On One’s Own is a column about, you guessed it, independent gaming. Specifically, nothing specific. The wayward wanderings of DIYGamer’s James Bishop might lead to probing art, gameplay, reception or a number of other aspects related to independent games. He might even talk about general gaming as it corresponds to the independents! (Henceforth referred to as the Browncoats) But you can rest assured that all things indie will be carefully considered on a weekly basis.

If you were to ask your average gamer to name an indie game, they would most likely name one that has been brought to the marketplace sometime in the past five years. That might be generalizing a bit, but there’s truth in it. We, as consumers, are constantly bombarded by a steady stream of indie titles, which is in no way at all a bad thing. But what has suddenly gotten into us that we are paying so much more attention to indie games? Why indie and why now?

Independent games are not exactly new by any standards. There have been a great number of independent games developed since the introduction of the console era and before that the original PCs. They just were not what some might typically think of as independent. That Drug Wars game for your calculator that it seems like everyone played eight to ten years ago? Technically, that’s an independent game. There were a large amount of shareware games that made their rounds via floppy disk back in the day as well. But that is not what your typical gamer these days might associate with the indie game scene.

What, exactly, has pushed indie games to the forefront of the mainstream audience’s mind since then? Especially considering that it is not like they did not exist and then suddenly did. We’re not looking at an entirely new art form, it’s just more visible. Somewhat ironically, the answer lies in the exact same reason we ended up with gaming in the first place: the ever-onward march of technology.

It used to be that to reach a large enough audience to be even barely noteworthy, a developer would need to team up with a publisher that could then get them some marketing and retail space. This is, of course, a generalization again but the basic idea of it is there. If you were some no-name developer, without the backing of a well-known publisher, it was unlikely that you would ever see your particular box with those zany characters you worked so hard on ever see the fluorescent light of a store’s shelf.

But like any good tech person will tell you, progress will eventually find a way. Or maybe that’s the guy from Jurassic Park… who is, technically, talking about life. That’s what happened, though. Eventually, consumers as a whole outgrew the antiquated notion of buying things by going out and getting them. Call it Westernization or whatever you want, but we’d rather have someone bring things to us over purchasing them for ourselves. I mean, come on, that requires effort! It’s just so darn convenient to order something. Less expensive, too.

It didn’t take long for games to make the jump either. Once people started ordering goods of any kind from the Internet, it spread like wildfire to all different markets. You still had your huge publishers with the marketing budget to spend on commercials and other attempts to garner attention, but the word of mouth sensation that is the Internet can’t be stopped. In a lot of ways, the Internet is one big never-ending chat room. Even if you leave, there will be people mucking about on the tubes in some fashion. Think 4chan but even worse. Or better. Either way, there’s a lot more /b/ out there than anybody will ever admit. In any case, you can’t stop the signal and someone, somewhere, is talking about the newest indie game to come out.

This perceived renaissance in independent games is not simply because we have suddenly started making better games either. Sure, there are a number of great indie titles out there but the movement did not start with Flower or even Braid. These were just the heralds of the real reason. We actually have digital distribution to thank for the abundance of indie games that we now have at our fingertips.

Where we before may have needed to know a developer personally, or develop our own games, in order to get our hands on something that might truly be dubbed with the dubious honor of being ‘indie,’ now all it takes is a quick jaunt to the Xbox Live Marketplace or Playstation Store. Or WiiWare, if that’s your thing. All of these services, plus platforms like Steam, provide easy and immediate access to almost any game that a person could desire to play. With the ease of access, came an ease of publishing, thus the huge influx of what we refer to as indie games.

This, as stated closer to the beginning of this column, is not a bad thing in and of itself. The easy accessibility has led to the increased attention paid to all things indie, if not directly then at least tangentially. But the rise of the mainstream indie has also produced growing pains in the scene as a whole. The definition of what exactly makes a game independent has become broken and not easily explained.

As a recent example, The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom, a game released on Xbox Live Arcade just this past week, was originally intended to only be Matt Korba’s graduate thesis but was then picked up and published by 2K Play. With the rise of social networking sites, we’re also being inundated in an entirely new way with quick-start casual Flash games that many might, and do, classify as independent games. It is almost like a brand new world out there filled with hybridizations of all our old definitions. And that is why asking your average gamer what an indie game constitutes will consistently end up with varied answers. I mean, heck, even Mike Capps considers Epic Games independent.

Regardless of definition, it is clear that independent gaming has certainly hit its stride. More and more games seem to be coming out of the woodwork daily. Unfortunately, without clear guidelines it could all lead to disaster as well. But there is always hope for the future and as long as people continue to get together and share interesting ideas, there will always be changing definitions and new developers to inspect. And new developers mean new games. And I like games.