Workshop for Creative Territories Seminar, Utrecht, August 2014

What and Where is an Indie Game?

‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’

George E. P. Box

Orientations

• Digital Games as entertainment/leisure, as commercial, artistic endeavour, as media/social/sociological phenomenon….

• As object of interest for ‘creative economy’

• And for cultural geography

Mapping exercises

• Darchen and Tremblay, ‘Policies for Creative Clusters’, European Planning Studies 2014

‘Creative Cluster’ for Darchen and Tremblay

• Community of creative people• Catalysing place where people, relationships,

ideas and talents can spark each other• Environment offering diversity, stimuli and

freedom of expression DePropis and Hypponen (2008)

[vs ‘technology’ or industry cluster]

• Codified, not ‘tacit knowledge’• Silos ok, no need for relationships, diversity,

shared knowledge building….• Logistical, infrastructure benefits of colocation

in a particular place (transport hub, tax regime, resource availability)

‘Creative’ mapping

Gibson, Brennan-Horley & Warren, ‘Geographic Information Technologies for Cultural Research’, Cultural Trends 19:4 (2010),325-48

‘Cross-flows’ of movements of people to creative work sites

‘Anything can be mapped, hypothetically…’

but recall Box’s dictum that all models are wrong, but some are useful.

‘Catch and release’ (GPS tracks) of ‘creative workers in Sydney

Models (and maps) are

• Necessary but faulty• Stiegler: pharmaka: poison and cure. We need

them to navigate, interpret, act in the world.

• Some different models/maps/diagrams of indie games

Material/Virtual

• Indie games as produced and played forms/objects

• As material and mental:• Stiegler: the who and the what in a co-

inventive dynamic; • Digital materiality: information is not

immaterial but ‘matter in transition’

Transitions and determinations

• Transition of materials (ecological)• Of artefacts and cultural practices (globality)• Of spatio-temporal ‘structures’ : 24/7,

virtuality, etc

• Cf also Karen Barad: ‘local determinations’ of material fluxes, flows make up ‘reality’ as known, representable, understandable

Different (maybe ‘useful’) orientations

• On cultural value, significance

• On local, global relations

• On economic, political, ecological dimensions

• On historical and cultural imaginaries/archives

Step 1: On the material/ecological

• Read p. 1-5 of Sy Taffel, ‘Escaping Attention: Digital Media Hardware, Ecology and Material Cost’ Culture Machine 13 (2012), 1-28, at http://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/24

• Try to apply to producing an indie game; then playing an indie game.

• Make some lists, situate some technologies and material/energy flows

Step 2: Mental/cultural places

• Identify sources/inspirations for game virtual spaces

• Try to situate these, geographically, historically:

• Egs?

• Tank Hero: Laser Wars (Clapfoot 2011, Toronto):: Battlezone Atari (1980) … Silicon Valley

• Arcade games age: 1970s-80s US, Japan, UK Computer entertainment ‘revolution’: Mobile Games and/as Repetition

• Mechanical War + Sci Fi: cold war computer technoscience/gaming and simulation

Step 3: Mix ingredients together

• Experiment with synthesising the two kinds of modellings of indie game materiality and spatiotemporality

• Discuss useful working out or ‘interesting failure’