Indie-viduals: Videogames' Hegemonic (Re-)Production Culture

This DiGRA 2018 extended abstract, authored by Lars de Wildt and Stef Aupers of KU Leuven, examines whether independent game development escapes the commercial conformity of the AAA industry or instead reproduces its dominant conventions, with a particular focus on how religion is represented in games. The authors open by framing games as a major cultural industry marked by risk-averse investment, homogeneous content, and a narrow range of protagonists, and they contrast this with the countercultural promise long attributed to indie games, which emerged alongside accessible development tools and digital distribution platforms.

The study is based on in-depth qualitative interviews with 27 international developers drawn from varied religious and non-religious backgrounds, including agnostic, atheist, Protestant, Catholic, Sunni Muslim, and Germanic Pagan designers. Its central finding is that indie development often mirrors rather than departs from established conventions. Non-religious developers tend to draw on stereotyped religious imagery, such as priests who heal simply because they are priests, as narrative shortcuts, while religious developers report difficulty finding room for their own convictions in their work. The authors argue that game design has become a universal language of tropes rooted in North American and Japanese development culture, which frames religion as commodity, conspiracy, or fantasy.

The paper identifies five mechanisms sustaining this reproduction: the universalized origins of design logic, a Eurocentric and fantasy-inflected depiction of religion, the narrative efficiency of familiar tropes, social taboos around designers expressing religiosity publicly, and the perceived economic safety of catering to a presumed secular gamer audience. The authors conclude that independent production, despite its rhetoric of individuality, remains constrained by precarious economics and conforms to a standardized design language, offering empirical support for neo-Marxist accounts of cultural hegemony under capitalism.