Maverick Award Speech

The great thing about games is that simplicity can be just as involving as complexity. Like music (my favourite art form) it's just a matter of hitting the right buttons, pulling the right strings and getting the right audience. Once you start targeting the largest audience, you forget about the rest; the result is homogenised crap. What constantly amazes me is that the small niches are ignored. So much so that the next generation has no concept of these forgotten styles. Now I've no idea whether I'm talking about games or music anymore. I'm not suggesting that digging up forgotten/ignored genres is the way forward, but it's certainly a great platform to get started from, particularly as gaming has been dragged by the nose by technological advances vice creative ones. A constant argument I have with a friend is with turn based games (xcom being my favourite) and real time games. My friend cannot understand why I prefer turn based when 'real time' is apparantly more, um, realistic. My friend will not take 'because I enjoy it' as a reasonable answer, stating that turn based games were bound by the constraints of technology and turned 'real time' once technology allowed it. This is the sort of reasoning that seems to dictate what sort of games we get to play; dead end reasoning if you ask me!

Congratulations, Greg, with the well deserved award!

But do you really think that the hit-driven mentality of the industry is the only problem? I applaud the enthousiasm and the creativity of the indie games scene, but frankly we, as developers, still have a long way to go before our medium will deliver works that "illuminate and help us understand our world" on a regular basis. In my opinion, we're wasting a lot of time mucking about with what passes for experimental gameplay innovations rather than dealing with content and you know, the human condition and all that.

I hope that one day, indie games can claim that they deliver more profound and meaningful artworks than the commercial industry. But so far, in terms of illumination and understanding, the Big Games are doing just as well, if not better, than the small ones. It's unnatural! ;)

Johnny: Innovation can happen at a lot of different levels. Trying to experiment with gameplay is one; addressing unusual subjects is another. Neither Kudos nor The Shivah is particularly innnovative from a gameplay perpective, as an example, but they both deal with subject material you won't find in a mainstream game.

I agree. But for each of those exceptions in the indie games scene, I can find an exception from the commercial scene. What I would like to see is indeed something like an independent film scene for games: where each and every game that is made has some ambition in terms of content. Where art is not the exception but the rule. I'm hopeful, though. I believe this is starting to happen right now. And channels like Manifesto and Steam are definitely stimulating this evolution.

I agree. Independent games shouldn't just strive to be innovative or different, or to do old things in slightly different ways, they should strive to be *better* (better for people that is) than the big-budget game industry is.