//About Us

//What is IndieCade?

• The premiere gatherings for independent gamemakers from around the globe
• Global crossroads for trend-setting game fans who will be the first to see and play new offerings from the independent game community
• A vital marketplace of ideas and projects
• A place to meet collaborators, as well as investors
• A preview of top games by the important innovators working outside the mainstream game industry
• The catalyst for an overdue creative renewal in the game industry.

Independent gamemakers, like their counterparts in film, build games that take tremendous passion, the inspiration of innumerable collaborators, and very often a life savings to complete and distribute. Like independent filmmakers, they compete for publicity, support, and distribution against established producers and productions with budgets measured in the millions. But when it comes time to find an audience, the parallel ends.

An independent work that breaks through can have a powerful creative impact on its industry. But the rapidly maturing game industry, unlike cinema, has no comprehensive, public venue to introduce, explore, and celebrate groundbreaking independent work. Worthy independent games, prospective funders, and players looking for new experiences rarely find one another.

Imagine a series of global showcases and festivals serving developers as well as the general public – collectively forming an international marketplace and a traveling celebration of this community’s new voices and their trailblazing work. Imagine thousands of independent creators, developers, thinkers, players, and fans from across the world, sharing this sense of community and the work at its heart with the rest of the world. That’s IndieCade.

//Why IndieCade? Why Now?

The game industry is in the throes of a creative crisis. While technology becomes progressively more sophisticated, pushing millions of polygons per second and boasting photorealistic graphics and accurate physics simulation, the soaring development costs entailed in using this technology have caused game publishers to take fewer risks on content.

The result? Most new games released by the majors are merely knockoffs of prior games, licenses, or sequels, marketed largely for their extra bells and whistles and better graphics. At the same time, the number and quality of affordable, commercially available, and easy-to-use tools as well as the ease and affordability of digital downloads, has increased dramatically, allowing a growing community of cutting-edge mavericks to invent new game mechanics, introduce new storylines, and create politically and aesthetically challenging new work. The biggest challenge faced by the growing independent game development and interactive arts movement is exposure: how can these independent and spirited creators reach an audience of content-hungry players and fans who are tired of the same old fare from the usual suspects? Just as the film industry is continually re-invigorated by independent filmmakers at independent festivals such as Sundance and Cannes, so will the interactive media community be renewed by exposure to the raw ideas of emerging talent at IndieCade.

//Background

The game industry is a $25 billion industry worldwide with $10.5 billion alone exchanged in the United States. It is also a relatively young industry. As it has proven remarkably lucrative, games themselves have rapidly escalated from costing tens-of-thousands of dollars to approaching tens-of-millions as competition increases and the new consoles emerge.

According to the Entertainment Software Association, in 2004, more than 248 million video and computer games were sold to 75% of American households, generating $7.3 billion in sales, more than double revenues in 1996. The game industry is one of the few IT sectors that remained unharmed during the IT “bust,” boasting continuous growth during the rocky 1990s. Yet the success of the game industry has also lead to a significant reduction in diversity of both product types and audiences. Most game publishing companies have conglomerated over the past decade, purchasing smaller studios and creating a small handful major industry giants. As a result, games are more and more focused on markets and less and less on creative innovation. Due to the influence of such mega-chains as Wal-Mart and Target, publishers have become increasingly risk-averse, focusing resources on license-based products, sequels and well-established “sellable” game genres. In contrast with the early 1990s, when the nascent CD-ROM and console business was “up for grabs,” today's game industry is less innovative than ever. Even blockbuster title The Sims met initial resistance from its publisher as an unrecognizable genre with an uncertain market. It has since become the best-selling PC game in history.

Even the game industry itself decries what many have called its “creative crisis.” In 2005, at his annual “State of the Industry Address,” E3 expo founder Doug Lowenstein gently admonished the game industry for its narrowness of vision. He laid out, jokingly, “six easy steps for world dominance.” By the 10th Anniversary of this major industry event, Lowenstein urged game companies to:

• Broaden the market by reaching out to other audiences and demographics
• Create more complete games with more original gameplay
• Make games more accessible and easier to play
• Evolve new financing models
• Exploit emerging platforms, such as the Internet and Mobile Phones
• Solidify cultural credibility

Ten years earlier, at the inaugural E3, the game industry was nothing but innovation. At this point, there were a number of “set-top” boxes vying for position in what was to become the highly lucrative console market. Meanwhile, the CD-ROM, a technology that pundits had consistently predicted would be “dead in two years” since its introduction in 1985, was experiencing a renaissance. Games like Myst and Seventh Level were establishing the mystery and puzzle game genres; “interactive video” was still seen as viable with titles such as Voyeur and Johnny Mnemonic ; and First Person Shooter games were establishing real-time 3D as a new paradigm with games like Doom and Quake. Each new title was groundbreaking, establishing a new genre and new conventions.

In 2007, 12 years after E3's launch, the picture is very different. The U.S. game industry, enamored of its own success, has become increasingly resistant to innovation. Most American titles produced today are sequels to successful titles or licenses for movie and television titles. The “hard-core” market is still courted, in spite of the fact that the “core market,” playing games like The Sims (Maxis/EA) and Roller Coaster Tycoon (Frontier/Atari), now outnumbers them by two to one. Mainstream game publishers continue to pay little attention to the rapidly expanding casual game scene, which now makes up about 10% of the market, 2 but is expected to grow steadily in the coming years, fueled largely by a demographic consisting of women above the age of 40. The casual game market is expected to grow to 4 times its current size by the year 2011.

Even game designers themselves lament the lack of creativity and innovation in the industry. And yet the risk-averse nature of the mainstream game industry, in which games cost between $10 and $25 million to produce, has led to a chronic “cookie-cutter” syndrome that even has developers weary.

//Signs of Life

Yet even as the game industry has become static and predictable, a rising tide of independent game development taking place around the fringes of the industry is freshening up the gaming scene. This has been fueled by two parallel trends: One is the release of such “moddable” game engines as Torque and Unreal. The second is the growth of the Internet as a development and distribution context. In short, even as budgets in the mainstream industry continue to skyrocket, in reality, games are getting progressively easier and cheaper to make. Small teams of independent “garage-band” developers have made waves with underground “mods” like Counterstrike, the Half-Life (Valve) modification that eventually distributed more units than the original. Meanwhile, small companies are leveraging ease of development and direct-to-market distribution framework of online and web-based games.

With the game industry focus on multi-million-dollar blockbusters, often overlooked are these smaller independent efforts that occur outside of the mainstream and distribution infrastructure. While many of these appeal to smaller markets, even independently produced “alternative” games can garner a significant audience without the benefit of major publishing or advertising budgets. The Finnish-based online virtual world Habbo Hotel boasts 12 million players worldwide, four times that of Blizzard Entertainment's blockbuster massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. And Whyville.net, an independent game-based science learning community targeted to children 8-12 nearly twice the subscribers of Sony Computer Entertainment's multi-million-dollar blockbuster EverQuest.

An emerging number of small independent game developers have begun to challenge the status quo of game publishing. Game modification, the practice of building original content using commercial game engines, has generated numerous new independent game projects. “Game Art” is gaining attention in the art world. Games for social change, for instance, represent an increasing movement internationally, epitomized by The World Food Program's Food Force , a game about fighting world hunger, which has been downloaded by approximately 4.5 million people since its release in April of 2005.

//The Nascent Exhibition Scene & Early Festivals

Over the past five years, a number of different worldwide venues have hosted special exhibitions and festivals on independent games and game art. The University of California Irvine 's Beall Center for Art and Technology hosted “Shift+Ctrl” in 2000, one of the first independent game exhibitions held outside the framework of an industry-sponsored. Mass MOCA's 2001 Game Show included both analog and digital game art in the context of a traditional museum exhibition. In 2002, London 's Barbican Gallery launched ‘Game On,' a touring exhibition on the history of commercial video games, including selected newer experimental works. The same year, the City of Melbourne, Australia hosted Trigger, an exhibition of alternative games and game art. In 2004, San Francisco 's Yerba Buena Gardens hosted “Bang the Machine” and the same year UC Irvine's Beall Center hosted ALT+CTRL, a sequel to its 2000 exhibition. Numerous smaller group and individual shows have also been hosted at museums, galleries and cultural centers around the world and digital games are increasingly being embraced as a new and legitimate mode of cultural production. Even machinima, the rapidly growing craft of making movies inside game engines has spawned numerous showcases, screenings and events.

Worldwide, about half a dozen annual festivals and other events currently include independent games and interactive media. These include the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival (a part of the larger Fringe Festival), Milia (includes some interactive media in their Digital Media Content Trade Show), Slamdance (which primarily focuses on independent films), BAFTA (whose main focus is television), and the small Independent Games Festival (IGF) (which is part of the trade show at the Game Developers Conference). A number of smaller exhibits, such as the game presentation at the Digital Games Research Association, take place intermittently and are also provided limited access to academic conference attendees only.

//The Imperative for Action

The decline of innovation in the game industry, combined with the rapid growth of what can appropriately be called the “independent game movement” creates not only the opportunity but the demand for a public event that showcases the best work of international independent game developers, artists, modders, and alternative creators. In spite of high demand, E3 has traditionally not admitted non-game-industry attendees; the Game Developer's Conference is equally off limits to the general public. Yet the success of such products as Whyville and Food Force would indicate that the general public is interested in being exposed to new games produced outside the mainstream game publishing infrastructure.

Meanwhile, developers have limited opportunities to show their wares to the general public and to build a community with other innovators in the field. Most successful indie games prevail by word of mouth. Few have any public forum for exposure to new audiences. There is no central space, virtual or otherwise, for the Independent Game and Interactive Media Community and the creators and the consumers.

[1] Lowenstein, Doug. (2005). E3 Expo State of the Industry Address. Washington DC : The Entertainment Software Association http://www.theesa.com/archives/2005/05/e3expo_2005_sta.php
[2] Mills, Greg E. (ed.) (2005). IGDA Casual Games White Paper, International Game Developers Association, 2005 http://www.igda.org/casual/
[3] Vance, Maureen. (2004). Casual Online Gamer Study. Digital Marketing Services for AOL Games. (Press release: http://media.aoltimewarner.com/media/cb_press_view.cfm?release_num=55253774 )
[4] Fried, Ina. (2006). “ Casual games get serious: Companies are increasingly coming to the conclusion that expanding the game market means expanding the types of games they make to include smaller, simpler titles.” CNET News.com, May 12, 2006. http://news.com.com/Casual+games+get+serious/2100-1043_3-6071465.html
[5] Takahashi, Dean. (2006.) GDC Preview: Game Developers Focus On Creativity. San Jose Mercury News Arts & Entertainment Blog, March 20, 2006: http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2006/03/gdc_preview_gam.html