getting over it with bennett foddy tool assisted

As someone interested in how we create safer spaces and more viable environments for all the bodies and persons who wish to participate in video game culture, I'm in sync with Foddy's intentions.īut as a historian, I am equally suspect of reading the past in the terms of the present-what we call historical anachronism. Part of Foddy's work was to challenge the validity of that sensibility by offering a history-check of indie hubris. To follow Foddy's argument, McMillan's lack of historical awareness in part produced his sense of entitlement and authority. While my point may seem like a ponderous subtlety, conflating these ideas actually produces different kinds of histories-which in turn, affects how we experience our emotional relationship to the past. When Foddy cited the “indieness” of Commander Keen or Lemmings or the Scandinavian demoscene, he was often referring to their “independent” status. Additionally, indie is also sometimes a genre or marketing tag tied to this movement. In the history Foddy wove, there was no distinction between these two very different categories.

Indie, however, is a movement that emerged at the turn of the 21st century. In Garda and Grabarczyk's classification, independent may apply to work that is “financially” independent (non-AAA), or stylistically independent (non-mainstream). I borrow this handy distinction from scholars Maria B. By that logic, we should be much more open and accommodating of what McMillan experiences as “segregation.”īut the successes of Foddy's talk came at the cost of a different kind of historical “accuracy”-our capacity to make conceptual and historically meaningful distinctions between two separate but often conflated cultural phenomena within game production: the independent and the indie. In gesturing for a historically-based notion of inclusivity, Foddy successfully countered the idea that the indie is a radical break in how we produce and experience games. As Foddy told it, video games are always already indie, and a word shouldn't be getting in the way of celebrating everything the indie movement has to offer.įoddy's larger cultural and inspirational goals are well taken. For Foddy, the dream of a unified scene is an elitist one what McMillan framed as segregation, Foddy spun as proliferation. Rather, it is the baffling diversity of indie games, the reality that indie creation is more mechanically, representationally, and developmentally expansive than in any prior moment in video game history. Having established that the “indie” has always been there, Foddy suggested that what is truly unique to the now isn’t the “newness” of indie games at all (which is the mythology of a few elite indie devs). In most cases, they have existed within video game history since at least the early 1980s, if not earlier. These qualities didn't emerge fully-formed from the brains of the indie upper crust, like some digital Athena escaping from the head of Zeus. In Foddy’s alternate timeline, the attributes we apply to “indie” production are nothing new-including accessible tools, self-distribution, superstar success narratives, and aesthetic or mechanic experimentation.

Directly addressing Edmund McMillan's lament that “ use to feel very united but now feels very segregated,” Foddy argued that contemporary anxiety about the indie scene’s waning glory is largely a product of poor historical literacy on the part of the scene as a whole.

Getting over it with bennett foddy tool assisted