It is my pleasure to announce that our special issue of the journal Loading on indie game development is now available and online. Indie, Eh? is a collection of seven articles and four discussion papers that begins to open up the indie game scene as fertile terrain for game studies scholarship. While indie game related papers have appeared here and there before this is the first integrated collection on the topic.
This issue is edited by Bart Simon with the generous help of Jen Jenson, Nis Bojin and Shannon Tienas well as G.P. Lackey and Saleem Dabbous of KO-OP Mode for the most excellent cover art. I also need to thank a whole slew of wonderful reviewers and of course our dedicated authors who worked hard to make this project happen. Aside from the publication of high quality, intriguing and engaged scholarship we had as our mission the goal of moving an issue from CFP to launch within six months. This is a nearly unheard of time frame for journal publishing but we wanted to prove it could be done and that journals are still the best venue for timely, collaborative and publicly accessible discussion for pressing issues in game studies. We also wanted to continue to open up the lines of communication between indie developers, gamers and researchers in the hopes of generating new avenues for future collaboration.
There is no doubt though that publishing something like this requires the enthusiasm and dedication of a whole range of caring folks and I am sincerely awed by everyone’s commitment to the issue. We hope you will enjoy and learn from the articles and we welcome all comments and ideas for how to progress the research on all things indie.
We also like to thank the Digital Labour project of the GRAND NCE, the TAG Centre and Concordia University for generous support in bringing this issue to fruition.