Where are all the RPGs in the IGF? @ Sinister Design

If you follow indie games you might keep a close eye on the Independent Games Festival…you might also note we rarely have any coverage for it. Why? RPGs are rarely prominent in the IGF (and western ones even less so). Craig Stern from Sinister Design looks at this issue in a (very) lengthy post that examines a number of possible reasons:

This is a big one, so bear with me. By and large, the creators of the most successful IGF entrants picked one or two things that they wanted to do and poured all their efforts into doing those things really, really well. This is generally thought of as a good design approach, but in practice it runs counter to what we generally consider desirable in the RPG sphere. Among RPG developers, open-endedness and player freedom are highly valued. This has its roots in the traditions of the pen-and-paper RPGs that spawned the genre: we want the player to be able to go anywhere, make consequential choices, and play the game in a wide variety of different ways (a.k.a. “role playing”).
This means that your typical RPG features at least half a dozen distinct gameplay systems to suit a variety of different gameplay styles: item collection and management; crafting; dialog; stealth; combat; magic (typically with a number of different sub-specialties); character building (both in terms of creation and point allocation/skill tree navigation); and oftentimes, gambling (simulated with stat rolls, or via a full-fledged card or tile-based mini-games). That is a lot of stuff to have to do and do well; for a solo developer with limited time and budget, depth and polish can easily end up getting sacrificed on the altar of breadth.

More information.

And here is me thinking that "Anito - Defend a Land enraged" won at IGF in 2004 …

2004 is a few years ago …

I was worried it was going to be a sour-grapes type of post, but he makes a good case why the IGF is probably not the best venue for RPGs. It's not a "fault" of the IGF so much as a format incompatibility.

I don't care for the artsy type of indie games which is why I don't really pay attention to the IGF. They hardly have any winners that I'd be remotely interested in. The only game that won and looks like it might be fun n is Frozen Synapse and maybe Splunky.

The only thing I'm interested in is reading the entrants. I've found out about a lot of indies I didn't know about by going through that list. I couldn't care any less about who makes it to the finals or wins.