Earlier this month game maker/novelist Jim Munroe and myself, Miguel Sternberg, attended Indiecade '09 in Culver City, California. He was there as a finalist for his interactive fiction game, Everybody Dies, while I was there to play independent games and enjoy my vacation.

This feature was contributed to Aboot Play by Miguel Sternberg, most famous for letting you shoot floating, demonic squids in the face with a shotgun. His bio lays in wait, its veins pulsing with the equivalent of liquid terror, at the end of the feature.

Running over three days, Indiecade showcases a large selection of independent games along with a series of panels and discussions, ending with an award ceremony. On the surface it closely resembles the Independent Games Festival that takes place as part of the much larger Game Developers Conference, yet Indiecade stands unique amongst other festivals with its emphasis on socializing.

It wasn't about networking, or taking notes on sales channels, or even showcasing some great games to the public; it was all about getting a bunch of talented game makers from around the world in one place and giving them a opportunity to hang out and talk shop.

Unlike events like the PAX 10 or IGF, the finalists with games in the show weren't required to stand around and tend their booths around the clock - they were free to attend talks and play each others games. I don't know if it was intentional but this also had the benefit of breaking down the distinction between the finalists and the general festival attendees. It was common to find yourself having lunch and discussing games with a group of students, finalists and random attendees who'd all just met.

Events were spaced out in such a way as to give ample time for hanging around the hotel, discussing the last talk, trying out games, exploring the nearby Museum of Jurassic Technology, or just general socializing. It made for an extremely laid back and friendly experience.

The opening event included a series of fast paced micro talks from all the finalists. One memorable evening was spent playing Fuck You It's Art, a game created at the event by the Copenhagen Game Collective in which players must debate the artistic merits of imaginary games picked from a deck of cards in an effort to convince the other players that the game is or isn't art. Sims creator Will Wright gave an excellent keynote, which included a break for one of his infamous micro talks on the Russian space program. Henry Jenkins and Eric Zimmerman had a wide-ranging discussion on Game Literacy, and pretty much every talk I attended was enjoyable and thought provoking.

The festival included almost thirty games, most of them playable at the show. While the emphasis was definitely on traditional digital games the judges selection also included some notable exceptions, including an alternate reality gamethat included 50 hand-made notebooks and multiple websites called Deep Sleep Initiative, a mixed reality game played both on computers and by participants in a park five miles away (sadly due to it's locational aspect this was only represented by video of the original event) called You Get Me, and a board game which was one of the standout games of the show and really deserves a more detailed description. It's called Train.

Train combined found objects (a Nazi typewriter, a smashed window, and model trains) and an intentionally ambiguous rule-set to force players to contemplate the Holocaust and issues of complicity and abstraction in a way no other medium could. It's the best example I've ever seen of the concept of procedural rhetoric - that games can talk about meaningful things specifically through their rules rather then how they look or the story they tell. You can (and really should) read more about the game here.

Even amongst the selection of digital games, the emphasis was always on providing a wide variety of play experiences with games ranging from (take a deep breath now) a farming sim with ASCII art graphics (Sowlar) to a 3D first person beat'em up with art inspired by Hieronymous Bosch (the Source Engine powered Zeno Clash) to a 3D MMO with bright 2D cutout graphics that's more Bjork than World of Warcraft (Papermint) to a 2vs2 platform game played around four screens arranged in a cube (Minor Battle) to a steampunk block sliding, gear matching, pipe fitting puzzle game (Cogs).

While still dominated by US games, the show was extremely international with games from Chile, Korea, Denmark, Argentina, Singapore, U.K, Austria, Belgium, Spain, Sweden. Canada made a good showing with three games at the show: Jim's Everybody Dies, point and click adventure game Nanobots with it's cast of charming tiny robots, and Osmos, a spacey-game that plays with scale and physics (and took home both the Fun/Compelling & Best in Show awards).

While the heart of the conference was the Culver Hotel, several of the games were on display t two local Galleries while the keynotes and several other talks took place at a local theater. The opening gala event took place at Royal T, a surreal mix of a modern pop art gallery and Japanese style maid cafe. Morning talks took place over breakfast at a local bakery and late afternoon ones over drinks at a local bar.

Spreading the convention over several small local locations not only gave us all some much needed sun but also helped set the tone of the festival, moving it away from the trade show feel of game 'industry' events or the niche of gamer events towards being a more inclusive cultural event.

Having attended and enjoyed both PAX and GDC, I can say that the two behemoth-sized events are full of good times while still serving important purposes. Still, when Toronto steps up and holds its first big international game event I'd rather it was more like Indiecade than PAX or GDC. In the end it's hard to explain exactly what made Indiecade so great. In a way it's like trying to explain to someone why a great house party they missed was so good (did I mention the convention ended with a great house party?). Really you had to be there, and hopefully next year you will be.

Miguel Sternberg of www.spookysquid.com is an indie game developer and pixel artist living in Toronto. He's currently working on a game based on the guerrilla gardening street art movement, titled Guerrilla Gardening: Seeds of Revolution.