Culver City (California) -  The first day of Indiecade has come and gone, with a warm welcome from mayor Andrew Weissman of the quaint (if artificially so) movie-making hometown of Sony Pictures USA and Culver Studios where many of your favorite films and TV shows were put together – Culver City, California.

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.

A few years ago I wrote a screenplay treatment about a movie called 8-Bit, inspired by an art gallery installation that paid tribute to the great 8-Bit games of yore rendered in beautiful oil and canvas paintings.

This week I have come across a growing number of videos that also find their muse in the pixelated style of the 8-Bit ouevre.  Add to that the enormous popularity of not only classic 8-Bit arcade games on high-def consoles like the Xbox 360, but the emergence of neo 8-Bit games like Rocket Riot – an indie game that graduated from the Indie dev marketplace to the bona fide XBLA catalog.

Is it pure nostalgia or something deeper in the transforming human psyche that commands our interest, like a scratch in an old vinyl 45?

Behold 8-Bit Waterslide in Real Life

Exhibit B:

8-bit trip

Announced at Comic Con and off an exclusive tip from AICN (Ain’t It Cool News), we have discovered that Sam Raimi, director of Darkman, Spiderman 1, 2, 3 and Drag Me To Hell is set to direct the massive World of Warcraft franchise into an epic film in partnership with Legendary Pictures whose head honcho projected the film’s budget at well over 100 million US dollars.

World of Warcraft is the most successful MMORPG of all time, with well over 15 million subscribers, premium computers designed with custom designs from its catalog, and even its own credit card.  Some have surmised that the value of a virtual World of Warcraft coin is greater than that of many of the world’s countries (at last check the value of the WoW gold piece ranked 77th in the world).

World of Warcraft fans have much to celebrate as Raimi’s unique mondo-movie style seems to translate well with what would normally be considered B-movie fare.  The world of Azeroth, where the mythology and lore of the World of Warcraft unfolds is rich with characters, races, classes, gods and history.  Thousands upon thousands of hours of gameplay and development offer an almost bottomless well of stories from which to draw ideas.

We can’t wait to see how this hugely popular MMO translates to the big screen, effectively setting a precedent for the MMO-to Hollywood migration.