On Indie Games: Intro?

      It seems to me that as of recently there has been a sort of "indie game revolution" in the gaming industry.  With games such as Minecraft and Super Meat Boy gaining popular recognition among gamers it seems as if Indie developers now have a growing market.  What I mean by indie game revolution is just that, that gamers are broadening their horizons past the big corporate name titles being pumped out by companies such as EA or Activision and looking into games with more humble origins.  In short the continuation of such a movement means that there will be a wider variety and greater amount of well polished games as small developers will actually have an audience to get their projects off the ground.


     Indie games are awesome, for one reason:  the developers can do whatever the hell they want with the game, it's their own.  Companies pick apart games and dictate what can and can't be done; not enough guns, not enough burly men, not enough cliche plot lines.  An Indie developer has the freedom that normal developers do not.  They can wake up and say "I want to make a game about a dad who's secretly an octopus" and hen actually do it.  They have unbridled creativity and in turn they produce quirky, interesting, entertaining, and wonderfully absurd games.


     This movement is crucial in a time where the bulk of games revolve around a recycled concept of fighting aliens or terrorists in the same 1st person shooter layout.  Admittedly, some Indie games are guilty of this but the majority put an interesting twist on the idea.  For example Frozen Synapse takes the typical cyberpunk shooter and turns it into a turned based strategy game of which, personally, I think is refreshingly novel.
However, I don't hate big name games and in many instances there is no reason to.  What I'm trying to put out is that the gaming industry needs this rise in the popularity and productiveness of independent developers to bring in more original ideas and a wider variety of game concepts.


   As I start to post more, I'll put up some opinions and thoughts on some individual indie games that I enjoy playing, as I think I'd have an easier time discussing them if they were in their own separate posts, so ya this more of a brief intro into a series of posts I may or may not do.