geekosystem

It's been a little more than a week since Indie Game: The Movie was released to a worldwide audience via Steam and iTunes. I finally got around to watching it and I cannot recommend it more highly. When I pressed play in my iTunes window, I was expecting your typical video game documentary, but what I watched was a truly inspirational peek into the lives behind the games. These are people who make games, not because they want money or fame, but because they simply love making games. The film leaves its audience with the idea that anyone can make a game, not just the bigwigs at EA Games.

This week in Editors' Picks: Extra cables, preventing you from exasperatedly strangling yourself with broken cables since whenever cables were invented. Braid, one of Soulja Boy's favorite indie games. And the Kindle Touch: A bookish yet sensual maneuver your special someone is sure to love. Er, I mean, a device you on which you read books.

Steam, widely acknowledged to be the single best digital distribution network for PC and Mac, is taking a step into some unknown territory and selling its first ever film, the ridiculously appropriate Indie Game: The Movie. The film is available for pre-order now for a price of $8.99, but doesn't unlock until June 12th. Could this mean Steam is going to be moving into the movie space in a big way? Probably not, but with this news, you can't exactly rule it out.

The Humble Indie Bundle is back, and just in time for the holiday season! For those who missed out on the bundle's first iteration, the Humble Indie Bundle is a neat package of generally-awesome indie games, and features a custom price tag, in that customers can literally pay what they want for the bundle, and the bundle is free of hampering DRM. Customers can also choose how much of the money they paid for the bundle goes to the games' developers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or Child's Play charities, and they can also tip the creators and administrators of the Humble Indie Bundle.

This time around, the second-ever Humble Indie Bundle comes with the beautiful Machinarium (including the original soundtrack, which is nothing short of ear-candy), Braid, Cortex Command, Osmos and Revenge of the Titans. The admission price of whatever you want is absolutely worth any of those games alone, and each game runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, so there's really no reason not to go donate a few bucks to charity and pick up five worthwhile indie games.

Roger Ebert has mentioned his opinion on video games before, but, as he says "I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it." That has changed, now that the movie critic has published his response to Kellee Santiago's "Games Are Art" TED talk here, on the Chicago Sun-Times website. I found that Ebert spent most of his time refuting her arguments point by point, and did not build a compelling argument of his own. While I could go through his essay point by point refuting arguments, I was hoping to keep my blood pressure to a manageable level now that the Great Kick-Ass Hype Tsunami of 2010 has finally come to a close, and besides that, I've always found that refuting someone in great detail without presenting a better founded argument of your own to be a little bankrupt of purpose. My major objections after the jump.