GameCrimes: Giving an English voice to the Spanish videogame scene

- This is a (slightly tweaked) re-post of the post "Foundation (part 1)" that was posted on Feb, 11 on our blog https://gamecrimes.wordpress.com. I've changed bits here and there to make it work better as an introduction for our project. -

I pretend to use this space to reblog those post from our blog that I think might be of interest to gamasutra readers. All of those post will be related to the spanish videogame industry in one way or the other. This one is a sort of introduction to the idea behind the podcast.

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GameCrimes is a podcast dedicated to interview Spanish developers and to help spread information about their works in English. We also have a companion blog and pinterest to provide further information, like crowfund projects, new releases and important developments within the Spanish community.

We have to start stating the obvious, yes, there have been Spanish videogames all along since the first Spanish-created published videogame Bugaboo (1983) up until now. Actually what it’s known as “the Golden Era of Spanish Software” is kind of coincident in time with the UK’s “Bedroom Coders” and shares its hobbyist origins. Then it faded away slowly, but there have always been Spanish videogames and developers around, so why start this now?

As we all know the indie games scene has grown a lot over the years and by now it has created several “generations” of creators and that is causing some inner tensions, with some people looking to pin the difficulty of being successful to the fact of the existence of an “indie elite” or clique. That got some arguments about it going on and eventually became a sort of an industry joke (the indie illuminati, later evolved into gaming’s feminist illuminati). The most interesting thing out of all that talking came as a re-examination of how it is becoming more and more difficult to make a living of being indie and how in some ways the access ladder is being pulled away (there was a Penny Arcade post about it done by Rami Ismail, but I’m unable to find the post online now. There are online answers to it tho).

– but there is a video! –

And even more interesting for us was the fact that this kind of internal analysis of the indie scene went further to look at how the scene is very English centric and there is a lot of people left out in the fringes due to language barriers (you can see articles about that by Rami Ismail here and Cliff Harris here.

One of the things you can criticise on those posts (and this is something that is even acknowledge by Ismail himself at the end of the video up there) is that they provide no real answers but just make the questions.

Our podcast (and site) is our answer.

Obviously it is not intended as THE answer, or even a complete answer. It only works for Spanish language and it’s far from complete as we only cover Spain’s developers. We would love to expand and cover Latin American devs but it’s better to start small and focused.

In short, we suggest that the best way to help non-English voices to get more exposure is to create projects that will help to build a bridge between the English speaking audience and the non English-speaker devs.

We’re sure this is not a novel answer and there are plenty of people doing exactly this. And we don't claim either to be able to cover the entire Spanish scene as it just has too many sides. But we can promise to try our best and be fair and informative and we're going to do that happily.

The problem so far is that as for the developers themselves, it is quite hard to reach the English crowd starting from scratch. We're trying to slowly build some awareness about our project and publishing this here, on Gamasutra is part of our effort in doing so. I hope this project will be interesting for a few of you, if so, please check our podcast/blog and if you think it is a good idea share it around as the Spanish scene is really waking up.

More about that soon!