Specular Maps

Like comic books, video games hold a peculiar place in the public imagination. Closely associated with misguided youth, they’ve served as scapegoats for shortening attention spans, antisocial behavior, and violence. But there’s another persistent question—which comic books endured for decades—that now hounds interactive media: “Are video games art?”

The answer, of course, is “Sometimes.” At a time when video games earn considerably more money per year than Hollywood movies—and the biggest games have budgets north of one hundred million dollars—the industry’s top developers have grown similarly risk averse. But one doesn’t buy the latest Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed for a highbrow gaming experience any more than one goes to see Furious 5 for a profound evening at the movie theater. What’s happening in indie games—just as in independent cinema or small-publisher comic books—is generally a lot more interesting than the trends in mainstream video game production.

The past decade has been a golden era for independent games. Development tools have gotten cheaper and more accessible; console makers have opened up their digital marketplaces to indie developers; mobile gaming has evolved; and there’s a growing demand for diverse experiences and interactive storytelling. Also, there’s no denying the artistry of many of the projects at the vanguard of this movement. Jonathan Blow’s 2008 breakthrough Braid, which deconstructs Super Mario Bros.–style game play while examining issues of mortality and memory, set a high bar for artistic integrity. For an indie offering, it also made a lot of money, which helped open the floodgates. In the decade that followed, tiny development teams have reinvented many of gaming’s classic genres and delivered some profound storytelling, from the suspenseful and gutting 2013 masterpiece Gone Home to the subversive and hilarious 2017 platformer Night in the Woods.

As much as independent games have flourished in the past ten years, the most astonishing development might be in their soundtracks, for which a relatively small community of musicians—the vast majority strangers to modern pop music’s traditional model of album cycles, touring, and merchandising—has built an exhilarating, thriving, and often avant-garde musical universe in the shadows of the traditional music industry. Disasterpeace’s soundtrack for FEZ, and Lena Raine’s for Celeste, among others, aren’t great just “for game music”; they’re deep and groundbreaking electronic works that tip their hats to the lo-fi “chiptune” sounds of gaming history while building sonic cathedrals on top of them.

Often, these artists are trained in aspects of game-making. Many are programmers themselves, and most have functioned as sound designers in at least some capacity—creating the effects and ambient noises that accompany a game’s action. When...