The indie game And Yet It Moves was recently released on Steam and Greenhouse. It's a platformer in which you puzzle your way through the levels by jumping and falling, with the ability to rotate the world itself in four different directions. 

It's another example of the self-conscious formal invention that characterizes more and more indies. And its implications are pretty cool -- where "normal" platformers have you manipulating a body that is continually, perilously in danger, in this game the "body" is the combination of figure and ground. Where effective navigation -- platforming -- once required fluency with the given environment, here success requires fluency with platforming conventions. When can up become down? Which walls can effectively be turned 90 degrees to become platforms that can be jumped across? How can you fall gracefully, without dying? The shape of the world is not horizontal or vertical, like in other platformers, but essentially circular. You never can tell whether you end a level (by finding the exit door) in the same orientation as you started it.

In other words, your sense of what is in danger is not the imperiled body amidst the platforms, but rather your ability to keep body and world both in the proper upright position until you find the exit. To draw out the metaphor, it's as if your own, real body is trying to find its feet in this flat, foreign world. Ultimately the game might be read as a sort of platformer sim. What would it feel like to be a 2D figure in a flattened space, where up, down and forward were the only dimensions that made sense? Kind of like playing And Yet It Moves. The game's surfaces even appear to be made from shreds of photographs, like the woods in my childhood backyard were mashed into a single plane.

My one small gripe with the game is that its paper cutout aesthetic does not quite match its twee electronic soundtrack. The website emphasizes the handmade quality of the game, but it's one too many signifiers of DIY creativity. Ditch the artistic aura, and you're still left with that elusive artistry, with mechanics becoming metaphor.

The above screenshot, released with the announcement that Volition will be including the "ostrich hammer" as an unlockable weapon in Red Faction: Guerrilla, throws the rest of the game's earthy (well, Martian) brown tones and sci-fi lego boxes into painfully sharp relief. Volition got the idea for the weapon from a NeoGAF photochop that pokes fun at the game's dead-serious portrayal of Martian revolution. With the ostrich hammer, you can smack people in the face with the ostrich's belly as you swing the bird around by its unfortunately long neck. It's the deadpan, realistic portrayal of ostrich hitting armor that makes it work. This is the first time I've noticed people actually becoming excited about something in the game.

There needs to be more of this absurdity in games, and less sci-fi geek wish fulfillment. Shouldn't photorealistic graphics make the prospect of ludicrous, surreal worlds all the more tempting? Apparently not, since what we often get are boneheadedly literal transpositions of ideas that are already cliches on paper.

Can Volition explain the ostrich hammer? Does it matter? I think that internal consistency negates creativity. A toothy, reptilian, bipedal alien strapped to a portable cooling apparatus makes all too much sense in the Resistance 2 backstory. In contrast, in DOOM II, demons from Hell meant skeletons with rocket launchers strapped to their backs and obese dudes with gatling guns for arms. That was cool, though people raised an eyebrow even back then. Consider the subtle, but significant, transition from Half-Life to Half-Life 2. In the former, white-coated zombies and bullsquids made up a new vocabulary of scientific terror. In the latter, robots became a much more common sight, and headcrab biology became something we could write about. It seems that the better graphics technology becomes, the more pressure is felt to draw creatures and situations that might be feasible in the real world. Reality is the dream. That's boring :(

Unlike other visual mediums, videogames practically coerce their audience into believing them. Still images rely on illusion; cinema relies on continual forward movement. Games appear to react to us, so we can't help but react in return. But they're far, far behind other mediums in appreciating the uncanny, sublime, and morbid qualities of the body. For all their gore, can any single act of violence in games echo in your mind like Bunuel's eyeball-cutting scene?

I want my expectations to be disrupted more. I don't want to just play out my fantasies. I want to do things I have not imagined. This probably isn't going to happen in a seamless, internally consistent world. Compare two videogame mashups, Eat Lead and ROM CHECK FAIL. The former had 500% more graphical firepower and 1/100th the imagination. The latter exploded your mind with the simple technique of juxtaposition.

That said, I'm excited about the following screenshot of Beyond Good & Evil 2 -- one instance where photorealism may actually heighten, not dampen, the game's uncanniness. (Plus, there's that desert backdrop, which looks like J.G. Ballard's Vermilion Sands.)

For all their underdog charm, indie games are the ones with cool haircuts. The real outsiders -- the ones with the prickly personalities and odd smell -- are the serious games, the simulations that business, academic, and government instutitions use to train their noobs. John Teti and I wandered into the Serious Games showcase at GDC and did some toying around. Watch: In five years, these games are going to be all the rage.

Nintendo dropped by the office recently to do a live-action demo of Rhythm Heaven. Here's where our own Evan Narcisse's choral training was put to some good use.

Having played through 99% of the import, I can say that it's even better than this acoustic rendition. I hear they gave free copies of the game to everyone who attended Iwata's GDC keynote. T_T

(For a better-quality version of that vid, go here.)

I marched into Day 1 of GDC with the Crispy camera, intent to record everything. After a GDC staffer helpfully informed me that I could only record the first five minutes of each panel, my mission to "upload at least one video a day" became "just see as many games and people as you can before falling asleep." Here are my Day 1 scraps, starring the view from my hotel room, breakfast with news editor James Fudge, the Indie Rant panel, and some guy shooting a zombie (I mean Majini).

Here's the picture Keita Takahashi drew. As you can see, it doesn't look too much like me. I was wearing a tie, glasses and a lanyard around my neck. I'm not sure what I'm holding in my left hand. Is it a handbag? A bullhorn? A thought bubble?

My intent was to get Mr. Damacy to draw a character that wasn't the King, the Prince, Boy or Girl. Unfortunately I think my request for "something that isn't in any of your games" was interpreted as a challenge. Since Takahashi's games include virtually everything that exists (and some things that don't), his first impulse must have been to draw me, or a somewhat formless character with some of my attributes.

I should take a moment to thank the unlucky woman who agreed to translate for me. Many of us listened to Takahashi's talk by wearing headsets through which a simultaneous translation was being broadcast. This had a weird effect. Instead of Takahashi's own voice echoing through the packed conference room, I had a sweet-voiced translator speaking clearly and directly into my ear. It was like hearing Takahashi's subconscious, or having all of his meaning transmitted directly into my brain. I think all press previews for games should be handled this way, even if the dev team and PR staff could speak English. They'd be a lot more persuasive.

Jonathan Blow's "Experimental Gameplay Sessions" today made one thing clear: Gaming's having its modernist phase. Every game we saw attempted to deconstruct a gaming mechanic or trope. Examples:

The Unfinished Swan -- vision. FPS where you have to feel your way blindly through the world by painting its invisible surfaces black.

Where Is My Heart? -- visual coherence. 2D platformer that splits your view of the level into fragments, like a bank of poorly aimed and sometimes overlapping security camera feeds.

Shadow Physics -- dimensions. 2D platformer whose surfaces are created by the shadows of 3D objects that you manipulate.

Miegakure -- physics. 4D platformer where the fourth dimension is not time, but space (this one temporarily shorted out my brain).

Spy Party -- perception. Spy/counterspy sim where people's observed behaviors tell you how to proceed.

Today I Die -- reality. Puzzle game centered on a poem that changes the world as you change its words. (His previous game Fate screwed with linear narrative, letting you see and manipulate the beginning and end of the story.)

Achron -- cause-and-effect. RTS in which you and your opponent continually send units back in time to turn the constantly shifting tides of the battle that hasn't yet happened, with the help of a timeline that shows when events happened.

Closure -- shadows. Puzzle-platformer whose surfaces only exist if they're lit.

ROM.CHECK.FAIL -- signifiers. Retro-themed mashup in which characters from different game worlds collide.

Spelunky -- death. Like all roguelikes, death and rebirth in this game aren't necessarily failures, but part of the process of exploration.

The level and range of invention here is pretty staggering. But two other presentations stood out to me: Flower and Noby Noby Boy (discussed in a separate panel with Keita Takahashi). These are both games that push the boundaries of what we consider games, and what we think they're capable of.

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Flower, as you probably know, is a game in which you're an incorporeal avatar that soars freely through vast outdoor environments. According to Jenova Chen, the team started with one goal: make a world of peace and harmony. Then Sony wanted depth and challenge, so they tried out mechanics like blowing a seed to land in certain areas of the ground, giving you the RPG-like ability to attain and use special powers, and having you deposit petals in collection orbs that would fly to checkpoints. Then the designers realized all this "hard fun" -- the challenges and rules of games -- were at odds with their original goals of peace and harmony. So they decided to ditch them.

"Hard fun" is a concept we're all familiar with, and it's the raw material that the games listed above work with. In general, videogame challenges have either been physical (reflexes in platformers and shooters) or tactical (inventory management and battle in RPGs; things that Tom Chick plays) in nature. In these new games, challenge is conceptual as well: Can your mind piece together the world of Where Is My Heart? Can it work out the intricate dimensional folds of Miegakure? Can it switch freely between 2D and 3D in Shadow Physics? Can it come to grips with the high probability of failure in a roguelike such as Spelunky?

thatgamecompany decided to forego these aspects completely in order to preserve the emotional tenor they'd begun with. Traditional game challenges (and by extension, new conceptual twists on those challenges), they concluded, couldn't be reconciled with a feeling of peace. I can't blame them -- there's a recursive element to the way games like Miegakure and Achron are offering new modes of gameplay, questioning and reinventing only how past games (a couple used hacks of Super Mario Bros. to demonstrate new mechanics) have played. It's a way of looking back in order to fill in the gaps in what can be explored. Flower doesn't have that kind of self-consciousness. You don't need to know anything about the history of games to understand why you should care about it (in contrast, I don't think I was alone in wondering "would I really want to put myself through that?" about the other Experimental games, even if I understood the appeal).

This is what I see Flower doing:

Jenova and company ditched gameplay and focused on feeling. I have to wonder if the profundity of this move hasn't been a little overblown by a lot of people here. They're basically making art -- if using the rational, iterative process of design -- hanging on to an abstract emotion like any good musician or novelist or painter might do. Jenova even showed a line graph that charted the player's emotional response -- climbing tentatively upwards, then dipping low, then finishing at a comfortably high notch -- as he progressed through the game's levels. It's a refreshingly pure and clear-minded idea that you could apply to song, a book or a painting.

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There's an ironically scientific bent to the way Jenova and co. systematically approached, analyzed, and arrived at their very artistic game. I assume it's because they're game designers at heart. Meanwhile, Keita Takahashi, who has a background in fine art, approaches his games from a reckless outsider artist's perspective, the polar opposite of thatgamecompany's methodical climbing out of the box. He told us he'd been feeling increasingly constrained by the real world, like he was only taking part in systems. He wanted an experience that was pure in comparison. In making the chaotic and demented playground that is Noby Noby Boy, he said he wasn't attempting to make a videogame (let alone a formally innovative videogame, or a newly emotional videogame). He just wanted to make something fun. This is what I saw him doing:

Takahashi showed slides of gifts that he'd handmade and wanted to send to exceptional Noby Noby Boy players. If they tried to resell the gifts on eBay, he'd buy them back and keep trying to find them a permanent home. And he encouraged game-makers to ignore the industry AND the players -- and make games that each of them, personally, would want to play. For this artist, Takahashi's talk was inspiring and more than a little emotional. See, for him, the whole world's the game. And we can enjoy it all.

I wasn't expecting Wednesday's Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice award shows to play out like bona-fide award shows. I was expecting a low-key gathering in one of the convention center rooms, something akin to a spelling bee, where people would get called up to stand in front of the microphone and share some well-meaning but awkward words. Instead, this was a real show in a darkened auditorium with a host (Tim Schafer was scintillating as the host for the second half) and 'celebrity' presenters and award speeches.

What struck me were the little vignettes that played on-screen for the nominated games in each category. Clips for explosive games like Gears of War 2 and Left 4 Dead might well have been scenes from big-budget action films. Clips for many indie games, like Seamus McNally Grand Prize winner Blueberry Garden and Osmos, recalled the quirky humor and strangeness of short films and foreign animations. The music is as important as the visual style. The former games tend to be backed with sweeping orchestral soundtracks; the latter tend to favor twee electronics and chamber arrangements.

If you watch something like the Academy Awards there's often a sudden transition in feeling, when the awards for best animation are announced, from the weighty topics of 'serious' films to the frivolous fancies of cartoons. Likewise, one might think that a game like Blueberry Garden would seem a trifle compared to the likes of Gears 2. But the game's little beaked protagonist and wavy lines easily held their own against Marcus and Dom's HD brows when projected wide onstage.

I think it's because, for all their self-conscious quirk and style, these little games serve some seriously muscular gameplay. James Fudge and I trawled through the IGF pavilion this morning, catching sneak peeks of games like Zeno Clash, Machinarium, Night Game and Feist. I didn't get to play Night Game, but if it's anything like Nifflas' Within A Deep Forest -- and all signs point to yes -- there's a brutal, very physical platformer hidden beneath that twilight surface. I did play Osmos -- which involves click-propelling a sphere over and around obstacles -- and its calming atmosphere completely belied its tense, verging-on-chaotic, sometimes frantic gameplay.

That feeling of intense calm, the contradiction between what you see and how you feel, is an effect I'm not sure I've had in another medium. It's cool that even the sweetest image can squeeze your nerves.

Indie game makers ranted today. Their rants were on subjects like "Why you should make a demo," "What is indie?" and "The IGF is flawed [for accepting PixelJunk Eden because it's clearly not a bedroom work]." The latter was an impromptu rant given by an eyepatch-wearing Phil Fish (of Polytron, who's making the really excellent-looking 2/3D platformer Fez) that turned into an existential rant about what it means to be indie.

Fish's sentiment was this: I like being indie. But when I pause to consider the word indie, I no longer know what it means.

As an artist I think I can extrapolate on Fish's dilemma: I like the process of finding an idea. I like the risk and adventure that comes with following it. I like the commitment of pushing it into the outside world. Chances are, I like feeling like an underdog, because that makes the reward so much greater when my idea works. Not just for me, but for everyone.

"What's $100 [the cost of entering the Independent Games Fetival] to Q-Games?" Fish said. "It's like a fart, it's nothing."

Indie's a buzzword now, and it's not just because big companies like Sony are creating the buzz with (to use Gus Mastrapa's phrase) "fake indie" games. There's a buzz about indie because, for all its identity crises, the scene has clearly become aware of itself as a phenomenon. Unfortunately it's that indie (to misuse a scientific phrase) "phenome" that makes the scene want to examine and deconstruct itself in search of its defining qualities.

This happens a lot in small music scenes. There's a period in which the scene's creative fertility is at its max. The scene's creators interact and feed off of the energy and ideas of the collective. Then, seemingly overnight, there's a transition into self-awareness. This tends to dovetail with corporate awareness. There's then an attempt to define "rules" that preserve the scene's original spirit. (Take punk or hip-hop as broad examples.) There's an extended, never-ending debate about what's "real" and what's "not real" in the scene anymore. There's maybe a bifurcation, or a larger split, in which dissenting camps can keep on doing their thing while minimizing their interaction with each other. The "scene" moves forward as a sort of umbrella floating over its collection of sub-scenes and micro-scenes.

I don't know that all this fully applies to games. But I think two contradictory things about indie developers having existential crises:

1. Overthinking the future and romanticizing the past aren't great for creativity.

2. It's a very good sign that there's an indie spirit that wants to be preserved.

There's a thread in indie games, from You Have to Burn the Rope to Where, that acknowledges the medium's history while looking ahead, looking deep into murkier waters. That's what a true artform does, much more than it creates auteurs with personal visions. And where nods to classic games intersect with new gameplay experiments, that's where you can find a sort of gaming spirit that is finding its outlet. As developers argue over the value of what they do and how they do it, you can see their arguments hovering around this energy. As the divisions begin to lay out their boundaries in this scene, you can see the whole thing growing fitfully, but growing nonetheless.