The Art of Independence – Presentation and Notes

Here are the slides (and my personal notes) from my Free Play keynote lecture. Being the keynote, the subject for my talk was pretty simple and to the point: “The paramount importance of independent games, and how they are crucial to games development as an art form.”

It should have been easy, right? Well, consider this: how do you tell the assembled artists and indie game developers making these games that what they are doing is art and important without it being condescending or obvious?

In the end I just dove in, added some stuff about founding Interzone (which is one big indie studio) and then threw in some extra business stuff to round things off. I went this way because most independent developers struggle with the money and project management far more than the actual code.

If you click here or on the link above you can check it out. If you turn off the pics it’s actually reasonably quick to load and fits everything on the page pretty neatly.

Free Play 2007

Free Play was fantastic. The panel discussion with Paul Callaghan and Jonathan Blow was very interesting, with several disagreements and some lively debate. It was great to have lunch with Jonathan and talk more about the intricate relationships of game design, martial arts and coding. I’m still convinced that we need to think more about narrative and games rather than giving up on them though Jon! It was also very encouraging to see groups of indy developers coming together after every presentation to talk about the ideas that were discussed and how they can be applied to their projects.

It was very interesting talking to some of the Next Wave organisers too; I really enjoyed the idea of a game conference as part of a wider series of art festivals and must write more on this at a later date. I’m hoping that Byte Me! will cover some of this ground but BEAP &/or Festival of Perth people please get in touch!