Here's your challenge: determine which are more hipster, indie games or old-school renaissance games. By indie games, I am referring to narrativist/story games. These can largely be defined as those that came out of The Forge. By old-school renaissance, I mean those retroclones that attempt to reinterpret the original 1970s and 1980s versions of Dungeons and Dragons, as well as a few other less popular systems.

Here are the basic (stereotypical) pros and cons I can consider for each category.

Indie
Pro:
Many proponents (or at least, vocal proponents) talk down to "trad" gamers.
They're light on the rules, because, you know, rules are so yesterday.
There is a cloistering of the players.
Con:
You could teach your mom to play these games... well, most of them.

OSR
Pro:
It's retro.
The rules for role-playing are gone! That unshackles you from the rules!

Con:
Grognards are not hipsters by definition.

These are both too mainstream. But true retro is better. It was wrong in the old days, but you only thought that because you didn't understand it.

I may need some more weapons-grade facepalmium after seeing this thread...

Neither. True hipster games are obscure games from just after the era which the OSR is trying to emulate, when there was a sizeable glut of such things that never had the internet available to them, and thus never got beyond a handful of fans (usually from the one convention they managed to scrape up enough cash to get a booth at) before they went out of business or the makers got bored. As a result, the few remaining copies are hoarded by a small cadre that believes that, "The game never got a real shot, because the masses prefer their corporate-published gruel."

By comparison, OSR games are deliberate attempts to be derivative of the original corporate sell-out, which gets points for irony, but that's about it, while modern indie games, due to the effects of the internet, are still made with an actual idea of appealing to the foolish hordes.

OSR games. Indie games aren't particularly well known, and that's about all. They're small, which doesn't make them hipster, particularly when the fans want them to grow and are extremely unlikely to whine about "selling out". OSR games, on the other hand, tend to get pushed with an attitude of "games were real back in the day; old school gaming is the best; modern gaming has fallen." Said attitude is pretty much equivalent to "I liked the hobby before it was popular, but then it sold out", which is classic hipster. Indie games, having gone their own way, are more like the nerds who's hobbies are hated, who also hate hobbies that are more prevalent.

"What is your name? What is your quest? Is PBR a true hipster beer or a faux hipster beer!"

"What do you mean, African PBR or European PBR?"

"I... I didn't know there was a... AIEEEEE!"

"How do you know so much about PBR, my liege?"

"Well, one must know these things when one is King of the Hipsters. Now tell me more about earthquakes, sheep's bladders and Gygax-compliant D&D."

*clippy-clop* *clippy-clop* *clippy-clop* *clippy-clop*

But Dungeon World is an indie narrativist game that recreates OSR D&D stories!

The question explicitly asks which is the "more hipster", which implies a scale of hipstertude. Therefore the answers "neither" and "both" amount to the same thing, i.e. they are at the same point on the scale. "Both" is also definitionally incorrect, so it is reassuring that nobody has demonstrated their stupidity by opting for it, but I digress...

Indie games are the more hipster, by a factor of approximately pie.

Here's the thing...

There's nothing hipster about tabletop gaming of any variety. We're such a niche, we couldn't rise to the level of hipster-ism.

Steampunk costuming is *almost* hipster in that it is attempting to be the "cool kid" thing to do in the game geek world... but even that is too niche.

But really, I hate labels like hipster because people tend to use them to mean "a thing that I don't like that I intend to demean with a label....". Like "Conservative" or "Liberal" or "Socialist" or "Banker".

Can't we all just get along?


Ok, maybe bankers are truly evil.

Liberal wannabe hipster...

Er, I mean; sorry, it was--ow, my; hip!?