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.

... At risk of showing my unsophistication here, I must admit some of them make me feel like the hayseed who wanders into MoMA and stares, perplexed, at the often odd experiments on exhibit. Like, I know that Jenova Chen's fl0w is great. But, you know, I didn't really get it. It's simple; there's not much to get ....

I've played it, I guess it's fun enough, And as beautiful as the above Flower trailer is ("it's Flower, not Fl0w-er!") I just don't know what it's about. Perhaps my overstimulated little brain is just habituated to more... stimulation, and I guess if I were a truly enlightened, spiritual individual I could just chill with fl0w.

Just like their big league relatives, indie games run the gamut - but there's something irritating about indie pretentiousness when the goods don't live up to the idea, be it music, film, or gaming.

Indie is the New Popular [Sexy Videogameland]

fl0w is a soothing and visually stunning downloadable game for the Playstation 3.

SCEA sent me a final build of the game for my debug and I spent a chunk of time last night playing through it and I quite enjoyed the experience. I haven't yet played the offline multiplayer experience, but plan to check that out later today. It supports up to four players, any of whom can drop in at any time.

When fl0w was first announced for the PS3, I immediately went out and tried the game on the PC. fl0w was originally a Master of Fine Arts thesis from Jenova Chen, a gradute from USC School of Cinematic Arts and one of the creator's behind another visually stunning game: Cloud.

While I enjoyed fl0w on the PC, I quickly became bored with it. It seemed too repetitious and didn't appear to have enough of a framework to keep things interesting.

In the PC version of the game you drift around a sea of lights and sound absorbing smaller entities and avoiding larger ones as you try to grow your organism in both size and complexity.

As you drift around with your mouse, you can absorb certain organisms to drift down a level and others to drift up a level. The whole experience was very Zen in a way, but again, it seemed to be missing something.

The PS3 version seems to have found that missing component.

The most noticeable difference with the game is that you control it with the Sixaxis' tilt controls. And I don't mean like steering your amoeba like a car. No, to play the game you sort of hold the controller flat and then tilt it in the direction you want the organism to move. So to move forward you tilt the controller away from you, to move sideways you tilt the controller on its side.

Initially, I found this form of control very off-putting, but within ten minutes I was liking it and within 20 I wasn't even thinking about it anymore. Soon after I was zipping around the colorful soup of sound and shapes, deftly avoiding some things and chasing down others.

Where in the PC game I never seemed to quite grasp any set of rules or methodology, in the PS3 version I quickly came to grasp what I could and couldn't eat and what things I could eat, but only carefully. I also learned that each type of thing I gobbled up played different music.

There were times that I felt someone had finally turned Electroplankton into a real game.

After playing as the original type of organism for a bit I fell through to a level that allowed me to select a second, different, type of growth. Again I played through the game, noticing some subtle and not so subtle differences in everything from movement, to what you could and couldn't eat, to the sights and sounds of the game.

After playing non-stop, literally, for about two hours and with five different creations I found myself swiming through a sea of credits. I had, if such a thing is possible in fl0w, beaten the game.

While I'm a bit disappointed that the game only took two hours to "beat" I recognize that the game really isn't something you play through and put down. It's more like a toy. Sure it has objectives and a way to succeed and fail, but fl0w is mostly about the trip not the destination.

fl0w is most certainly going to be one of those mega hits for the PS3. Brian Crecente

• flOw (PS3) Jenova Chen's trippy swim and eat finally arrives on a home console.
• Crackdown (X360)
  Fight crime! Throw cars and junk!
• Supreme Commander (PC)
  Real Time strategy form the creator of Total Annihilation
• Sonic and the Secret Rings (WII)
  The spiky haired hedgehog makes his premier appearance on the Wii
• NBA Street Homecourt (X360)
  EASports keeps it coming with the fourth entry in their NBA franchise.
• War Front: Turning Point (PC)
  An alternate WWII where Hitler is dead sets the tone for this PC game.
• Maelstrom (PC)
  Fight aliens in a post apocalyptic future
• Virtua Fighter 5 (PS3)
  Punch and kick your way to victory!
• Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja (DS)
  A new RPG with best title ever.
• UFO: Extraterrestrials (PC)
  More strategic alien battling

Flynn De Marco