Indie Games

Recently, some guy posted this rant on Youtube. He makes a few interesting points, though the overall style is a kind of passive-aggressive, barely contained outrage that is a little tiring to sit through. Basically, he's saying that commercial games and artistic, indie games are fairly equal in terms of quality gameplay experience, but that few people are willing to donate money to indie game creators, even if they have enjoyed the games they put out.

There is one thing he doesn't take into account.

Commercial games are expensive to buy because they are expensive to make. They are non-risky and rarely take chances because they represent a huge investment.

Indie games are the opposite. In fact, something that one person whipped up in a weekend's worth of work (like the amazing Tower of Goo) is arguably not an investment at all. Just one person working on his hobby.

The indie games industry doesn't need a huge influx of cash and graphics to produce quality products. They do it now, even now with barely anyone donating anything. If everyone who played those games donated $5, then absolutly nothing will change, except that a few genius programmers will get a little richer.

Did Blair Witch Project change the indie movie industry? And yet, it was a movie that cost barely anything to make, and made a ton of money. The ranting guy would love for the video game industry to have a Blair Witch Project. Maybe it will. But even if it does, people will still line up to buy Madden 2011 and World of Diablo just as surely as they line up for Transformers or Spy Kids.

I'm Alive!

The inaugural post of Qwiblorg! is devoted to an awesome Batman Animated Series clip that you have to see. It's a flashback sequence that goes on for about 10 min, recounting the death of Joker. Okay, so you may have seen Joker die before, probably more than once, and even that time in real life, but this time it's somehow much more chilling. After all, Dark Knight Returns has Joker die from what is essentially a fistfight. Not particularly inventive or appropriate to the character. In the 80s Batman we have a pretty iconic Joker death scene, but it's still little more than a big fall. The Riddler, or Two-Face, could have died in a simular fashion. The Animated Series writers realized that, if the Joker was to die, it couldn't be by Batman's hand. After all, Batman has had many opportunities to do away with the Clown Prince of Crime before, in the comic books as well as in the Dark Knight, and yet has failed to take advantage of this. The Joker could only really die by accident, as a result of one of his own dark schemes gone wrong. In having a villian essentially self-destruct in the face of the hero's mercy and unwillingness to kill, the writers follow a classic literary trope. That's why this clip, while not perfect, is as close as we, as a species, have gotten to creating the Iconic Joker Death Scene. Oh, and Harley dies too. Whoops.