Indiepocalypse
“Indiepocalypse” is a useful term to know if you are new to searching for video games relevant to your interests/professional life. This term was originally deployed to talk about a short economic bubble around the first superstar indie games in the late 2000s, but has come to be a broader derogatory term, referring to the supposedly negative effects of the mass proliferation of independent games from single creators or small teams resulting from vastly more accessible game creation tools through the 2010s. Though who see this exponential increase in available games as a negative tend to be the reactionary elements of games fandom and media, under the usual guises that this ‘glut’ of games somehow diluting the level of quality in the medium or taking attention from other supposedly more-deserving (read conservative) games. Pretty much the same argument every arts institution through history has made when their hegemony has been challenged. In reality, the “indiepocalypse” is a flourishing. Specifically of widely more diverse creators and artistic visions for what video games can even be.
Why is this tidbit term from insider history useful to you—as a curator of a museum, as a teacher, as someone interested in how art is being created in the digital age? Because it round-about explains why you’ll have so much trouble finding art-minded games relevant to your inquiry. The major infrastructure of the last 30 years of video games has been built on a tightly closed-ecosystem model, with multibillion-dollar international platform companies, multimillion-dollar studios, consumerist masculine white fandoms, and media tied closely to those institutions. The entire video game media ecosystem was never designed to help curious people find, say, the first game by a young artist about queer friendship—or basically any game we feature here at VGxA—amongst tens of hundreds of thousands of titles. Itch is at least trying to include some curation, but other than that, insider word-of-mouth and social media still remain the best way to find art-minded projects. Which is the precise resource someone who is coming fresh to games from the arts will be lacking.
All of this background is to say, I always deeply appreciate those in games who are dedicated to curation and publicly documenting their discoveries. One such platform is the ironically named Indiepocalypse. It features low-cost packs, called “Issues”, of curated video games that are part of the lineage of DIY art movements. Each issue has that oh-so wonderfully skronky zine aesthetic and features a highly diverse selection of games. For instance, the offerings from issue #1 have everything from a project exploring the American invasion of Afganistan to a crayon-art space arcade game from a father-son duo. The site runs on a submission model and splits revenue, so it is definitely useful to creators of game-related projects as well as those looking to discover new works.
Creator: Pizza Pranks
Link: https://pizzapranks.com/