If you're having difficult answering the question "What are you playing this weekend?" here's a list of what you could be playing for mere pennies on the dime. Steam's "Weekend Deal" features no less than ten of the top indie games from the past year, including Audiosurf, Blueberry Garden, Braid, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Darwinia, Everyday Shooter, Gish, Mr. Robot, The Path and World of Goo all for just $29.99 USD. Insane! I paid fifteen bucks for Braid alone!

If that's simply too much game for too much value for you to handle, Direct2Drive is similarly blowing out indie games, with the Best of Indie bundle. That features Zeno Clash, Defense Grid: The Awakening, Democracy 2, The Path and Cogs for just $17.75 USD. Bonkers, really.

Don't less these offers pass you by. Web servers are standing by to take your credit card information then send you data packets bursting with fun. Act now!

Best of Indie Bundle [D2D]
Indie Sale [Steam]

Everyday Shooter [Steam Games]

Kellee Santiago (fl0w), Jon Mak (Everyday Shooter) and Pekko Koskinen (LudoCraft) told us of their obsessions during our first session of GDC's Independent Games Summit. And these simple ideas that make their minds spin forced us rethink games a bit as well.

Kellee Santiago
Her obsessions: Intrinsic Rewards and Linear Gameplay

Kellee Santiago has been scratching her head over this idea of intrinsic rewards in games—rewards born from the game's construct itself. She illustrates the idea through Steven Spieldberg's "Director's Chair," a game in which players learn how to make a movie, make it and are "rewarded" with a movie. This game, from 1996 I believe, has been rocking her world a bit.

She then questioned the intersection between these intrinsic rewards and linear gameplay: are longer games better? Santiago points out that our current review system values length, not necessarily quality—which is ironically flawed since none of us have all that much time to begin with. She concludes, how many awards it has and how long it takes are not indicative of a game's quality.

Jon Mak
His obsession: Input/Output Theory

Mak explains that video games are a balance between inputs (users hitting buttons) and outputs (pretty graphics and sound). But he argues that the output—the superficial—may actually be the more important part of gaming.

He loads a small tech demo he designed of a red ball that can jump up and down. It's pretty boring, he explains. But when doing nothing to the controls and merely adding more eye-catching animations (the ball squeezes and squishes like a cartoon as it hops), he thinks that the "game" gets far more interesting. And the thing is, he's freaking right. In shameful predictability, I want to play Red Ball Jumps Up And Down: The Game. Where do I enter my credit card info?

He wonders if the next logical step is designing a game in which the player pushes the same button over and over, making new, interesting things happen on the screen. Then he wonders jokingly if this game has been made already: Guitar Hero.

Pekko Koskinen
Obsession: How can games play in any medium, and what does this mean?

Koskinen took a turn for the theoretical, immediately boiling down "video games" to the idea of just "games." He argues that games transcend their medium (you can play chess on a computer screen, with physical pieces or in your head) while other forms are "rooted in their media" (a painting is no longer a painting without paint).

Ed note: I think that, maybe, Koskinen is comparing unlike categories. For instance, if we say a movie is not a movie without film, it's a bit unfair to compare that to a game. "Games" makes a huge category probably better compared to something broad like "story," in which case we see this same media transcendence.

Koskinen continues that games boil down to a series of fictional player behaviors, ultimately meaning that the game exists in the player. Koskinen is fascinated with developers not necessary designing games, but designing "lenses" for these player/games to view the world. "Game design" then becomes something broader, like personality design or even life design. The game can then just be a lens on top of ""how we walk to the bus stop," for instance.

Mak responds that maybe this is where his own arguments on input/output theory fall short because, as he so simply puts it, "The game is playing you."

And if you got this far, I hope you feel compelled to discuss some of these ideas on the comments. Our brains are too tired.

It's worth listening to just to hear Jonathan Mak call Everyday Shooter a "celebration of geometric sexuality." And, of course, I don't know that any Kotaku readers have overlooked any of these three games—but in case you have, yeah, it's time to check them out. I just wish that the radio piece said a little less about GLaDOS, since her evolution of character is one of the most fascinating and surprising (yet gloriously inevitable) elements of Portal. Still, hopefully well-written stories like this on NPR help these games sink into the mainstream consciousness as much as they have our own.

Video Games that Got Away [npr]

1. Sit your ass on the couch.
2. Load up your PS3.
3. Download Calling All Cars or Everyday Shooter for just $5, or 50% off
4. Download flOw or PixelJunk Racers for just $5, or 30% off
5. Play games, laugh at freezing masses, scratch testicles at will—should you have them. The deal is going on now through Nov 29th.

PlayStation Store Update [via vh1]

Everyday Shooter — that PSN release that you'll hopefully all be downloading a couple of weeks from now — had a presence at the show, with its creator, Canadian Jonathan Mak, on hand to give people a go at the game. Since the title isn't getting a Japanese release just yet, Mak was previewing the game from a laptop, and offering the use of earphones so that you could take in the game as it was meant to be played, meaning in a space where you can actually hear the music (not easy when you're located right next to Capcom's bombastic booth).

As has been written elsewhere, the game is an absolute blast, but surprising to me was the variety of gameplay that each level introduces. From Geometry Wars-like waves of enemies you move on to hard-to-kill and quickly-spreading insectoids to a level that Mak says was inspired by the Ghibli film Porco Rosso (you need to shoot down red airplanes that continually circle you).

It sounds like Mak is in a good place right now, with the release of the game coming up, and plans are already on the way for a new, undisclosed project. While I was at the booth, a writer for Japanese game bible Famitsu walked by, and he was so entranced that he pretty much promised on the spot that he would feature the game in an upcoming column.

Jean Snow

I am, to put it lightly, a huge fan of Jonathan Mark's Everyday Shooter. It's the sort of simple approach to gaming that both seems to get casual gaming and still provide the sort of experience that a hardcore gamer can enjoy.

So I was thrilled when I heard that the game was headed to the Playstation Network. After playing through the game on my debug Playstation 3 I was even more thrilled, the translation was sublime.

Now I hear that Sony is in talks with Mak to sign him on for a multi-game deal. I think it could be a major coup for the PSN, specifically the indie/casual side of things, if they can make things work out. Mark brings to the gaming scene a sense of fun that seems at times to be getting pushed to the side, so it's nice to see it pop its head up on a major platform.

And when played on the Playstation 3, it becomes that much more captivating, mostly because of the high-def graphics, the big screen and the surround sound. This is a game created by a person who loves games, for people who love games. It's almost a fallacy to refer to it as a game, really it's more of a body of work, an album, to stick to the music theme so prevalent in the game. You can play a level, like you play a song, enjoy the experience, get a sense of what the developer was going for. But to truly experience the game, you need to sit down and play through it, enjoying not just the completion of the game, but the journey you take getting there.

I'll be playing the game live in a few minutes, streaming it here on the site using Justin TV, hang around if you want to catch a gander.

Sorry you missed it, but you can watch the archive of the video by clicking here and choosing Aug. 8 at 10:45 a.m.