Kristian Segerstrale vs Indie

I just came back from Nordic Game 2010, where I and the rest of the Nordic Game Jam team had a talk. Besides our own talk, I primarily came back with 3 really good experiences; I am going to talk about 2 of those here; the Indie Night and Kristian Segerstrale’s keynote.

Indie (Night)

I went to the Indie Night at Nordic Game, which was a small pre-event arranged by the Copenhagen Game Collective. I’ve always felt a close spiritual relation to the indie scene, as I do believe that we are exploring a new art form and many of these people take that work very very seriously. Perhaps the best way to describe many of these people, like Cactus, Nifflas, etc, is that they are the auteurs of the game industry, and they do amazingly important work in moving the industry forward.

Kristian Segerstrale

For those of you who may not know who Kristian Segerstrale is, he is one the founders of Glu Mobile as well as Playfish (which was later sold to EA for $250M). Kristian held a brilliant keynote, entitled “Five Lessons for Game Entrepeneurs”. Of course, most of  that advice were inspired by his work with social games, and I do actually think he had a lot interesting points. His main points evolved around thinking about games as services and constant data mining what the users are doing.

I believe there is a point that as soon as you start thinking about games as a service, then there is an argument following from that, which includes adapting the game to the consumers and making sure they have a better experience, they try out more features of the games, etc. This is the point, where for the game to succeed, you as the game’s creator must loosen your grip on control and start thinking about the users as co-creators.

Segerstrale vs Indie

Now this may be a false conflict here, but I find both sides of the coin very interesting. On one side, I think many indies represent the auteur product driven viewpoint, while some may say Segerstrale represent the more democractic viewpoint of ‘we give the public what they demand’. The balance of course, in the new world of social games, Facebook, location-based games, etc is  to find out if you are listening to your users so much (ie thinking about the money) that you essentially have lost all artistic vision. Of course, some might argue, that as long as people are having fun and enjoying themselves, who cares about your single-minded vision?

Now I only mentioned Segerstrale, because I have seen him speak a few times, and I have been impressed every time. What is really going on here is a conflict between the product driven core definition of a game, and the new social-driven games as a service thinking. A conflict, that Bill Mooney brought to an explosive level with his slightly tactless acceptance speech for the award for Best New Social/Online Game at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards 2010. You can find some interesting musings on it on ZDNet, as well as by Raph Koster and by Josh Sutphin.

My Personal Solution

I have always personally tried to strike balances; I live in a collective, so some might think I have socialist tendencies, but I am really a libertarian at heart. The same goes for games; I strongly believe an artistic vision is needed, but I don’t believe money smells, nor do I believe you sell out just because you carve out a niche with users who hopefully have some of the same likings as you do (Geekstack has similar musings on Zynga here).