First Draft (Workshop for 4/17)

It still needs work, and I've got more research I want to talk about. But at least this version is a little more coherent than what I had before. I still don't know how to double space, or include gifs, but I'll work on that as the week progresses. Shouldn't be too hard to figure that stuff out.

Fan Creation:

The Relationship between Independent Video Gamers and their Audience

Video games today have found a niche in our culture as being both a past time to kill time, as well as a potential medium for educated learning. While big time video game industries continually pump out new titles every couple of months to cater to their fan bases, a somewhat underground phenomenon has been going on for the last five years that has engaged several million young people. This phenomenon is the relationship between an indie video game creator, the people who play these games, and the people who will spend time watching these games being played by another person. Because of this relationship, new small-project games are being created every few months with the sole purpose of being played by someone who will then show off the game to a wider audience, who then considers buying the game for themselves. The question that this relationship presents, then, is what results from this relationship? While indie video game creators get feedback from their audience reaction, what kind of impact does this make?

For those who don't know, Indie games is a shortened name for Independent games. People with software and artistic skill with a drive for coding and animation will create their own games and set them out for the world to see. Usually indie games are collaborative and at least two to twelve people are involved in the development process of a game. However, there are a few indie game developers who try to create video games alone. One example of this would be Scott Cawthorn who recently made the indie horror trilogy called "Five Nights at Freddy's." It's a simple game that relies more on animated jumpscares and point-and-click mechanics. For the most part though, indie games resemble the type of games produced in the early 90's, and require at least an animator and a software designer who have overlapping skills with music arrangement, programming, and communication. For big game companies, feedback on a video game title usually either results in more time for more games to be made and a larger staff if the game sells well. If it sells poorly, then the studio could get their time schedule cut, lose important staff for upcoming projects, or even in the worst case scenario, have the entire studio fired or go bankrupt. For indie video game creators feedback isn't as large scale in terms of newspaper coverage or losing hundreds of thousands of dollars as it would for a studio like Ninja Theory or Naughty Dog. However, for an independent video game developer, they can easily go bankrupt or lose sponsorship if they do not make dead lines or sell enough copies of their game. While it's true that TellTale Games and Thatgamecompany are Indie game studios, in hindsight, they aren't the type of indie studios I want to discuss. This is because Thatgamecompany's origins come from Sony's desire to have a game studio devoted to developing titles for the PlayStation Network. Thus, they were funded by a large corporation from the beginning and had a head-start at succeeding. TellTale Games, similarly, was created by employees who formerly worked at Lucas Arts, and thus, had the experience and the network to see that their company succeeded. Rather, the type of game developers I want to look at in this essay are the obscure ones who weren't looking for success but ended up creating something a small group of people wanted anyway.

As most people reading this article probably already know or might guess, indie games tend to take more risks than the Triple-A games like COD, Madden, Elder Scrolls and the Final Fantasy franchises. Often times indie games will create a certain feel to game flow and style that hasn't ever been seen before, such as "SCP Containment Breach," "Amnesia: the Dark Descent" or "Slender: The Eight Pages" by Parsec Productions. As one video game blogger says:

"Indie games show Triple-A games there's a market for a kind of game that they've never sold before...a market for a kind of game that they would never experiment with because they are too scared to risk their money. Because they aren't artists...There are people out there who are making video games because they just want to without any idea if it'll make them rich. They just can't help it." - Jonathon Holmes, Blogger and Editor-in-Chief of Destructoid.com. From Pixels and Polygons: An Indie Game Documentary

Basically what's being emphasized here is that independent game developers see themselves as artists. They believe risk is rewarded and that their audience, who are also gamers, know the type of games that they want to play. For example in the original, "Slender: The Eight Pages," it was a new mechanic for the player to search a labyrinth-like environment to collect a set amount of pages to finish the game--while at the same time trying to avoid the monster that stalked behind the player and would kill them if they got too close. Because of how simple "Slender: The Eight Pages" was and the fact that the monster "Slenderman" originated from Something Awful forums (a comedy website with various types of content) and then was transferred over to Creepypasta (a website dedicated to writing and sharing ghost stories online) the game grew widely popular with kids and teenagers. After the game came out, something interesting happened where small-time gamers would try and make their own spin-offs of the game. These games took the original game mechanics and placed the player in a new environment with a different monster. While these games were not very well made, or even fun to play due to glitching, people still played them as long as they were free to download. Another thing "Slender: The Eight Pages" did that hadn't been done before was parody itself.  The mode called, "Give me twenty dollars" was something the player was rewarded with after beating the game and involves the player wandering the forest in daylight. While Slenderman still functions the same as before, he is also accompanied by Ron Brownz song, "Give me twenty dollarz." Thus, creating a comedic effect while playing and spawning the "Give me twenty dollars" internet meme. The creativity used to make a horror game "The Eight Pages" and the fact that people spend time creating fan art, songs, and even spin-offs of "The Eight Pages" shows that people invest a lot of time into creating things for the enjoyment of others. It also shows, that if Parsec had copyrighted the footage of "The Eight Pages" from being uploaded onto YouTube, then their game probably wouldn't have had the cult following it has today. In fact, the success of "Slender: The Eight Pages" was so spontaneous and quick that another game studio called Blue Isle Studios collaborated with Parsec Productions.  With the two studios combined they launched "Slender: The Arrival" two years after the first game. This time with better graphics, another monster, and a coherent narrative. Despite the fact that the game's average score on multiple game review sites came out to about a 7 out of 10, the game was still released on both the Xbox One and the PlayStation Network as of March 24, 2015.

"Indie Games are able to focus on a core gaming experience that might not appeal to everyone, but does appeal to small group of players in a really big way." Amy White. Senior Editor of GameSkinny.com.

 What Amy White is saying here, is that recent indie games have been approaching players with the intent to evoke an emotional response from the player. And example would be the game, "March," where the player is locked inside of a polygonal world with their "girlfriend" and listen the narrators love of this woman who supported him, only to realize that he was falling out of love with her. The game draws curtains when the woman who was following you ends up leaving with another man. These type of games try and get the audience to 'feel' something, which in turn makes them reflect. Some games become so popular that they actually motivate people to create. In this way, a simple game can transform into more than what it is. For example, a group of fans could get together and create things like cosplay, comics, animations, figurines, etc. This is amazing because if one simple video game can produce dozens of spin-off games, original songs, and original animations--how powerful is a video game? Is the time spent creating fan content time well spent? Triple A games like COD and Final Fantasy also have fan-created content, however, because it is copyrighted, content can be subject to being taken down, or some content can eve be considered illegal (such as creating a song and profiting from it). Even under the creative commons law, fans are subject to being prosecuted if it's proven that they are making money off of a video game company's content. With indie games, this isn't the case. In fact, it's encouraged for fans to go out and make things, such as a crocheted dolls, cosplay, fan art, animations, and music. With indie games, fan created content is unhindered and prolific. Online websites like Youtube are only the door that indie game developers open to let the fans in and then run out with more ideas.

"In describing in the way they played and the things they liked (or didn't like about the game)...they wrote about the game design elements of the game. In fact, most of what they did and discussed related to design." - Catherine Beavis. This shows that frequent gamers know what needs to be in a game to make it a "good" game. Most indie game developers start out as gamers who get tired of playing the same kind of games, and thus, seek out to try something new or different. Beavis goes on to explain that the kids in her research group later on decided to design their own games. She even argues that the multiliteracy and multimodality of video games is important to include into the English curriculum because it gives students a way analyze and interpret texts. Much like Gee, she believes that looking at a video game from a designers perspective helps people get creative when they work with texts.

As a whole, Indie game developers want to do something different than what's already been done before in the past. By using sites like YouTube to showcase their games to a wider audience, game developers are able to not only publicly show people their skills and talents--but how video games can go a lot father than they already have. Video games inspire gamers to not only create better video games with more challenges, but they also inspire audiences to create more content. What independent video game developers do is start a chain of spontaneous creativity. While the pop culture that these games create is fleeting and many people would say, "These people are wasting time," I believe that this process is doing something important because when fans create something, they usually are learning skills during the process of creation. A person learning new things while also expressing themselves helps build confidence, and may help them in future endeavors.