Indie Game: The Movie

I watched Indie Game: The Movie on a Sunday afternoon when I was supposed to be doing something productive.

That coincidence was unhelpful.

Several unfinished tasks were open on my computer. I started the documentary as a break from work and soon found myself watching people whose inability to stop working made my own procrastination look almost healthy.

The film follows independent game developers through the long, unpleasant middle of creation: the part after the exciting idea and before the finished thing. There are bugs, deadlines, money problems, arguments, exhaustion and the growing fear that years of private effort will eventually be compressed into a stranger’s five-minute judgment.

I expected a documentary about games.

I recognized programming.

There is a dangerous moment in any personal project when the object stops being merely something you are making and begins to function as evidence about you.

At first, abandonment is easy. A small experiment can fail without meaning much. Then you spend enough evenings on it. You solve problems nobody else will ever know existed. You redesign parts that seemed finished. You delete weeks of work because the structure was wrong. Time accumulates inside the project.

Eventually criticism of the thing can feel like criticism of the person who spent that time.

This is irrational.

It is also common.

I once built a small application for no particularly important reason and delayed showing it to anyone because I kept finding details to improve. A button was slightly misaligned. One transition could be smoother. The wording of an error message bothered me. None of these flaws prevented the application from working.

The real problem was that finishing would remove my control over the audience.

While the project remained unfinished, every weakness was temporary. Once released, weakness became visible.

The documentary understands this fear.

Users do not know the history of a compromise. They do not know that a bug took three nights to find or that a feature was removed to save the rest of the system. They encounter only the present version.

They click.

It works or it does not.

They care or they do not.

There is a kind of cruelty in that simplicity.

Creative software makes the situation harder because technical success is not enough. A program can be correct and unwanted. A game can run perfectly and leave the player cold. Engineering asks whether the thing works; art adds the less answerable question of whether anyone feels anything.

The romantic story of independent creation is freedom. No manager. No committee. Build exactly what you want.

The documentary shows the hidden clause.

If nobody can stop you, nobody can tell you when to stop.

Freedom can produce a workday with no natural boundary. There is always one more improvement available, which means perfection becomes a horizon that retreats at exactly your speed.

After the documentary ended, the unfinished work on my own screen looked less innocent.

I closed one file and sent another project to someone before I could revise it again.

Nothing dramatic happened.

They found a bug.

That was useful.

Finishing, I realized, is not the point where nothing more can be improved.

It is the point where you accept that improvement must continue in public.