The Bottom Line

Have you ever heard of the Independent Games Festival (IGF)? Well, I'm almost certain that everyone has heard of the Sundance Film Festival. Imagine the interactive electronic entertainment industry's equivalent and you get the IGF. Video games, like movies, come in all shapes, sizes, genres, and, in this case, budgets!

Some games, such as Halo 2, Half-Life 2, and the entire Grand Theft Auto series, have much larger budgets and tend to be mainstream games. According to the IGF article on Gamespot.com, the festival "serves as a showcase for quality games that are created without the financial backing of a major publisher." Modifications, or "mods" for short, also fall under these categories.

The IGF received hundreds of entries this year and currently has 46 finalists spanning over three main categories. These categories include: Main Competition, Mod Competition and Student Showcase. The Main Competition, which features arcade-style and in-browser games, includes several sub-categories such as the Seaumas McNally Grand Prize, the Best Web Browser Game award (Runescape?), the Innovative in Game Design award, the Technical Excellence award, the Innovation in Visual Art award, and the Innovation in Audio award. The Mod Competition features games that were built around another game's engine and the Student Showcase encompasses the games developed by high school and college students from around the world.

Out of the many games featured in the festival, several popular ones, that also happen to fall under the Mod Competition, stand out. For example, there were many Half-Life 2 mods that were entered by their respective third-party developers. Dystopia, Plan of Attack, Eclipse, and Dodgeball: Source are among the 17 finalists in the Mod Competition. The other finalists include mods from such popular titles as Neverwinter Nights, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Doom 3. The Mod Competition is probably the most popular category in the festival due to the fact that the mods are built around the game engines of mainstream games.

Many of the 19 finalists in the Main Competition are smaller, downloadable games that you could probably find just browsing a random online arcade. Of the games that have great potential in this category, the one with the most is, without a doubt, Darwinia, a game offered but not developed by Valve, the developer of Half-Life and the Steam client. Darwinia is a game that puts the player in the shoes of a computer user who must guide the Darwinians, small AI beings who are living in his computer, and help save them from a computer virus that has infected the virtual world. I played the demo when it was first released and I found it to be a very innovative game. If any game deserves the Innovative in Game Design award, it is Darwinia.

The most interesting category, the Student Showcase, has several creative and polished-looking games in the final ten. Students from schools across the United States developed seven of the ten finalist games. Some college students attending SungKyunKwan University in Seoul, South Korea developed one finalist game titled, Palette. Students from the Media Design School in Auckland, New Zealand, created the other finalist game called Goliath. Perhaps there are students here at FSU who have the skills to enter such competitions in the future.

The winners of the IGF will be announced at the IGF Awards Show on March 22,
2006 at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). The GDC runs from March 20-24 at the San Jose Convention Center in California. With all the mainstream video game awards shows (remember G4TV's G4Phoria?) around today, it is good to see the smaller developers getting the credit and the fame that they deserve. To cast your vote for each category go to http://www.gamespot.com/misc/igf/index.html. GG.

Article Tools