“Although women and girls represent 51% of the global population and are the fastest growing segment of the video game market, they have been largely ignored as a primary audience to date.

Women now represent more than 45% of the video game marketplace, and their influence is rapidly growing across all genres of games: console, casual and application-based. A very significant opportunity exists to drive revenue and build franchise brand loyalty by developing and marketing video game content that focuses on interests of women / girls, and by reflecting them as the primary content characters.”

Moderated by Belinda Van Sickle, president, GameDocs and chair of Women in Games International, the session features Jennifer MacLean, CEO of 38Games; Kellee Santiago, president, That Game Company and Megan Gaiser, president & CEO, HER Interactive.

Other sessions include:

• Global Games: How International Markets Are Playing a Leading Role
• Convergence in Entertainment and Games

Learn more at nabshow.com

IGR will be there and reporting from the show, so stay tuned for a week of exciting news and ideas!

Listen now to:

KeramCast.com Episode 19 – The Rise of Indie Games

Osmos has a long list of critically favorable acclamation including top marks from IGN and IndieGames.com among others. The game can add another notch in its belt as the winner of the Indiecade award for Game of the Year. The Canadian-made ambient osmotic space shooter was developed by Hemisphere Games, led by Eddy Boxerman, who spent several years at Ubisoft working on the Splinter Cell franchise. Congratulations to the Osmos team.

Audience Choice and Finalists Votes Unanimous

This year both the main prize and the first runner up for both The People’s Choice Award and the Finalists’ Choice Awards were unanimously voted in both categories.

The first runner up went to The Deep Sleep Initiative from developer Arx (Tracy Kobedo Brown, Nicole Epps, Karin Ray, Hee Jun Kim, Brad Michael and Allison Theus), an experimental, casual alternative reality game (“ARG”) designed to lead players on a journey through a cross-media landscape.

The Deep Sleep Intiative - Journal

Using a collection of fifty-one individually unique, hand-crafted journals, the game steers players to a variety of websites to paint an original world wherein every area the player uncovers brings them closer to solving the final mystery.

First place in People’s Choice and Finalists’ vote went to Minor Battle (lead designer Andre Clark, producer Drew Moxon), an innovative capture-the-flag scenario wherein team members, who can switch from tank to defender to runner on the fly, attempt to carry a bomb, like a football, in order to drop it on the opponents key targets. What makes the gameplay so interesting is that it is designed to be played on multiple screens.

Minor Battle uses four screens to play capture the flag

We asked the team how they saw this positioned in the marketplace and they implied that it would be best suited for public gaming areas like cinemas or theme parks. Though effectively a prototype, anyone who could pony up for a set of four 22″ wide screen LCD’s could easily set this up at home.

The Singularity and a New Model For the Indie Game Label

At the end of the ceremony, in an interesting twist, Jesse Vigil of Psychic Bunny and Indiecade Festival Director Sam Roberts along with Celia Pearce (Festival Chair) announced a partnership venture to form The Singularity – a new independent game label.

Celia Pearce (second from L), Jessie Vigil, Sam Roberts announce The Singularity indie game label

We spoke briefly with Sam about the announcement and asked if he felt any affinity with SubPop and its model for releasing indie music in the early 1990′s.

“We plan on following the Motown label template wherein talented artists worked on a salary and participated in the revenue share but in this case would keep 100% of their intellectual property. The idea is to work almost as an A&R function, finding the most promising young developers and aligning them with [the equivalent of what would have then been] the best recording engineers and producers.”

The the bread has just gone into the proverbial oven, The Singularity plans on releasing two to four titles per year.

The Christmas tree lights that line so many of the artisanal cafés and galleries throughout this neighborhood somehow provide a perfect setting for the often artsy, cerebral and philosophical fare that is increasingly permeating the independent gaming world and simultaneously pushing it in ever wider audiences. Indie games are no longer the poor man’s first person shooter. In fact they are far far from it. Subjects ranging from Korean folklore concerning rabbits that populate the moon (ClassicNight), the wandering through the mind of a drug addict – and being rewarded for tripping out – (Akrasia)  inform not only the concept but innovative play style of today’s emerging fare.

IndieCade Opening Day - Microtalks

We sat in on the two hour-long microtalks session wherein each of this year’s nominated finalists was given 12 slides at 16 seconds each to talk about their games. The result was not only consistently entertaining, but utterly fascinating. I mean, these developers range from one-man Spanish speaking self-taught Flash programmers who flew all the way from Argentina (Moon Stories) to 19-year-olds talking some pretty heavy physics and engineering paradoxes (Closure) to recent graduates from USC (Minor Battle) and the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab (Akrasia).

Nowhere to be found were the frag enthusiasts or Columbine tributaries that one used to expect from the definition of floppy disk era indies like DOOM and Duke Nukem.

For better or worse, depending on your take, indie games are becoming something entirely new. Or perhaps, to be fair, there is a wave of independent game development that is fanning out into something entirely new and marvelous – it’s modern and in step with the forefront of design, it’s thought provoking, emotionally rich, literary, post-modern, multi-cultural, subversive and evolving beyond its usually gummy genre types (for eg. Space Shooter, Platformer, Puzzle, Escape the Room). In fact the conjunctive titles of the very genres under which they are being cataloged are starting to fail as classification becomes increasingly elusive.

But that is the essence of Indie as a word – built in to its very definition (like the word AlternativeTM once did) is the need to subvert and break from the mainstream.

All of that was on display at the opening day. Some would argue that this year’s finalists hardly represent the best of what is out there – but many of them really are; polished despite breaking so much from the pack, playable despite being so unorthodox, accessible despite being so small (many of these may have had literally no budget).

We will zoom in on some of the games we saw and the developers with whom we spoke over the coming days.

For now a moment of rest.