Viking ZX's article on "The Indie Hypocrisy"

I was alerted on Present Perfect's Fimfiction blog to this fascinating op-ed article by Viking ZX (known as Max on that site) entitled "The Indie Hypocrisy". It's well worth the read, as are the comments on his Fimf post plugging it. Yes, that's right: a Fimfiction comments thread contains considerably more signal than noise. It does happen occasionally!

The gist of this article is that there's an odd disconnect between the general feeling that indie games, indie movies and so on are great, and the general feeling that indie books are bad. Viking ZX even gives an example where indie books were slagged off in a thread devoted to praising indie games, and reasonably enough feels irritated by the inconsistency.

Various people in the comments (there and on Fimf) who know much more about this than I do have made some fine points, for example the general lack of trustworthy curation for indie books – but one that struck me particularly is one that most certainly applies to fanfic as well. Many people, including me, have made it before in various situations, but it bears repeating:

Assessing writing is time-consuming.

Glance at a picture and you can generally tell within a few seconds whether it's any good and, more to the point, whether you like it. Listen to a song and you probably won't have to wait much longer to form an opinion. But writing isn't like that. A few stories are so good they grab you immediately and never let go. A larger chunk are so bad you know after a paragraph that they're rubbish. But there's a huge slice in the middle where you'll need to spend, at the very least, ten or fifteen minutes seeing how things go.

There is a flip side to this, as ocalhoun mentions in the Fimf comments: writing has a really low barrier to entry. If you can string a few words together, you can publish a story. You're not going to be able to create and publish an indie game unless you have some idea of the fundamentals of programming and design. As such, it's much easier for rubbish to get published in writing. By fanfiction standards, Fimfiction's "write 1,000 words vaguely on-topic and in coherent English" is quite a high barrier, by virtue of being a barrier at all.

Several commenters express sadness that in the Big Wide World of Original Fiction there's nothing really like Fimfiction's community. If you're a voracious reader of ponyfic, how do you decide what to read out of the 100,000-plus fics on the site? In most cases, recommendations will be part of the mix. On the whole, these work fairly well – if a fic is plugged by several people, not all close friends of the author, that's usually a good sign. You might not like the story, but it's rarely objectively bad.

A number of the people commenting on Viking ZX's piece are Proper Writers, in that they write (or seriously want to write) original fiction and sell it to people who have never seen a pastel pony in their lives. But even from my point of view as someone without such ambitions who is comfortable in the easy world of Equestria, I still found it thought-provoking. There is a difference between how indie games and indie books are treated: to what extent does there need to be?