Interview with Kelly Wallick

To give a little background on my history in the game industry: I've been involved six or seven years, so for me the IGF was the pinnacle of achievement for an Indie developer, because it meant your peers recognized you, that fans recognized you, and it also meant becoming something larger than just a small thing you'd been working on on your own.

Since I started, it hasn’t changed much for me, aside from the fact that a couple years before I took over, there were times where I felt out of the loop, as there were games that I had never heard of, even though I was knee deep in the Indie game scene. I think some of that was coming from the style of jury selections and the work that Brandon Boyer was doing. It’s not that I disagree with it, but I think we have a different style of jury selection, and we run in different circles. I think it’s important to celebrate commercial successes, to celebrate successes within the Indie scene, and not so much have it be like, "What is the most obscure thing that we can find and lift that up." I like to have a balance of those two things.

I definitely worry about that, but I worry about a million things. I like to do the jury selections, and shape the direction of the IGF, by looking at who I consider well respected, thoughtful, passionate, and committed to the idea of the Indie community. Who are those people and how do I get them onto the juries? I am less concerned that this person is going to be able to look at an Indie game and pick the right game, and more concerned that they will be capable of participating in a nuanced and complicated conversation about what it means to be an Indie developer.

What does that mean this year? What does that mean for this category? What does that mean in the context of all the other things that have happened within all these different communities? We get people together to have that conversation essentially once a year.
The juries are like a summit of the people that I would consider to have the most interesting and passionate conversations about the state of the Indie scene, and then through those conversations, and through their selections, shape what gets nominated, is picked as finalists, receives honorable mentions, and what wins. I see the awards as representative of the conversations that happen during the jury selections.

I see it very much as that. In the last three years, if you look at the winners, especially of the grand prizes, those games do reflect the conversation that I've seen within the juries, and within judging, and everywhere else.

Very smart complicated people sit down and have nuanced thoughts, critiques, and ideas, and that's what I think makes IGF so great. It's built up such a reputation that people hold it precious. There are a lot of people who care very much about the Indie community, and I feel the IGF is a good reflection of that, and it gives an outlet to say, "Hey everybody else in the industry, hey everybody else in the world, this is what's going on, this is what's going on with the community, this is what's going on in games, and this is what's going on with Indie developers either artistically, commercially, or socially, or otherwise,"

Yes. There are definitely singular artists. That's an exciting narrative from a movie perspective. Minecraft was like that too; Notch was essentially a solo developer. That story has a lot of cowboy, American roots - you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you button down. The reality of the situation is that the games that blow up are lightning in a bottle. That makes it interesting in Indie Game: The Movie because it is so rare a situation. You’re right that idea also made it to mainstream, giving the impression that that’s what it's like when you make an Indie game.

I'm not saying that Indie Game: The Movie was bad, or that it did bad things, but around that same time, we ran the Megabooth in PAX East in 2012. It has grown into a community. How do we help each other? How do we support each other professionally? How do we support each other emotionally? How do we support each other financially? How do we make this sustainable, and welcoming, and tolerable for people?

There are people that can do it on their own, but I think that's a very rare and isolating, in some ways a sad thing. If you're by yourself like that, the whole reason Indie meetups are popular in different cities, is because you do spend a lot of time in front of a computer by yourself, you are very isolated working on this thing, and to get out is rejuvenating and important to the process.

I'm sure there is. It's in any entertainment industry, right? Things get democratized, through the internet, and through globalization, but then with that, you have choice paralysis from a consumer perspective.

To me it's less of a tension, and more of a balance. When I first started it felt like much more of a tension,  like anything that you were doing to provide somebody opportunity, also meant that you were denying other people opportunities. The industry has been maturing in understanding that there's merit to doing artistic work, and that everybody should have opportunities to get their game out there, and to make a game. But on the other hand, it is an industry that a lot of people sustain their livelihood off.

If you want to put your game out there, there are a million places that you can do it, so because there are things that are curated or limited doesn't limit your other opportunities. We would have this kind of early on with Megabooth curation where people saw us as a golden ticket. But getting nominated for an IGF award, or getting selected for a Megabooth doesn't guarantee anything. We are one of a pile of factors that can lead to success.

Yes, but another issue is the way games are treated in the mainstream. Music and TV are treated as serious grown up media where real serious people can be involved, and do real serious things. But games are still considered this silly thing that only kids do. There are millions of people playing StarCraft and League of Legends, and streaming, and there are billions of dollars in the games industry, and tens of thousands of developers. Then you still get some random person just being like, "Man, video games. Did you know?" That's what makes it into the mainstream consciousness.

On top of it, some people will declare, "well, I don't play games." Then they play a game on their phone for 10 hours a week while they're commuting on the train. In some ways the culture around being a Gamer, with a capital G, can feel very gatekeepy and scary. Some people who like to play Halo, or just run around and shoot things, will be like, "Oh, you aren’t really playing video games, if you don't wear a video game T-Shirt, and wear a video game hat, and also speak video game language."

I think Indie Game: The Movie gave a glimpse into what video games supposedly are like, but it showed a very narrow slice, of a very narrow slice, but somehow it made it past the games bubble, and fed into the narrative that society already has about games.
People have been making video games from the 1960s. How many years do video games have to exist as a medium, being a part of everybody's everyday life, before we to stop pretending that it's just this silly stupid thing that kids do?

For us it's great because the amount of freedom that I have, the fact that I run this company, and I sustain myself, and I've created entire eco-systems for people that make a lot of money, and make a lot of creative output. My background is in chemistry, I didn't have a background in this field, I was able to come in here and work my way up and exist in a playground essentially. I don't think I could do that in any other medium because there are too many people paying attention, too many giant systems, too much stuff. It is beautiful as it is, and it is a little nice that the rest of the world is not totally paying attention, but then reaping the benefits of the creative output that comes out with it, without meddling it too much.

Did you ever see the movie Mars Attacks!?

I think all the organizers kind of know each other, but the amount of time they ever spend in the same room is very small, because we're out running around, and organizing, and doing all these different things. There are definitely games that cycle between all of those festivals, there are games that exist within only one or two of them. I think they're interconnected, but they all serve specific purposes. Indiecade is very artistic, it’s basically going to a modern art museum, or something.

Going to BitSummit is more like a peek into a very hidden world of Japanese games, which are very private, and hidden, and subdued.

A MAZE. is like going to the coolest party in Berlin. It's all the New York hipster art kids’ kind of thing. Even the Megabooth has its own niche - we're cool, but still kind of nerdy. We always joke that our Twitter persona is like if Ned Flanders had Twitter. We're neutral, a little kind of like nerdy, but also consumer friendly, and commercially viable, but it still has the hip indie scene undercurrent.

IGF is, "Woo, you made it to the big time." There are places for everything. Wild Rumpus is another vibe, or Mild Rumpus if you're at GDC for that. There is a place for pretty much every kind of community, and every kind of game and if there's not, it gets created by someone.

I see it less now than when I first started in the Indie scene. When I was getting involved, there were some successful indie studios, but it was a small subset. Then people became more interested and wanted to be that lighting in the bottle, the next Minecraft. Then came the indie gold rush, where discoverability issues started to pop up, and tools like Unity, Twine, and GameMaker made it easier to make games.

That was the time I felt the most anger around the question of is indie. Since then, the people who rushed in for the sake of rushing in have fallen back out because it wasn't sustainable for them.

The people who have stuck around have a better understanding of the importance of making this sustainable so people that can make a living. Therefore, there is less of a desire to do gate keeping. For me, it has a lot to do with creative control. You have to have money, but just because you have money, does that make you more indie? To me it almost makes you less indie, if you came from a situation of financial privilege, and you're using that to assert the fact that now you are a true indie developer.

It's either that, or living in abject poverty, but we should not say it is admirable to sacrifice yourself to make your art. There are now many small funding opportunities, and also successful indie developers who have gone back and started funding things like Indie Fund. There are many private angel investors in the indie community, because people want to give back to help people that they understand are in a different situation than they were in.

For me it’s not about where the money is coming from, but more about creative control, attitude, community, and the vision you're trying to put out.

For the Megabooth it’s, "Do you in good faith consider yourself an indie developer?" Sometimes we have people email us, and I just had a meeting today with somebody asking whether they would be considered indie. When we get in those gray areas, we put it into the submission system, and we have the community of judges and jury members have that discussion. That's where the most interesting stuff is hashed out with questions like, "Oh, maybe this team was in deep, but they made a bunch of money on their first game, is their second game release still indie?” I leave that up to the pillars of the community to have that discussion, and ask what it represents to other developers. What message is this sending if we say no? Are we punishing people now for being successful?

I think that's always going to be there, and always going to be shifting. Even for the Megabooth, when somebody's getting publisher money, if they were published by the ESA, or EA, we would not likely consider that an indie game, but if you're getting funding from an indie source, or a government grant, then yes.

And when it gets in the gray area, we just give it out to the rest of the community and say, "Well, what do you guys think?"