ABSTRACT
This chapter frames the collection by offering a personal reflection on the authors’ path toward developing a distinctly ‘indie game studies’. The indie scene is an empirical anomaly in the context of prevailing political-economic thinking about global media industries, and the serious investigation of this is critical for the development of the field of game studies beyond its singular focus on game objects and consumption. This position is prompted by the author’s own work tracing the development of the indie scene in Montreal in the late-2000s and the need to make sense of local cultural economic conditions for understanding game production. The chapter ends with some theoretical observations of the idea of cultural autonomy in the case of indie game studios and calls for further research tying empirical studies to traditions in cultural theory.
