Plug and make: making video games on borrowed time

Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics, pp. 1–20

Abstract

Indie game developers stand in balance between often insecure economic management and creative ingenuity. These two aspects converge in the ways makers combine readily available tools, i.e. middleware, to streamline their work. Much of their work is dedicated to putting together audio and graphics editors, free-to-use software, plug-ins, and communication platforms, to make videogame-making possible. As such, independence becomes a question of being able to navigate and creatively rearrange an accessible programming ecology of potentially interdependent programmes. Based on 24 months of online and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, I interrogate how ‘indie’ videogame makers’ attempts to be ‘independent.’ As previous literature has shown how independence is a process that makers build and negotiate, I show how such process unravels in dealing with multiple temporal dimensions. Indies operate between the times they secure around the edges of their primary commitments; they build temporary pieces that will eventually fit together; they live within flexible temporalities of software obsolescence. Therefore, indie videogame making revolves around figuring out how to be in between and work around different pieces of software as much as competing schedules. This comic article seeks to graphically investigate and represent those in-betweens and the work of translation they require.

Authors 1

1. Federico De Musso corresponding Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University, Leiden