# on book covers and indie games with bad ideas to consider the initial underlying premises of / ideas behind most indie video games as weak anaemic uninspired and generally flimsy this is hardly a major revelation - if one believes in the accuracy of theodore sturgeons estimate about the amounts of pre existing crapola while it's impossible to gage the success or failure of an indie game from planning notes and conceptual outlines - perhaps it's wrong to only think the proof of a game lies only in the playing rather than in the planning developers should reconsider the exact point at which they're actually playing a game; perhaps it's more fuzzy and broad than they think if one write outs the premise of your game in a single sentence and it already sounds wack then something's wrong - but what? yes it's entirely possible to have a weak premise and a good game; anyhow what makes an indie video game so different so appealing? despite speed and technological efficiency / findability it's still uncertain just how easy it is to truly find good games i was in a popular mainstream bookshop in town at the weekend; standing in the sci fi / fantasy section was a young potential author talking to ir friend about the importance of having good book covers - nothing about the ideas expressed in and through ir book mind you - but simply the need to have an attractive seductive front cover to pull in the punters unfortunately while the vast majority of the books in these shops look amazing - the underlying ideas they're (/supposedly) based upon are not worth a second glance at the cover indeed these book covers are often incredibly well designed are beautiful and enticing in inexact inverse proportion to the human meaning weight and importance of the ideas in the book itself you say "wow what a cover" - and then you read a couple of random pages - and quickly discover it's just another romantic story of middle class picnics up at the big house; light breezy and brainless in fact the modern bookshop is more just a cynical front cover distribution warehouse than a soul warming place of literature and imagination where simply selling the idea of a book is more important than anything in the book itself it seems the same is happening with indie video games; while ir graphics and art have rapidly evolved the ideas from which they draw are often ones from culture.. and are thus often hopelessly conservative and antiquated by ideas one doesn't mean the arbitrary set of elements one throws together to make a game - rather what is being said? it's not that the world doesn't need another cute indie side scroller - perhaps the world doesn't mind either way - but (..] // republic of bob