On One’s Own is a column about, you guessed it, independent gaming. The wayward wanderings of DIYGamer’s James Bishop might lead to probing art, gameplay, design, reception or a number of other aspects related to independent games. But you can rest assured that all things indie will be carefully considered on a weekly basis.

Indie games are fun to play but, more than that, they are interesting to look at. This might sound trite and a bit underwhelming, but the fact of the matter is that a game that looks good and appeals to our senses is therefore more likely to be played. Unfortunately, what many these days consider to be pleasing to the eye is merely a constant race for the highest quality, best definition and the better number of… well, everything. The struggle for high-definition is one that large, corporate developers and publishers fight on a day-to-day basis.

Even back when Mega Man was first released, it was on par, if not exceeding, the expected graphics at the time. While, technically, Kirby’s Adventure or Super Mario Bros 3 might be the most colorful and best uses of sheer computing power from the time of the NES, Mega Man was pixelated, bright and just unrealistic enough for a man with a light bulb as a head to be used as a boss. Part of the allure might have been the challenge but hand-in-hand with that was always the art design.

This is why for Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10, direct descendants of their old NES relatives, both utilize those same characteristics. One of the interesting conundrums, however, of these releases harking back to the franchise’s beginnings is simply why? Why would Capcom go back and put out a genuine sequel to a game with NES-era graphics? Especially now?

The answer almost certainly rests in the continued prominence of indie games. Indie games continue to sell well despite constantly getting the short stick on graphics. Many of what gamers seem to consider the best indie games have incredibly simplistic graphics. Partially, this is due to budget concerns but is also linked to the rise of minimalism in gaming.

Minimalism, like so many styles of art, is hard to define. Thank goodness for dictionaries! Essentially, minimalism is a style wherein the artist strips whatever they are creating down to the absolute bare-bones essentials. Illusions, decoration and what mostly amounts to fluff are thrown out the window. These kinds of designers look for the bare necessities, those simple bare necessities. (Must… resist… Disney joke.)

Another fairly recent title from a bigger publisher to head down the rabbit hole of minimalism is Echochrome, the 2008 title published by Sony for both the Playstation Portable and the Playstation 3. Echochrome utilizes an engine called the Object Locative Environment Coordinate System, which is just a fancy way of saying that it determines what happens in the game based on the current camera perspective. Depending on how you have the camera view titled, different things might happen on the screen.

Tilted one way, your character will start walking and then end up on the ceiling when you tilt it back. Overall, it is a very confusing experience and obviously reminiscent of M. C. Escher’s artwork. But while the gameplay is a bit confusing, the artwork is incredibly simple. The character you control is pretty much what many designers might first craft in order to place a more recognizable skin on. It’s basically a skeleton. The areas you walk around on? Platforms created by straight black lines with white interiors.

These kinds of games do not have huge art budgets; they don’t need to send out casting calls for voice acting and any number of other more traditional elements are completely thrown out for what they might call the essential experience. Echochrome is a puzzle game where a wire character traverses different platforms at different angles. Mega Man 10 is a platformer where you run, jump and blast your way to the final boss. They both have roots in the simpler times of gaming but the reason they have come to light most recently is the prevalence of this style in games that do very well and cost very little: indie titles.

Part of this has to do with limitations, of course, but at some point a designer has to actively decide to use simplistic graphics. Somewhere along the line, thatgamecompany decided that Flower would only use the controller’s tilting functions to simulate the movement of the wind on the petals. It’s true that the limitation is sometimes forced, like with Jason Rohrer’s Passage, but the majority of the time it is left up to the developers… who then typically choose to be simplistic as a cost-cutting measure.

But the reason that the art of indie games work so well, and why bigger publishers are starting to pick up on this too, is that removing a number of defined elements allows the player to construct an environment of their own choosing. This may not make a lot of sense at first, but then think about how a piece of fiction might use understatement. The things that we do not know, cannot know or are not told tend to be the most important part of the experience.

They leave it up to our imagination. Of course, it’s a fine line between imaginative and dull. Most games rely on gameplay to keep the experience fun just in case the art, at least in this way, fails. That is not to say either one is more important than the other, just that the essential gameplay and art work together to craft the experience. Both are understated in an attempt to make you extrapolate further meaning. At least, this is what a number of designers do.

A number of other designers, however, take the same approach as Capcom and Sony have taken. They see this return to an older style of graphics and, logically, conclude that this is a return to the roots of gaming and what some might think of as a “retro revolution” of sorts. In reality, the original thought of some indie developers has been photocopied so many times that it has lost all of its artistic meaning and depth. Not all indie games work this way and certainly not all of them are good. Sometimes, indie is actually just a moniker for a cheap production by one guy that doesn’t mean much of anything.

It is the games that do mean something, that stick to this original emphasis on minimalist principles, that are the best indie games. It doesn’t really matter if they’re popular or if they sell well (although their developers would like you to support them, as would I) but only if they cause people to well and truly think. That’s what any good book, game or any other piece of art will do: stimulate thought.

In a lot of ways, the divide between mainstream games and indie games resembles the difference between those seeing shadows and the freed prisoner in the Allegory of the Cave. In this ancient allegory, people are born strapped to a wall so that they see only shadows being cast from a fire behind them and hear only echoes from the noise above. They come to believe that shadows and echoes make up the sum of the world, as it is all they have seen and heard. The shadows are reality versus shadows being a reflection of reality and so on.

At some point, one prisoner is freed and comes to learn the truth of the situation. That prisoner then attempts to inform those still trapped to the wall about what it is the freed one has learned but those still kept prisoner see only shadows. In a world where meaning is often deeply personal and hard to describe to another person, how can a person explain a meaningful reaction to an indie game?