Chapter 4. Indie Dependence: Diversity and Religious Conventions 4.1. Introduction In the previous chapter, I looked at one big company to see how and why religion is used to make commercially successful videogames. Outside of this ‘AAA’ context, indie developers make games alone or in small teams: the “art-house” equivalent within a billion dollar videogame industry (Warr, 2014). The discourse surrounding indies stresses originality, diversity and autobiography. Game designer and author Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters first articulated this discourse that developers: “outside of the mainstream have revealed much more [about ourselves]. They have shown us a new perspective through their unconventionality, their creativity. […] real diversity, a plethora of voices and experiences, and a new avenue for human beings to tell their stories and connect with other human beings.” (2012, n.p.) If indie developers tell “their stories,” this allows me to empirically study how they put their identities into games. In the context of this dissertation, it is valuable to look at the role of religious identity in independent (individual) game development, in contrast to AAA development. Particularly since religion and irreligion (whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim, atheist, agnostic, and so on)12 are defining parts of our histories and identities (Berger, 1967; Lorenz, 2008). Do independent game developers represent their own (ir)religious backgrounds in their games, and how and why do they (not) do so? To answer this question, I selected 35 indies to interview, from Australia, NorthAmerica and Europe.
With irreligious, I mean atheism, agnosticism and other kinds of rejection of or indifference to religious traditions. For this dissertation, ‘religious position’ includes irreligion.
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