Anyone who tries to argue that “games aren’t art” is now viewed as completely out of touch, retro throwback graphics are very much in vogue, and military shooters are now contemporaneously considered as the single-most tired premise for a game imaginable. Things have more or less completely flipped around now to where the AAA publishers are now painted as the ones who threaten the sanctity of the medium (accurately so), and indie developers are seen as a sort of last bastion of hope for innovation in the field. Suffice it to say, but the public perception of indie games has largely changed for the better in the past decade. If all this sounds too dumb to be true - like I’m just inventing a hypothetical person to get mad about here? Well, here’s the thing: That person used to be me, and I can confirm that I certainly wasn’t alone in my boneheaded beliefs. Boy howdy, did folk ever like to toss that walking simulator label around - where any game that didn’t center around constantly shooting everything and everyone on screen was somehow seen as a “political statement.” These same detractors would then go off to play military shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield, where it’s well-established that politics clearly play no part in those IPs. Truly, these were stupid times: An era in which we apparently had to re-litigate whether or not games are art (they are), where pixel graphics were considered as lazy (they’re not), and when some of us were seriously worried that the emerging trend of “walking simulators” threatened the very sanctity of the medium itself (they didn’t). Divorced from its literal meaning in simply describing games developed and published outside of the AAA system, it had briefly taken off as a dismissive derogative - a catch-all for any game that dared to deviate from the industry standard template, prioritize its story-telling over mechanics, or – god forbid – not incorporate combat into its gameplay loop. “Stone flowers will suffice to keep me nice and warm.”įor a time in the late aughts and early 2010s, the term “indie game” was something like a dirty word in some circles.
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