I looked up when I joined Twitter... March 16 2009. What happened to me in 2009? I was 14; a few months prior I had gotten my first M rated games, Assassin's Creed and Far Cry 2, my second and third purchases on Steam. Around the same time Ben Abraham would put up the first post on the videogame writing curation blog Critical Distance and Braid would escape the shackles of Xbox Arcade to join a wave of Young Professionals turning Passion into Business on Steam. It would take another year or two for indie games to get wrapped up in the sociality of Twitter, but 2009 retrospectively felt like the ripples of a coming wave. "Following" Jon Blow, Kotaku, Tim Rogers, Clint Hocking, Anna Anthropy, et al. was my first experience of Web2. From my little desk in central Indiana I was suddenly connected to people's thoughts about the medium that I'd never considered. I'd refresh Critical Distance every day hoping to see a new blog post, find new heads to follow, learn about new games worth playing, and hear from people with identities that were unheard of where I grew up. The world exploded open in front of me; I felt I had found my Community even if all I could do was observe it.
This euphoria withered as the reality of the platform's conditions set in and the New Commons’ dynamics became more apparent. As time passed Twitter became more and more of a marketplace. Ideas, identities, and conflicts didn't move forward, they just cycled and those cycles became clearer the longer you stayed. The world stopped feeling like it was expanding and began to feel like it was compressing, with Gamergate as the beginning of the Twitter Universe’s Big Crush. The last few stars burned brightly into existence in 2014 by riding the digital supernova aftershocks of the Very Online games industry's collective trauma. Alt-games got their spotlight and overtook the industry as harbingers of Meaning. At this point I was in school for game programming and the ultimate feeling of this period of Games Twitter was that the doors were closing fast. Blogs were being replaced by Steam as it got flooded with algorithmically sorted Democratized Content, Twitter was losing its reputation as a source for selecting Good Works other than what would drive discourse, and institutional awards were losing their sway as their judging processes became more business focused. The number of people making and supporting games was increasing, but the diversity of subcommunities and the attention spans around games were not.
The reality of the scene hit my teammates and I as we were about to graduate from Depaul University's game development program. Even if we were to win a student award, the odds of making something that would sustain us were slim, and while the attention that videogames were getting was increasing, the job market was not. As we poured hours into our final student project, it was hard to escape the feeling that a brief window of favorable institutional affordances had just closed. In the end I think that work paid off and we made something we were all proud of, got minor recognition in some of the spaces we respected, and went our separate ways in the world. In many ways, we were incredibly lucky; each of us found a job at least adjacent to what we'd studied.
That period of intense reflection with my team and classmates continues to frame my desires for community. Would we have been better off if we had "made it in?" The past 3-4 years have sometimes felt like standing on a dock, watching the ship we'd intended to board begin to sink beneath the waves. There have been continuous cries of "indie apocalypse" but that description feels a bit too hubristic to fit. "Indie" games’ most coherent goal, much like Indie Music, was ultimately to scale up, not to draw in. Beyond the obvious flattened aestheticization that can be seen from the works put out by notable indie publishers, the creative communities that networked their way out of Twitter similarly formed their insular circles and moved on. The local scenes and spaces that acted as an extension of the overflow of energy online have since hollowed out, both because Twitter socialization encouraged people to leech energy from the successful and because burnt-out early indie developers had nothing left to gain. The question that lingers for me as those places fade away is "Where do I go now?" The clearest path always seems to lead back to Twitter.
As I scroll through thousands of Takes that read identically to ideas from a decade prior, it's hard not to look back on the games industry in the 2010s as one of the primary victims to the intertwining of social media with professional life, the virtualizing of artistic communities and the subsequent divestment from physical space¹, and the collision of Capitalist Realism with platform network effects (“Twitter sucks but there is no alternative”²). Meanwhile videogames feel like they're stalling formally. While accelerating in importance they’re also at a peak in their mundanity, and writhing at the heart of their creative community is a platform that decomplexifies and pits all who enter against each other. Twitter’s assertion to the games community at its onset was that videogames are made by individuals for individuals. But without anchors of interdependence this lonely ethos begets a culture of self-service and a loss of the perspective essential to solidarity. The struggle of our next decade must be the pursuit of new models of community that oppose the forces of platforms like Twitter, otherwise their creativity-stifling influence will continue to compound.
¹ https://www.8ball.report/p/gamerbait
² It's easier to imagine the end of games than the end of games twitter