Today was the first day of the Slamdance Independent Game Competition. We set up this morning and spent most of the day showing our game to festival attendees and chatting with the other developers. Bawls is sponsoring the competition and has provided a seemingly infinite supply of their hypercaffeinated guarana drink. And we got really great gift bags too, thanks to sponsors Activision and NCSoft. The judging continues through Monday, and the award ceremony takes place that evening.

Following in the tradition of Savage: The Battle for Newerth at last year's IGF, Alien Hominid raised eyebrows by becoming a finalist at both Slamdance and IGF this year. Those eyebrows are raised because both competitions have rules against the eligibility of games already in published commercial distribution. From an outsiders perspective, Alien Hominid certainly seems to qualify -- or rather not to.

As I'd hoped, I got a chance to talk extensively with the cool cats from The Behemoth, creators of Alien Hominid. And as I expected, the situation is far less straightforward than it seems at first blush.

Most of the crew at The Behemoth had worked together porting games for console. Alien Hominid started out as a very popular web game, and the team decided to try to develop it for console. Contrary to popular opinion, they got their publishing deal with O3 Entertainment after they'd completed all the development -- one studio founder sold his house, another mortgaged his, and a majority of the team worked for free. They bought their dev kits ($10k apiece for each platform) themselves. Even though the group estimates Alien Hominid's development budget at $1.3 million, most if not all of that money came from debt and sweat. And the studio is still waiting to see their first royalty payments come in from the console releases of the game. While I still wonder if they might be insane to take such a risk, I've really enjoyed chatting with the developers today. They're good people who were driven by an uncanny urge to bring their game to completion. And they were kind enough to donate a GameCube copy of Alien Hominid for the Georgia Tech EGL.

I've been tracking a question in my mind since before the festival: what is an indie game anyway? True, Alien Hominid closed a publishing deal last summer, but their game didn't go into distribution until late 2004, after the Slamdance entry deadline. More puzzling, the investment in the game came from the developers themselves, not from the publisher. And The Behemoth continues to actively market their game, again a task usually assumed by the publisher. Doesn't this sound rather, well, independent? Of course, the scale is totally different; The Behemoth came to Slamdance with a fully polished GameCube game, buttons, action figures, and tons of printed marketing materials. For them, the festival is probably first a trade show and a marketing opp, second an exhibition and a competition.

Park City is beautiful and utterly packed with people. It's been an unexpectedly welcome treat to be back among the world of film, mostly because Sundance and Slamdance draw a different crowd than my usual events, which are firmly ensconced in the game industry. Today's fireside chat about the convergence of games and filmmaking offered one such novel perspective. X Men producer Tom Desanto, producer John Frank Rosenblum, NCSoft marketer Mitch Jones, and sound designer Nathan Smith hosted a casual chat about issues in film/game adaptations and crossover. By and large the sentiments shared by the participants recapitulated the same tired perspective on the industry: it's a business that needs to focus on predictably profitable ventures. A lot of times, this means that the final products -- both games based on films and films based on games -- are crap. In some cases, a game has to ship to make a Wal-Mart stock deadline no matter what shape its in. In general, the game developers noted that they don't have enough time or enough access to the raw materials of the film during production.

What is an independent game then? Is it simply a game that doesn't have a traditional commercial publishing deal? Is it a game that experiments with or challenges existing conventions? Is it a game that introduces new platforms, technologies, or means of interaction? Is it a game that seeks to make an artistic statement rather than making money?

Perhaps one way to conceive of the independent game might be like this: an independent game is one whose inspiration, expression, or creation are not imposed by an external, controlling organization or structure. Would this conception of independence be an adequate one? I'm not sure. But after the fireside chat, as the sunny afternoon melted into cold evening here in Park City, I was struck by how liberated I felt not to have any interest in promulgating the commercial film and game industries' imposition of what kind of games are valid, and why.