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The "Indie" Fagotry

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The "Indie" Fagotry

Unread postby icycalm » 06 May 2010 19:20

This dude has linked me on his sidebar under the category "indie", lol:

http://miscgamer.com/

Indie

* IndieGames Blog
* Insert Credit
* Insomnia
* PixelProspector/indev
* TIGSource


Of course, if he means indie as in "independent publication" he is correct, but that is not what the other links suggest -- what they suggest is that he is linking sites which cover predominantly the indie scene (which my site doesn't), and which moreover cover it in a POSITIVE light (which my site sure as hell doesn't). It just goes to show how stupid people are and how little attention they pay to what they read.

To reiterate: Indie games are the scourge of gaming, some of the worst games ever made, almost as bad as "serious" games and "non-games", and one of my goals with this site is to expose this fact and explain exactly why it is so. It is therefore simply ABSURD to lump my site together with all those crappy indie circlejerk sites!
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Unread postby darksun » 06 May 2010 20:33

From his response to your Mini-games are for Mini-gamers article:

gum wrote:To summarize, the article basically says indie gamers promote indie games because they're too stupid to play the more complex games.

I do agree with some of the article's points, and probably a majority of the so-called "indie" games fall in the category mentioned in the article. However, indie/doujin games do have their usefulness, for example, at work I can play a quick game of *insert favorite indie game* during my coffee/lunch/secret break, but it's almost impossible to play more complex games like Warcraft 3 or Counter-Strike without getting noticed...

http://miscgamer.com/2008/06/27/mini-ga ... usy-gamers

The rest of the article is irrelevant rambling, none of which substantiates his claim about 'usefulness.' So, although he acknowledges your negative coverage of indie games, he totally effaces your reasoning. This is what happens when people conflate felt preferences with considered arguments.
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Unread postby icycalm » 06 May 2010 21:31

And Chaos has already answered his objection in the comments, lol:

ChaosAngelZero wrote:You know what, there isn't such a thing as a "busy gamer", because gaming and playing are leisure activities. And the fact that you don't have access to a decent gaming rig doesn't prevent you from playing great, probably much better old games than most indie stuff, nor does it change the fact that you're still playing lousy new ones. But hey, if you are actually busy then you're supposed to be working or having your lunch, not playing.


Hilarious, lol. Shows you what kind of lazy, ignorant bums we are up against.
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Unread postby icycalm » 06 May 2010 22:38

Also,

darksun wrote:The rest of the article is irrelevant rambling, none of which substantiates his claim about 'usefulness.'


This is because he has already "substantiated" it (i.e. explained it: you are using the word incorrectly). It's just that his explanation, while valid given his limited knowledge of videogames, becomes invalid if you consider all the old games of which is he ignorant -- as Chaos explained. So you basically failed to understand what he was saying.

darksun wrote:So, although he acknowledges your negative coverage of indie games, he totally effaces your reasoning.


He doesn't "efface" anything: he COUNTERS my reasoning, but with an INVALID counter-argument.

darksun wrote:This is what happens when people conflate felt preferences with considered arguments.


lol, no idea what you are trying to say here -- probably because you are not trying to say anything. I should have banned you for this tripe.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Oct 2010 15:53

Michael Rose wrote:Documentary Award: The Cat and the Coup
Aesthetics Award: Spirits
Sublime Experience Award: Faraway
Fun and Compelling Award: VVVVVV
Wild Card Award: B.U.T.T.O.N.
Trailblazer Award: Tim Schafer
Virtuoso Award: A Slow Year
Vanguard Award: A Slow Year
Jury Award: Groping in the Dark
Retarded Fucker Award: Derek Yu
Ugly as Fuck Award: Jonathan Blows
Pretentious Fagot Award: Jason Roher


http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/10/ ... nounc.html
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Aug 2011 23:27

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/the_myth_of_independence/

The contents of this essay were originally intended for the third essay of my Genealogy (which will only be available in book form), but I changed my mind and spun them off into a separate essay because I couldn't bear to watch that little cunt Derek Yu prance about and spew his bullshit everywhere. This was the post that sparked the explosion:

http://insertcredit.com/2011/07/25/the- ... t179324735

Derek Yu wrote:That "Passage in 10 Seconds" parody was made by a self-proclaimed indie developer, so you already see eye to eye with at least one!

Also, Recca is an indie game. ZUN is indie. Dwarf Fortress and ADOM (and most roguelikes) were made by indie developers. Skullgirls is an indie game. Natural Selection 2 is an indie game. These are all capital G, win/lose, high-octane, warboner-style GAME GAMES, as you call them. All "indie" really refers to these days is the size of your team and the amount of creative freedom you have.


"Recca" is an "indie" game, lol. His shit is demolished beneath by some dude, then I post my essay, then he posts more shit, which I demolish, etc.

At any rate, everything that needs to be said on the subject (and a great deal more!) is in the essay. It is impossible to refute it, and any counter-arguments raised by Yu and his ilk will all be so facile that even IC readers should be able to demolish them. My work here, in other words, is done, so enjoy.
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Aug 2011 23:30

Oh, and another thing. All mention of "independent" or "indie" games or developers from now on must be written with quotation marks, for now-obvious reasons. Failure to do so will result in the offender being banned. This will be applicable site-wide (i.e. in reviews as well, etc., and I will be going back in due course and editing older content as appropriate).
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Unread postby icycalm » 03 Aug 2011 18:55

First, there are the extra nine paragraphs, which I decided to add after reading Yu's pathetic counter-arguments in that IC thread linked above:

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/the_myth_ ... nce/#redux

Then, there is this email:

tacicamaplictisesti@yahoo.com wrote:Great article however you made one small mistake when talking about programming languages.

"If you employ the aid of even a language like, say, C++ you are still compromising with the people who wrote the language (— since, as every real programmer will tell you, any higher-level language than Assembly automatically restricts your code's possibility space; and the higher the language the greater the restrictions — at the level of Game Maker you barely have any choices left, which is why so many games developed with it play so extremely alike)"

In theory Assembly does give you more possibilities but in practice the larger your application gets the more unmanageable its complexity gets so that's why it's only used when maximum efficiency is a necessity, which isn't that often.

You're wrong in thinking that the higher the language the greater the restrictions. In fact the higher the language the fewer the restrictions. Take this example:
http://www.paulgraham.com/accgen.html
The C++ version works because someone knew how to make some very ugly hacks while the Common Lisp version is 2 lines. Here is a long article in which Andy Gavin, one of the co-founders of Naughty Dog, explains why C (which is even lower level than C++) is not the best choice if you want to do complex things.

"However, C is crippled by an inconsistent syntax, a weak text based macro system, and an insurmountable barrier between run time and compile time name spaces. C can only be customized via the #define operator and by functions. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible to do many interesting and easy things, many of C’s fundamental areas, structures, setting, getting, expressions, flow of control, and scope are completely off limits for customization."

"whenever complicated data structures are involved the effort needed is obscene, and C in unable to transfer this effort from one data type to another similar one."

Now while you may or may not like Naughty Dog's games it's undeniable that they are excellent from a technological stand point so the man knows what he's talking about. The PS2 Naughty Dog games were written only in Lisp and probably some assembly and they didn't even have load times. So why is C++ the preferred language for game developers? The same reasons a few other languages like Java and C# are popular: marketing, tools and the fact that a lot of people know these languages so they are easily replaceable.

I've never used Game Maker Language but based on the Wikipedia article it's about as high level as Basic.


And my reply to it:

I wrote:dumb-diri-dumbass

>In theory Assembly does give you more possibilities but in practice the larger your application gets the more unmanageable its complexity gets so that's why it's only used when maximum efficiency is a necessity, which isn't that often.

What does "efficiency" have to do with possibilities? Yes, dumbass, Assembly is harder to work with than fucking C++ -- that's not exactly a revelation now is it?

>You're wrong in thinking that the higher the language the greater the restrictions.

Then I am wrong together with all the real computer scientists working right now in all the world's universities. You are confusing the LEVEL of the language with its QUALITY, dumbass.

Now piss off back to retard-land and leave me the fuck alone.
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Unread postby icycalm » 05 Aug 2011 15:31

http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index. ... 2#msg10062

lobote wrote:This is what icy was born to do:

"Which finally brings us to the scammers' REAL, INTERNALLY-USED definition of "indie", which can be clearly discerned BY READING BETWEEN THE LINES OF THEIR FAKE ONES, and which I am now going to present to the world as the fruit of much labor in the art of psychological analysis and interpretation:

"It's indie if it's made by Derek Yu and his friends." "

He's great at destroying bullshit, even if I don't get his other points. Here's a link that an indie developer said about TIGsource confirming icy's opinion:

"While providing "constructive criticism" they actually insultingly promoted their favorite developers and their games, which was not very tasteful given the fact that all those games sucked big time. And that's the point when it became painfully obvious they're not there to help new independent game developers, but to actually discourage them, protecting their own "independent" game developers with their well-established propaganda machinery. And I got to admit, to some extent they succedded.

I decided to release my game and my site 'as is', give it some time and see how things turn out. Today, several months later, Invader Attack got very good reviews, one of which is GameVortex 89%"

http://www.codergames.com/news/games/ti ... poly-scam/
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Unread postby icycalm » 05 Aug 2011 16:21

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?t ... #msg594490

C.A. Sinclair wrote:Also the typical indie gamer isn't a fat nerd. That's the typical regular gamer. The typical indie gamer looks more like this:

hipster_metal.jpg
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Unread postby icycalm » 06 Aug 2011 01:30

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?t ... #msg594368

DavidCaruso wrote:
Paul Eres wrote:the final twist is that icycalm made limbo -- he wanted to make a popular art game so bad that the world would finally see the evils of art games, but it backfired when the world ate it up


His site gave Limbo two stars. His site also gave 5 stars to Deus Ex, a game where the Illuminati play a major role, and called it Videogame Art. His site gave 2 stars to Braid, a game with a message advocating nuclear disarmament (and as we all know, the Illuminati control the world's nuclear bombs).

From even this evidence alone (though more can be produced if necessary), we can conclude that Limbo was not only an icycalm-backed conspiracy to bring down artgames, but also an Illuminati-backed corporate attempt to destroy the indie gaming scene in its entirety and restore power to the CEO bigwig cabal, the ones sitting in the shadows smoking cigarretes while torturing dependie developers and extracting all the creative control juice possible from their brains. And no doubt, Bobby Kotick's hitmen were already in place with sniper rifles, ready to strike McMillen, Blow, and Fish down as soon as they got the order from icycalm. But for some reason, this didn't happen, as all three developers still lived on to act in the landmark Hollywood epic Indie Game: The Movie. The question is, why?

You've dug too deep, Paul. We here at the TIGSource forums have stumbled upon something much bigger than ourselves. This is...The Da VVVVVVinci Code.


moi wrote:indie games don't exist. Personal computers don't exist. we are not even real, it is still 1945 and we are just populating the mind of edmund macmillengovich, providing him a definitive escape from his torments. It is winter.
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Unread postby icycalm » 12 Nov 2011 14:42

http://culture.vg/features/commentary/w ... caust.html

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Unread postby SriK » 12 Nov 2011 15:49

Amazing that he managed to spin that much stuff out of (what I assume was) a joke.

Also, holocaust "indie" "artgames" have already been done. According to the "indie scene," they gave us Wolfenstein 3D, a real work of videogame art and a revolutionary Holocaust-themed game where you shoot Nazis in the face and kill Hitler, in 1992, but it seems that today they've degenerated into making sappy psuedo-artistic board games and handheld games which "don't have to be fun" (because apparently Schindler's List wasn't fun or something, I guess these people must have fallen asleep in the middle of the movie because it was so unfun to them.)

This reminds me of some great posts that substance/austere made during that whole 300 page TIGS thread:

substance wrote:
P Diddy wrote:But you can't make a videogame about the holocaust. Such a thing would always be seen as a lowly attempt to showcase how videogames can be serious.


That's it, I'm going to make a game titled "Concentration Camp Tycoon".

I don't think I agree with you on what constitutes a "serious game", though you are making a claim of what the general populace believes. Here's what icycalm's had to say in his Braid review, reflecting my thoughts:

icycalm wrote:Strange as this notion may sound at first, Braid's paramount failing, which far overshadows its thoughtless, self-conflicting mechanics and complete lack of challenge, is the same one that plagues so many Western-made contemporary reimaginings of classic videogame series: that of taking game formulas which were mechanics-wise FUNDAMENTALLY SHALLOW, and therefore originally appropriately clothed IN FUNDAMENTALLY SHALLOW BACKSTORIES AND AESTHETICS, and attempting to "elevate" them to some desired level of "seriousness", by DUMBING-DOWN the mechanics still further, and "DEEPENING" ONLY THE AESTHETICS.


If the game was complex enough then there's no reason why it shouldn't involve death camps/whatever. As long as it adds to, not subtracts away (by making the player irritated at how silly the game is, rather than embrace the silliness) from the immersion. The more serious the theme you intend to have, the more complex and immersive the game must be to compensate. That's why Heavy Rain was so unintentionally hilarious, by the way.


http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?t ... #msg493836

substance wrote:
AshfordPride wrote:Why would I want to exist in a death camp


Dying is good. Besides, you could, I dunno, ESCAPE from the place? Manage the concentration camp? Help people escape without being caught? Hell, if we ever get to the degree where you're able to, you can live through the harshest putative circumstances to see if you can do it.

The possibilities are endless.

AshfordPride wrote:Games are fun. Fun implies disrespect.


Don't construct these X implies Y sentences any more. It's an imprecise use of language which you've caught on to from some of the sloppy writers on this board. To correct the first sentence, good games are fun, shit games are BORING AS HELL.

Next, fun does not have to imply disrespect at all, you've been infected by this silly idea that having fun (deriving pleasure from an activity) is somehow shameful. Perhaps it was a passage from icycalm that threw you off?

icycalm wrote:The lowest action trash is preferable to wholesome family entertainment. When you clean them up, when you make videogames respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable


That was written in order to follow the style of the previous passages. Here is the position he later builds up to:

icycalm wrote:Consequently the vast majority of so-called "art" publications simply refuse to have anything to do with the advanced arts — with for example movies, since as far as diehard artfags are concerned movies are merely a coarse mass "entertainment" medium and nothing more (as if there could ever be anything more than entertainment, lol — notice moreover how diehard artfags achieve the admirable feat of turning "entertainment", i.e. pleasure, into an insult, a practice that videogame artfags will later on inherit and repeat, as we've already seen, with "fun"). They therefore let the "movie critics" deal with movies, with the implication that these people are not art critics — and let Ebert say what he will (just as Ebert in his turn does not consider videogame critics art critics — and let the videogame people say what they will).


But getting back to my own justification (you may interpret his words as you wish, I'm not here to speak for him, he can speak for himself, I'm just referencing what you've probably read), do I disrespect my friend when we go out shooting each other with blanks for fun? Do I disrespect the situation, do I disrespect people who shoot at each other for real? No, we're dead serious and both of us try to win, all while having fun. The more serious, the more immersive it is, the greater the respect we both deal with the situation, the more fun we have. In fact that reminds me of what the wisest of men once said:

"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." ~ Heraclitus

Finally, why would creating a movie about the Holocaust be respectful but then creating a game about (and here it's sloppy use of language on our friend's part which I've carried forward, the game is themed around the Holocaust , what it is about depends on its mechanics) the Holocaust disrespectful. Have you not derived pleasure from watching certain (good) movies about the Holocaust?

So, we're left with either the proposition that Schindler's list is disrespectful (as many people have complained, actually) or neither of them are disrespectful. They're both forms of entertainment, aren't they?

As for the funeral, the disrespect, the INSULT, is not primarily there due to you playing with the gameboy, but instead because you are not properly participating in the funeral.


http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?t ... #msg494135
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Unread postby icycalm » 12 Nov 2011 16:02

You need to "assume" that it was a joke? Seriously?
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Nov 2011 15:04

http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index. ... 7#msg23417

SriK wrote:though he probably was serious when he posted it originally


lol, dumb-diri-dumb

And even after you read the above post. But perhaps you simply lack the slightest hint of a sense of humor or something.
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Unread postby SriK » 13 Nov 2011 17:26

I was talking about lobote probably being serious when he posted the topic originally, not you being serious when you posted the article up on the site. But I misjudged him again, so sorry about that.
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Nov 2011 17:45

SriK wrote:I was talking about lobote probably being serious when he posted the topic originally


OF COURSE you were. If I had thought that you were talking about ME being serious AFTER I told you that the whole thing was clearly a joke I would have banned you immediately.

Regardless of what you were talking about, however, any mention of the word "serious" or any of its cognates in relation to this article is a clear sign of retardation.
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Nov 2011 17:50

This is why I am saying that you have no sense of humor, otherwise you would have gotten his jokes. They are not just one or two, either, for your information: they are in every goddamn line. And of course it is impossible to crack such awesome jokes, and with such frequency, without being aware of it.

SriK humor sense score: -*****
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Nov 2011 17:54

But I know what's gunking you up: the other thread on The Ghetto where you and the other shitheads ganged up against poor lobote, who has more intelligence in a single toe than the rest of you morons have taken together, because you couldn't see how smart the things he was posting were. At that point you slapped the label "idiot" on him in your mind, hence why it's so hard for you now to accept that he has a better sense of humor than you.
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Unread postby SriK » 13 Nov 2011 18:08

Yeah, that's definitely it. It's why I said I misjudged him again, like I did in that game theory thread he made before. Again, sorry for all the retardry.
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Unread postby icycalm » 22 Dec 2011 21:11

See, this is what I am talking about:

http://culture.vg/forum/topic?f=17&t=3786

If you ask the dude, he will tell you that he understood The Myth of Independence just fine. And yet he still comes here and starts threads about indie games, even though the article says it plain as day THAT NO INDIE GAMES ACTUALLY EXIST -- only "indie" games, and all of those are by definition either bad or terrible. A decent "indie" game is therefore a contradictio in adjecto, and indie games without quotation marks do not exist.

I mean someone might as well post Death Smiles or Arcana Heart in that thread.

Basically, threads about indie games without quotation mark are a sure sign that the author doesn't give a shit about the videogames he's talking about, and most probably about videogames in general. For if he really cared about shooters (like that "Hydorah" piece of shit he linked or whatever), he would have started a thread on shooters, if he cared about fighters he would have started a thread about fighters, etc. The thread then merely says that "I only care about games which utilize cunning tactics to trick people into wasting their time on them and praise them as good" -- i.e. I don't care about videogames.

The very fact of using the term "indie" without quotation marks PROVES you don't care about videogames. (And it's the same with music, movies and everything else.)

And it doesn't matter how many articles I scribble on this point. It seems easier for people to understand the nature of the universe than that simple fact -- that's how diabolically cunning a tactic it is.
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Unread postby icycalm » 31 Dec 2011 00:10

From Cool Memories V, translation my own:

Jean Baudrillard wrote:Résumé de l'art contemporain par un chauffeur de taxi de Londres, devant la Tate Modern : « Quand on y entre, on comprend pourquoi c'est gratuit. »


Summary of contemporary art by a London cab driver, in front of Tate Modern: "When one enters, one understands why it's free."


I am going to add it to the beginning of the "Indies" and "Dependies" essay.
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Unread postby SriK » 22 Jan 2012 21:48

HBO and producer Scott Rudin have acquired remake rights to Indie Game: The Movie, the documentary by first-time filmmaking duo Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky that premiered in Sundance on Saturday afternoon. Rudin will develop the film as a fictional half-hour comedy series for HBO and he will be executive producer.

It is the second Sundance deal for HBO, which acquired the docu Me @ The Zoo for broadcast before the fest began. Indie Game captures the emotional journey of a new breed of struggling independent artists: the indie game designer. Refusing to work for the major game developers, these innovators bet on themselves by independently conceiving, designing, and programming their distinctly personal games in the hope that they, too, may hit it big. The film follows several of these meticulously obsessive video game artists.


http://m.deadline.com/2012/01/sundance- ... to-series/
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Unread postby icycalm » 23 Jan 2012 02:41

Not in my wildest nightmares would I have been capable of imagining this.
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Unread postby Agentx » 23 Jan 2012 04:48

When I read that I thought it must be a joke. Even right now I'm not even sure I can accept it as real. On top of that, I hadn't heard of the documentary either, that honestly sounds retarded too... As if "indie" startups are so different from most anyone else. If anything, I'd be curious to see it, if only to see what HBO saw in it as series potential and why they bothered making it in the first place.

Will this "indie" label ever die?
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