I wrote this for a comment on Indie Statik but figured I might as well post it here too where it won’t simply be buried. Who I am and why I play indie games:

I’m a 25 year old graphic designer living in Brooklyn, NY. I don’t know exactly when I became obsessed with indie games and indie development, but it was probably around the time that Super Meat Boy was getting close to release that I knew I wanted more.

I think my fascination with indie games comes from the desire to relive some of those gaming experiences growing up. I relate Super Meat Boy for example to the first time I played Super Mario; the skill that Meat Boy demands from me now is more or less equal to the skill that Mario Word demanded from me when I was 4 yrs old.

Plenty of indie games are on a way more personal level than modern AAA games, which is a big part of the appeal to me. It’s kind of hard to pack anything truly personal into a game made by teams of dozens of people rather than a game made by a single person (or a small team).

As a designer, the desire to create and my experience with indie games has led me to try and create me own games. I can’t code, but I make my own assets and throw them together in construct 2 or gamemaker. That’s kind of how I see the core indie gaming community, a bunch of people who just love to play games made by people who love to play games; and then every once in a while a few of those people realize, “Hey, these 2-3 guys made this entire game all by themselves, I can make something this awesome.” So the indie gaming scene is seeing all this continuous growth.