For around a half year, I try to locate games that don’t fit within the “market” and - if I find them to be good - review them on my Blog.

I came to believe that there are many interesting works that struggle from a lack of attention. It is my believe that it would be worth to attempt to unite the different non commercial gaming communities and the various “lone wolfs” into a (at least loosely) connected, defined scene to allow mutual feedback, help, and allow us to detect each other among the zero-effort-projects and commercial players.

My idea is to establish the term Underground Game for such non-commercial games; the corresponding scene should be close to the free software/open source movement, and - so my idea - be open towards leftist politics but shut out right wing bigots for various reasons.

Here you’ll find a manifesto I created, if you want to dive in further (no ads, no tracking, no placed content - the blog is strictly uncommercial, so i hope this is okay - putting the whole wall of text here wouldn’t be practical): https://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/arcane_cache/2023/06/08/underground-games/

Right now, I’m druming in various smaller game dev communities and on mastodon. Would you have interest in partaking in such a community? What would be the right medium for a common channel in your opinion?

Greetings Valentin