I’m going to run through the presentations. Unfortunately I don’t see any grand illuminating theme to what was going on here; as a self-organizing system, this conference lacked viability — no to say that there wasn’t some quality here, but in the space of cellular automata it is difficult to find the right balance of behaviors, to find the gnarl, as Rudy Rucker likes to say. If there’s not enough cross pollination, the system dies out. Too much cross pollination and you get too much talk, too much white noise.
Panel 1: Self-Organizing Processes
Jean-Pierre Hebert – Randomly generated Black Square art, which might be neither black nor square. As a formal, theoretical concept I can see where it has a certain charm; as a method of producing art it falls flat. Having computers create art falls into my “job for machines” category — a category for things like automated grocery checkout lanes and touchscreen cashiers at the movie theater, the all-too-Marxian automation of capital production. Computers don’t need jobs, and they don’t need your help to get jobs.
Charles Ostman – Yeow! Who invited the transhumanist? “Nanotechnology is here, today!” he shouts. Ostman is a fervid advocate for nano research, but that’s because he is a snake oil salesman for the nano industry.
Nathan Brown – Can’t remember what this one was about… oh, yeah, the IBM logo spelled out in atoms, and some post-post modern poetry. English department windbaggery.
Michael Dyer – An interesting analysis of the artmaking process, then subjected to some contrived theorizing about which artforms will be “taken over” by computer code in the near future. The pairing of Dyer and Hebert on the same panel was one of only two sensisble pairings of thematic material for the day.
Panel 2: Evolving Systems
Michael Chang – undergraduate from the UCLA Design | Media Arts department. An enthusiastic but otherwise badly informed presentation on cellular automata.
Casey Reas – Casey has spent many many months of his life being hypnotized by cellular automata and flocking algorithms. Hey, I like CAs too, but shouldn’t you, you know, do something with them instead of stare at them all day?
Brian Attebery – At the top of the conference, Hayles encouraged the panelists to present their work in the form of a rant. Attebery was the first to do so. I’m not sure what he talked about — though I think he said something about The Thirteenth Floor being a vastly underrated movie. There’s a terrible irony is this kind of ranting, the nature of which is left for the reader.
Kate Marshall – Critical reading of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Not having read this particulr work, I didn’t take much away from the presentation. Except that DeLillo’s most recent books are weighty and bleak.
Panel 3[4]: Cultural Worlds
Bill Tomlinson – Some shallow remarks about intelligence arising as a way to detect honesty/deception in primates. There are always problems with trying to connect cause and effect relationships to complex systems. While it is valuable to make observations about what people do, how communities interact, I don’t think there is much science to be found in blind speculation about their origins. Hm.
Colin Milburn – A nice presentation of “nano” in popular discourse. The people next to me were scoffing and giggling at this presentation. I think they were transhumanists.
Nicholas Gessler – one of the conference coorganizers. I think he was the one who mentioned “cultural algorithms”, which are similar to genetic algorithms except that agents have a shared memory of their environment. I’m not sure who the UCLA Human Complex System Program is, which Gessler is a part of. Sounds like windbaggery.
Simon Penny – Showed videos of two recent installations. The technological aspects of Penny’s work is always highly refined, working with camera systems, robotic controllers, and video projections. The installations themselves have an industrial feel to them, grim reminders of the dirt and steel you would never see on a movie screen. Art for machines.
Panel 4[3] – Emerging Minds
Dario Nardi – Does perverse experiments on his students, using things like Myers-Briggs classifications.
Brooks Landon – A rant about science fiction, much talk of brains. Landon’s idea of sciencce fiction is a little different from mine, he appears focused on the golden age, cold war stuff.
Rudy Rucker – Read a short story about patterned paint. The pairing with Landon was the second sensible pairing for the day.
Sue Lewak – Got into a bit of a scuffle with Ostman (the dread transhumanist) over an analogy of science to the collapse of Alice’s dreamworld.
Well, there you go, sixteen presentations summarized on the back of a postcard. I would that English students read books, and artists make art. Po-tee-weet.

To some, perhaps, independent means low budget or no budget. This definition attempts to find an analogy with the way independent films are financed, though it’s a bit confusing, since even a low budget independent film might have a half million dollar budget. At the very least, film production always has some cost for equipment and film processing. But why would the lack of proper funding make something independent in the computer game industry? It’s a young industry where the few successful genres are just barely removed from their poorly financed origins, and where many studios teeter on the edge of financial ruin on a regular basis. In comparison to the major film studios, who are able to bankroll a number of projects and can rely on fairly predictable revenues, almost all game studios are independent with regards to financial security.
Perhaps independent in distribution? Distribution of independent film parallels mainstream cinema; both are watched on screens, or rented on video and DVD, or broadcast. With the introduction of a web/downloadable subdivision in the IGF, distribution seems to be a significant distinction for independent games. But why not just make it the Downloadable Games Festival? Aside from how you obtain the game, the computer and peripherals are the same for both mainstream and independent games. (In this case, I would consider a game played on a non-traditional computer setup to be legitimately independent.)
There are weaker comparisons to be make between the independent game industry and the book publishing industry, which also has a thriving “independent” sector. Of course, game publication is much more like book publication than film publication/distribution. However, independent bookstores often specialize, for example by carrying an extensive selection of children’s books; in the games industry, there don’t seem to be any genres or specialties that aren’t adequately represented by mainstream retail outlets.
I think the problem with both the games/film and games/books analogy is that “games” are themselves already specialized. A better comparison would be between software and film/books. This makes things much easier, as the concept of an independent software industry not only sounds plausible, it actually exists!
But who wants to talk about software? Software isn’t fun, software doesn’t have rockstars, Joe Lieberman doesn’t care about software. Never mind the fact that far more people spend far more time using software than they do playing pointless computer games.
Anyway, I should wrap this up with some sort of emperor-has-no-clothes, there-is-no-independent-games-industry kind of conclusion. Instead, I’d like to offer some suggestions for some truly alternative and independent computer games.
Prison Tycoon – Along the lines of various simulation games, in Prison Tycoon your job is to build a jail and fill it with convicts. States will pay you big bucks for each prisoner you can house, but watch out for overcrowding! Will you build a SuperMax, or maybe a West Texas-style tent prison surrounded by desert wasteland? Hire a lobbyist and get the state to pass a Three Strikes law — more money for you! Prison Tycoon is sure to bring you hours of entertainment.
SimHomeless – You control Alex, a mentally unstable homeless man trying to find his way back into gainful employment and a place to live. Where is Alex from? Where is his family? Who knows! Living on the street and begging for change, how long can you postpone his inevitable downward spiral? Play it on your Nokia N-Gage today!
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