It always felt like a good deal of the more visible indie devs were attempting to explore new artistic spaces more out of the dream that they could be a king of that space and strike it big financially, than to transform the overall artistic landscape. The indie game boom started around the same time as a huge global economic recession hit in 2008, and it felt like one of the few paths a creative person could take where there was potential to be genuinely successful. No doubt the massive success of Minecraft, or the still extremely respectable successes of games like Braid and Super Meat Boy helped that perception immensely. There was a small part of me, inspired by talks by people like Jonathan Blow, that thought my weird ideas could somehow catch on a little bit too. At the very least, indie games seemed like more of a sure bet for me to pursue as a career path than other creative fields I was interested in.

If you achieved any degree of minor success at that time, it was easy to think of yourself as one of The People: an ambassador into new space, a true explorer into a new Wild West of independent games. I often referred to this type of person as the “boy genius” because they were usually a particular type of young, ambitious, often feverishly egomaniacal man that dominated games and tech. Walking around a space like GDC, you could get a strong whiff of the vibe that whatever you’re talking about could be your big ticket to fame and fortune. This was true not only for the boy genius, but for basically everyone involved in every conversation I had, no matter how pleasant.

That little breakdown on the rock in 2016 is when it finally became clear to me that many of us had been existing in two parallel realities. Two identical-seeming conversations were happening: one was a conversation about ideas and ways to expand the medium artistically with the implicit understanding that you would be selling that idea to a large mass of people. Another was the same conversation without the desire to become massively popular or commercially successful.

In retrospect, that division between these two camps was always there. But very few were able to articulate it, because of the assumption that we all had the same goals. I was always broadly critical of indie game culture, yet I was still naive enough to think that a lot of people who were more interested in mass cultural exposure and fame would still be interested in going along with my weirder ideas. And many of them probably thought I was interested in going a far more mainstream direction than I had any interest in going. In their view — why would I be a part of this crowd if I wasn’t? We were strange bedfellows.

Eventually those two perspectives collided, and communities collapsed. This fault-line even existed among the queer and trans game developers I knew, many of whom who were more interested in getting mainstream exposure to their work than I was. Text-based games, “queer games”, “walking simulators” and other niches might have made some careers for a handful of people and made a lot of other reactionary gamers really mad, but at the end of the day they became just another market category. Depending on who you were, you either were happy about that or you weren’t.

The explosion of games out there meant a whole host of new things outside of the bubble began to define the culture of indie games. Being at GDC or knowing the right people didn’t give you the leverage that it once did. Now it was random forces of the market that determined a success, or maybe that the “right people” to know were totally different people now. Maybe they were streamers instead of game devs. Being at an award show around the “in-crowd” was no longer a ticket to success anymore.

I honestly thought this development was great. It was only by some immense luck and good timing that I managed to sneak my way inside the gates of an event like GDC with incredibly meager means. I was far more excited to see outsiders who weren’t imbued with the idea that being there entitled them into being “one of the special people” getting exposure. But many who were living inside of the gates did not seem to share those same feelings of excitement. If it wasn’t happening inside their own spaces with their own friends and acquaintances, many didn’t seem to want to know about it. And, to be fair, there was a lot of rightful anxiety that this shift away from conversations among a community of theoretically like-minded devs and into the world of streamers and internet personalities would create other negative consequences (which it has).