Well, we're here at GDC 09 in sunny San Francisco (sunny but cold!), and while things may have been overshadowed by the Big Name Announcements, earlier this week I spent a productive morning lurking around at the back of some sessions that are part of the Independent Gaming Festival arm of the Conference.

While everything here is interesting to the right sort of person, there was one session that had a little something for everybody. (Well, everybody interested in Indie Games, which is everybody, right?) It was the Indie Games Rant. Over the course of an hour, twelve independent game developers got up and ranted about something - anything - to do with independent gaming. The results were as varied as the developers, covering topics as varied as "Games as Art" to auteur theory, humour in games, ethics of game development, the benefits of making a demo, and even one gentleman who decided to see if he could write a game in five minutes.

Everybody is always told that while you should lead with a strong argument, you shouldn't give up all your cards too quickly. I have to admit that my thoughts on the first speaker, Heather Kelley was that the Rant organisers had made a mistake putting her on so early. Heather gave a presentation about a game idea she'd had a few years ago called Lapis, "a magical pet adventure and a stealthy primer on female sexual pleasure." Obviously I can't go into too much detail here (although it was really fascinating and something I'll be researching further), but it was a fascinating, brief, chat about the opportunities that are there for game developers who want to explore the concept of sex in gaming.

Following on from Heather was Mark Johns, who has designed the charmingly-titled Shit Game ("Part of the idea was to make a glitchy game where the glitches became gameplay elements that you had to master"). He spoke on the inevitable topic - Are games art? - and referenced a discussion he'd had with Roger Ebert, an American film critic known for his firm stance on the topic, believing steadfastly that games are not art. The argument was made that, back in the day, if you had told someone that the "pornographic nickelodeon theatres" would become the leading form of art and entertainment for the next century, they wouldn't have believed you. Perhaps games are the new cheap, dirty theatres, and perhaps they will dominate the 21st century in the same way that film and television dominated the 20th. Apparently, Ebert accepted Mark's argument... but then went on to argue exactly the same anti-game rhetoric in his next interview. Ah well.

Up next was Steve Swink, game designer at Flashbang Studios, who had a few things to say about ethical game design. "You have a finite number of hours in your life, you want to spend them doing something awesome," he said. Game developers need to keep this in mind when they're working on projects, to make sure that their end product is "worthwhile", and not a waste of the gamer's hours. The question, of course, is how to define 'worthwhile'. Steve explained that he was recently nearly in a car accident, but "had played a lot of Counter-Strike", so he had quick reflexes and was able to get out of the way. Whether or not this is worthwhile is debatable, but he also referenced the fact that through playing Civilization IV, he knew he was better at strategic thought - creating an overarching plan and then working on the tiny details. Again though, this may not actually be worthwhile. Then, what about happiness? Is it worthwhile simply to make a gamer happy?

Changing topics completely, Chris Lobay from Infinite Ammo took the stage. He explained that he'd initially started studying at film school, making the shift to gaming later in his life path. One of his favourite things while studying was learning about auteur theory, which dictates that a film is considered to be the work of the director - and only the director. This is why we have "Hitchcock films" or "Spielberg movies". By the same token, we have "Will Wright games" or "Miyamoto projects" - which is an adaptation of auteur theory onto video games. However - all of these auteurs came about in the relatively early days of games development - there are no big ones that have come out recently (although there are some independent people making waves - such as Jonathan Blow and Dylan Fitterer). The natural response to this is the slight expansion of "auteur", to also encompass a small team, rather than just an individual. "There is something to be said about small developers / individuals," said Chris. When a game is developed by such a small team, the end result is always going to reflect the creators' very personal opinion - and even when that person's opinion is different to yours, it's still going to have value. Hopefully this trend continues and the recent "huge boom" of independently-designed games created by a single person or a small group will keep bringing these personal opinions to the masses.

Erin Robinson is currently working on indie title Puzzle Bots, and spent her five minutes talking about humour in games. She pointed out the recent Bootleg Demakes competition run by The Independent Gaming Source - essentially "unofficial remakes of games made to look as if they were created on older hardware." Erin's own entry to the competition was Little Girl in Underland, also known as "Soviet McGee's Alice", full of broken English and "thinly veiled criticisms of consumer culture". She asked - if we can make such funny entries for a competition, why aren't "real" games reaching the same lofty heights? The closest we may have gotten so far is Little Big Planet, which takes a sock puppet and dresses him up as Evel Knievel (the next question: how on earth can we surpass that?!). Also referenced was the recent Cooking Mama drama, which saw animal welfare group PETA creating their own flash application based on Mama's culinary skill: Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals. According to Erin, the funniest part of the whole story? The fact that publishers Majesco wrote an open letter addressing the parody, taking the time to point out that their fictional character cared about the feelings of imaginary animals. "Now that's funny."

As you may expect from the team behind The Path, The Endless Forest and The Graveyard, Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn from Tale of Tales took a slightly different approach to their presentation. Their "meditative, conceptual rant" was all about defining what "independent" means, when it comes to games development. What are the developers independent of? Publishers? Pets? Life? Money? Morality? The President of the USA? ...it may not have contained any answers, but it certainly posed a lot of questions.

Kellee Santiago is considered a bit of an indie games "rockstar", thanks to her involvement with thatgamecompany, and their releases flOw and Flower. She took a slightly different approach to Mark Johns, taking us for a moment into a world where games are considered art. "The Kardashians are not what the founders of tv were expecting," she said - explaining that while television started as such a wonderful, creative entity, it's now dissolved and become an almost destructive force, honouring and rewarding superficiality over creativity. She continued, pointing out that now is the time to work out where we want games to go. We're at the birth of the medium - and that's something that doesn't happen very often.

Two developers from Metanet were up next, with Mare Sheppard explaining the importance of making a demo for your game. Many people choose to make a trailer, rather than a demo, thinking it'll create the same buzz - but according to Mare, this is a bit cheeky, even a bit manipulative, as the developers can simply package up the best bits of the game, polish them up and present it in a neat package. A demo, on the other hand, show's what's really there. While there are pros (small, raise awareness, promote sales) and cons (more time/cost, challenging, the risk of giving it all away) for the developer - there is no downside for the consumer! According to Mare's calculations, the benefits outweigh the negatives, and everybody wins!

Her colleague, Raigan Burns took a moment to ponder "cool stuff that somebody should be doing". It's a well-known fact that 3D artwork is hard. Raigan suggests that maybe devs should try using artificial, novel constraints.

• Perhaps... use nothing but boxes! A game that's used this mechanic is Rumble Box, which sees defeated enemies reduced to simple blocks (like in a ball-pit), which stack up as you play.
• Another idea... use non-photographic rendering, more than just cel-shading! Something like NPRQuake, which takes the original Quake, rips out the "drawing guts" and replaces them, creating a minimalist game comprised of very sketchy images, or a blueprint-effect.
• Or else... play around with post-processing! Experiment with something that takes the images from the game and does something totally different with them, rather than just slapping bloom and tone-mapping on top. Something like Textmode Quake, which feeds all the graphical information into an ASCII generator, reproducing the whole game in a text-only window. Quake can look a little muddy, but a game specifically designed for this effect could really take advantage of what's offered by the process.

The penultimate rant was presented by Phil Fish, who cut a dashing figure complete with eye-patch and yellow ensemble. Apparently, the dog ate his homework his computer exploded, taking with it all his notes for today's rant. Instead of one he prepared earlier, he called to the floor for requests. After filtering through a couple of unsuitable suggestions, he went off on a tangent about how "the IGF is broken". To be considered "indie", a game must be two things - self-funded, and it must be "in the spirit of indie games". Obviously, this is a little tricky to police, or even define. This year's award nominations included PixelJunk Eden, created by a Sony-contracted studio, including the guy who created Star Fox! Should they really be in the same field as the student who's been working on his creation alone in his basement? According to the "definition", then they're the same thing - but is that really fair? What does this mean for the industry? (It's worth noting that Phil was actually interrupted here by a member of the IGF, who pointed out that Q were not the biggest dev team in the award nominations, and that there were more than 20 smaller teams nominated as well. While that doesn't really answer the question, it's a little reassuring that most of the entries were created in what's seen to be the 'true' spirit of Indie.)

Finally, Petri Purho. He won last year's Seumas McNally Prize for Crayon Physics Deluxe, and is well known in the development industry for "rapid game prototyping". Today, he decided to take that to extremes - figuring out that "the awesomest thing I could do" was to create a game, live on stage. In five minutes. After crowdsourcing ideas (which took two minutes of five), he set to work on a concept he called "Peggle with rag-dolls". He did of course come prepared with a library of tools and a game engine/framework... which crashed the first time he ran it. Second time though, it ran smoother, and Petri thrashed away at the keyboard, adding "bipeds" and other game elements... time was running out quickly as he typed, mistyped, corrected, tested and eventually produced a 'game' that involved dropping a ragdoll body from the top of the screen, hitting pegs on the way down before crumpling at the bottom of the screen. The crowd went wild.

And there we have this year's Independent Games Rant. It was a fascinating discussion, with some ideas that stuck with us for the remainder of the Convention. Of course, sticking a bunch of random developers in front of a microphone may well be a recipe for disaster, and there were some 'delicate' moments in this year's presentation - but - I for one would really like the Rant to return in 2010. Who knows, they may solve the problems of the universe, in five-minute blocks.