollary of a strong community around an amateur game, is that real developers with much better coding skills than the original developer will end up offering to contribute to the game. These real developers need to be held at arms length, just like any other rabid fan. They are likely to provide a much needed re-design of a critical game component and then disappear half-way through the rewrite. Therefore, they should be assigned to non-critical tasks like user interface design and platform porting, where they can safely implement a full-typing system and message passing model in C without impacting on anything that the amateur developer cares about.
Indies avoid death-march by enjoying working 24 hours a day for no money; Amateurs avoid death-march by having to put the kids to bed first
The first indie game from an indie game studio is typically developed by students or graduates who have no steady income, but are writing the game for their resume or the expectation of leveraging a small commercial success into the opportunity for further work. In order to write their dream game, the indie game studio may turn to releasing a 'guaranteed hit' in the form of a casual game which they can quickly turnaround and develop a revenue model for. This makes Facebook and Pop-Cap, or a home brewed equivalent, an attractive proposition.
The amateur usually holds down a full-time real job and then codes in evenings, weekends or quiet days at work. Adam Foster freely admits to developing his Half-Life mod Minerva during the downtime of the European parliament summer. This conflict of development and real life leaves many amateur games as unfinished symphonies or the authors vanishing into the anonymity of the Internet. Setting the source free can sometimes mitigate this loss - but there is undoubtedly more abandoned amateur games, often deleted by the author, than all the commercial abandonware put together. This makes a Source Forge or Google Code repository essential - not for the developers - but for those trying to archive amateur games.
Indies try to create buzz by launching a Flash-based website with game media releases; Amateurs try to create buzz by launching a Geocities site with lots of flashing blink tags
Interactive fiction is the province of amateur games, platform games are moving into the amateur game space as the platform genre all but dies as a commercial success, roguelikes have been there almost from the beginning. Most modding efforts are amateur games although their creators may deny it. But modding efforts are different from typical amateur games because of the 'professional' nature of their content.
The mod team is built up from like minded individuals who are drawn to a single vision. This may be the recreation of earlier game content in a newer engine, or taking another media property and implementing it in a game engine. Over ambitious mod teams are much more likely to fail, as they lack the cohesive vision and drive of a single amateur author. This results in longer lead times to release, diversion of development resources into designing a professional looking game site or 're-launching' the mod with a newer look. Successful mod developers may be hired by commercial game developers and otherwise drawn away to newer or more interesting projects.
Interactive fiction and games developed using game development tool kits are usually smaller in scope and ambition than a typical amateur game developer. This is usually driven by the different needs of the interactive fiction author: to tell a particular narrative, as opposed to create a game space. The lack of control over the underlying rules lead these types of games to focus on content creation which is the most expensive use of time for an amateur. But the same common tool set allows communities of amateur developers to share resources and skills that make multiple authorship and content reuse a more viable option than a typical programmer led amateur game.
Mods and tool kit based games are common to amateur games in that they are usually derivative, poorly made, and the first step for someone exploring the possibilities of game development. The truly innovate mods and tool kit games play to the indie game strengths, while the rest play to the amateur game weaknesses.
Indie games are patched once they hit version 1.0; Amateur games are no longer played once they hit version 1.0
In a sense, amateur games are constantly in beta. Even if the source code is not open, there is no definite point of release, no point of sale, that fixes the amateur game in time. And the reaction to a version 1.0 of an amateur game seems to be the drifting away of a significant part of the player base, as they are no longer involved in the development process. Part of the attraction of amateur games is the positive feedback loop between developer and player. The same highs and lows of getting a suggested feature implemented and having a class nerfed are common to both amateur games and MMORPGs.
Indies try to 'make it' by coming up with a business plan and looking for venture capital; Amateurs try to 'make it' by coming up with a company name and looking for website hosting
The lure of commercialisation constantly plays at the back of the amateur developer's mind. But the strong amateur knows that his love of game development is a greater reward than money. In fact tying development to monetary return can sap the amateur game developer of motivation - suddenly the pressure of success destroys the pleasure of programming. This suggests a Pay Pal tip jar and feedback from a forum are the best means of motivating the amateur.
Every odd numbered Introversion title (Hacker, Defcon) is indie; every even numbered one (Darwinia, Subversion) amateur
There are commercial games that have been developed with an amateur game mind set. Every game that over promises and under delivers is amateur in this sense - suggesting Duke Nukem Forever and Peter Molyneux are perhaps amateur games greatest icons. GSC, developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, look to have the amateur obsession that demands that they constantly release the same game over and over, in an ever improving form. Bethesda with Daggerfall have attempted this feat, but with each subsequent RPG release, commercial demands and the destructive forces of user testing have worn down the amateur template they developed to. Time will tell which way Deep Shadows, developers of the equally amateur Boiling Point, tumble - will they constantly overreach and fail in true amateur fashion, or will they numb themselves with success and lose their burning amateur spirit.
Indies produce casual games; Amateurs produce inkblots
Bill Harris at Dubious Quality uses the analogy of the inkblot to discuss the development of three breakout independent games of the last year, at least one of which I've called an amateur game. These games have seeped into the consciousness of the wider game community from an extended development period and public beta. But behind this sudden influx of black fluid, amateur games are constantly writhing below the surface of what the gaming media reports, a nightmarish remixing of commercial gaming pleasures and independent game innovations.
Amateur gaming has the ability to disrupt the gaming industry. While an indie game has new and innovative ideas, the amateur game developer can spend literally years developing a game. Nethack has been 'in development' for longer than Starcraft has been played. Probably the only way now to out-Wow World of Warcraft will be with an amateur game, because only the open source development model could develop faster and with more resources than Blizzard has. Though amateur games will never have their Linux, because the most successful amateur games are driven by a single developer's vision.
Indies go to GDC, Amateurs go to IRC
Don't confuse the amateur with the indie. They come from different mind sets, with different motivations, means and methods. 2007 has undoubtedly been the year of the indie. Make 2008 and beyond the lifetime of the amateur.
Categories: Column: The Amateur
31 Comments
I enjoyed this immensely.
KG
Kieron Gillen | February 4, 2008 6:27 PM
Umm... what?
Cow | February 4, 2008 6:58 PM
This is just ... a long list of obviously broken generalizations that betray a lack of any real understanding of the groups it claims to explain, and of the development process in general. It regularly draws contrast between orthogonal features, draws sharp lines where there is at best a blur. Much of it is angry bile apparently spewed in the direction of aspiring developers who are often still in high school.
It's a curious screed ... I think it says more about the state of blog-journalism than, well, any other facet of reality.
Jimmy | February 5, 2008 2:14 AM
Indie doesn't mean shit, at most it means small bastard rather than big bastard.
and small bastards have a tendency to grow and become big bastards.
I mean once upon a time, Disney was the little indie guy, fighting against the repressive studio system.
*shrug*
Also I think you have too high a regard for the quality of code in commercial titles. It may mostly work, but that's really all down to testing and the advantages of console development. :)
Kriss Daniels | February 5, 2008 4:17 AM
Have you ever bought or rented an indie game that wasn't quite right? It may have been an amateur game, an illegal and inferior copy for which you paid no money. Amateur games are recognizable by poorly presented or photocopied jackets, poor sound and poor picture quality. Amateur games rob artists and studios of their rightful income and remove the cost of the game to the consumer! Amateur game development is a major problem in Australia! Please help us stop it! If you buy or rent an indie game you believe is not the genuine article, please call this toll-free number for advice, or write to 'post office box 123 Somewhere 9876'
Movius | February 5, 2008 6:56 AM
"Indies go to GDC, Amateurs go to IRC"
I wonder where that leaves all the #tigirc regulars who are attending GDC this year, including several igf nominees, and a certain previous grand prize winner..
Mark Johns | February 5, 2008 7:41 AM
..and one of the igf organisers. heh
article suffers from heavy tl;dr but the bits i ded read seem ill-informed and basically pointless. why pigeonhole people into these retarded categories to suit your own editorial bias
haowan | February 5, 2008 7:58 AM
i think there is a distinction to be made, but this article really doesn't do it.
dwarf fortress is a terrible example of "amateur" games, it's too extreme -- what about cactus or yahtzee? to me they typify amateurs much more -- but according to this article they're sort of half-amateur, half-indie.
raigan | February 5, 2008 8:17 AM
Daaayum, indie don't mean shit.
I dun giva fuk.
Encrust 'dat shit.
Chris Danielles | February 5, 2008 8:30 AM
This article is half brilliant insight, and half garbage. It looks like you have a lot of passion for the subject, but didn't proof your work before you released it.
In other words, you're an amateur games journalist. :)
...but polish this up a little and you might just have a hit!
Hunty | February 5, 2008 9:19 AM
This column is fantastic, and a terrific perspective on the indie game developers who are clearly on the verge of something bigger.
I often fall back on music as a reference point, because I've been covering that indie scene for so long - but there's a useful comparison: we tend to lump all "indies" together as struggling, underfunded underdogs. But there's a clear split between the ambitious indies - who will make the right contacts, hit the right publications, and ultimately tailor their work to appeal to wider and wider audiences - and then the people who just somehow don't click with the industry, who are focused on their own thing and their own passions, make less palatable mistakes, and often never go anywhere.
What I find interesting about the distinction is that once you praise the indies who are "going places," it casts doubt on the ones who aren't - who hate talking up their work, who hate doing the final spit and polish, who would rather (in music terms again) record freely improvised microtonal violin music than be the next Arcade Fire. Spend enough time hyping the indies who are breaking through, you start to look down on the ones who "aren't trying": clearly, something's wrong with them, or they have less value in the scheme of things.
Amateurs deserve their own yardstick and their own measure of respect, separate from the XBLA-bound indies.
Chris Dahlen | February 5, 2008 9:27 AM
I think the problem I have with this article is the conflation of terms that the author himself is guilty of.
He's using "indie" to mean both "commercial" and "professional", while on the other hand using "amateur" to mean both "hobbyist" and "unprofessional". In reality, a developer's economic motives aren't always tied to their ability and professionalism. There are amateurs everywhere.
It's likely that the article's length is due to the internal conflict caused by this unrealised distinction. The author is attempting to make sense of his own unintentional misuse of these words.
haowan | February 5, 2008 9:32 AM
Given that the author works on Unangband, a game I think his argument defines as amateur, is this some sort of exercise in self-loathing?
adamsumm | February 5, 2008 9:51 AM
I think this is more of a spectrum, rather than a black and white situation. I mean, there's a lot of vague blurs between these groups... and a lot of people would disagree quite vehemently with being typecast this way.
Suzie | February 5, 2008 10:15 AM
lol no
fish | February 5, 2008 10:20 AM
... :I
xerus | February 5, 2008 12:20 PM
Somebody needs a hug.
Farbs | February 5, 2008 3:49 PM
Hey, can we all play at the making up unclear and arbitrary distinctions game? I think I'm gonna call some indies "blue" and the rest "rutabaga" and figure some ways of lumping everyone into one of the two camps.
Because just about every indie I know would bear both labels or neither based on this article. Unless that was somehow your point...?
Coyote | February 5, 2008 9:57 PM
The difference between indie game developers and "amateurs" is completely arbitrary and a pointless distinction. Some indie game developers seek commercial success and some don't. Many try for both and succeed at both. I've never heard the concept of amateur game development as being anything other than being the same as indie development before this article. And I don't believe there is any distinction.
The Introversion point in particular was extremely stupid.
Tiktaalik | February 5, 2008 10:29 PM
Darwina is an "amateur" game? Have you even played it, or just looked at screen shots?
GreaterBeast | February 5, 2008 11:27 PM
I see this has already drawn some grumbling, but I'll add mine anyway. I appreciate the desire to point out that "indie" is actually a generalization that contains many different subsets of developers. But I don't think indie vs. amateur is a very meaningful axis by which to measure or understand devs.
I don't think "indie vs amateur" meaningfully distinguishes between any of the important community lines, either. (eg. Casual games, Flash games, platform scenes like GameMaker's or RPGMaker's)
What's even stranger about this is that this post takes all of the prescriptive notions of an indie game aesthetic and renames it "amateur". I would argue that "indie games" as a concept are moving further towards the opposite end of the spectrum - "indie" as an aesthetic and cultural judgment of a game rather than just describing how development was funded.
josh g. | February 5, 2008 11:37 PM
Thanks for everyone's thoughtful comments.
This is not an article in self-loathing - I'm definitely pro-amateur. I think amateur games creation is vital and expressive - but it's always worth noting that 90% of people's expressive ideas involve mimicing something else and then potentially subverting it. I mean, I started Unangband with a 'hey it's Angband but with...'
From a design aesthetic, I'm arguing that indie = deliberate attempt at innovation whereas amateur = any innovation is an (accidental) byproduct of either an attempt to recreate an existing game or something so novel it defies ordinary categorisation. So yeah, to an extent I'm trying to have my cake and eat it.
As for the Darwinia amateur game allusion: reading the history of development of Darwinia and how it nearly sunk Introversion as a company hopefully suggests how Darwinia could be seen (on some level) as an amateur game. Introversion are very much an indie company hiding behind an amateur strapline and I'm calling them out for using it.
Andrew Doull | February 6, 2008 8:11 AM
I'm not surprised at the number of people who didn't understand or like this article. Amateur game design is a state of mind (whether blessing or affliction), and this was written from deep within that state.
Awesome, Andrew - you had me at "standing outside the window without his pants on".
Nick McConnell | February 6, 2008 1:03 PM
I think I'm happier with people using the two terms interchangeably and not having all the stupid generalizations.
Robert | February 6, 2008 1:55 PM
Awful article which makes a meaningless distinction. You cannot judge a game by the career aspirations of its designer. Most part time game creators (what you call amateurs) are already software developers and are well aware of SDLC methodologies. You call the dwarf fortress developers "amateur" but you also say amateur developers don't carefully document their bug fixes. Well you just proved yourself wrong.
The fact that they don't polish their work before they open it to public scrutiny is courageous and generious, not the biproduct anti-professional spurts of unrefind creativity that are doomed to fail in the long run.
Greggbert | February 6, 2008 2:02 PM
I'm totally lost here, I either fall into both or neither, and I'm not sure what the point of it was. :)
Hanako | February 6, 2008 3:13 PM
Even drawing the distinction between "indie" and "mainstream" is problematic. The problem is one of ... well, expectation.
It shouldn't matter, but it does. Players (and journalists) have been programmed by the games industry to expect HDR lighting, normal mapping, full use of pixel shaders, bouncing breast physics, and... oh, right. Realistic hair, according to Electronic Arts VPs. Because realistic hair physics is what makes separates the great games from the crap.
As much as people like to claim graphics don't matter, just about all of us are swayed by "Teh Shiny." Hey, I do it too. I dropped over $1700 on a new machine SPECIFICALLY to play Oblivion at near-max settings a couple of years back.
But you say the magic word, "Indie" - at least to those few (but growing) who know what it means, and it may force a context shift and a second glance towards a game with "oh, so dated" graphics. Which is the perspective you wish people had all the time.
My belief is that if you play enough indie games, you'll get deprogrammed. When you can discuss the relative merits of both Bioshock and Cave Story in the same paragraph without it seeming to be the least bit strange to you, then you have arrived.
It seems like the article here is requesting that reviewers use a different yardstick for mainstream, indie, and amateur games. I disagree. I would like to see the same yardstick applied to ALL games. Just a yardstick that weights "fun," "innovative," "thought provoking," "amusing," and "interesting" a lot more, and "Teh Shiny!" a lot less.
Coyote | February 6, 2008 3:14 PM
The problem here is that classification schemes always break down.
The important point made here is that "indie" as commonly used is far too broad a category to be useful. Woohoo, let's abandon using labels that have become meaningless! This is good.
But then there's an attempt to create two new categories, which also end up being too broad and vaguely defined to be useful. This is not as good.
brog | February 6, 2008 4:27 PM
what i really want to know it: who is that handsome lad in the blue shirt?
raigan | February 6, 2008 8:53 PM
don't be stupid, that's a woman.
raygun | February 7, 2008 10:08 AM
@ raigan:
he is Jonathan Mak, from Every Day Shooter fame. And the picture was take at the IGS 2007 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1373490163872090270&total=51&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
Macário | February 8, 2008 10:28 AM