Frog Fractions

Indie Game: The Movie: The Paper - Documentary Films and the Subfield of Independent Games

This paper examines documentary films about independent game developers, arguing that such films play a significant role in constructing the cultural meaning of "indie" games, a term that remains ill-defined in both popular and academic discourse.

• The paper argues that documentary films about independent game developers play a significant role in constructing the cultural meaning of "indie" games, a term that remains ill-defined in both popular and academic discourse, drawing on Bourdieu's field theory and Fairclough's critical discourse analysis.
• The analysis rests on a corpus of four documentaries released between 2012 and 2017, selected for variety in subject matter, distribution, and release timing, and the author frames these films as contributing to the symbolic capital of independent developers and delimiting indie games as a space of heightened artistic value.
• The films consistently portray independent developers as passionate, creatively driven auteurs while casting major commercial studios in a negative light.

Well Played: A Seriously Weird Special Issue

The collection of analyses presented in Well Played: A Seriously Weird Special Issue explores the intersection of unconventional game design and the "Weird"—a thematic framework characterized by psychological dissonance, subversion of genre tropes, and the disruption of traditional player agency.