Last stop was the Eurogamer Expo in London. I won’t go into a highlights list as I’m sure the diagram above does a good enough job of summing this up. I’ll admit that I’ve been a light weight this week and was on game/play overload at this point so I’m sure the expo wasn’t just the incomprehensible brown blur of boys, bombs, boobs, blood and guns that I remember.

But what I do remember was the Indie Games Arcade upstairs, providing an eclectic respite and creative safe haven featuring titles such as Joe Danger, Time Fcku, Fig. 8. You can read about more of the games featured and the Indie arcade here (I’m particularly sad I didn’t get to see the responses elicited by the Happening Game, but David’s write up goes some way to consolling this)

Again its a shame that so much was overlapping last week, but on the plus side running up and down the country (okay so only from Nottingham to London) to events made it feel like the country was buzzing with excitement and love for games and I only hope this feeling lasts.

And on the 3rd day Marie uprooted from the Midlands and journeyed down to London for Playful 09. And it was good.

Highlights (in order of how legible my notes where)

+ Free red liquorish rope at registration

+ Kareem from Media Molecule talking in regards to managing a creative business/team by incorporating ideas of ownership, responsibility and encouraging personal projects.

+ Robin Burkinshaw talking about the history of Alice and Kev

+ @stml calculating the odds of Christ’s resurrection at 96 billion to 1, then going on to present his analogue matchbox computer that takes on players at noughts and crosses.

+ Learning via Russell Davis that the world’s largest model railway is in Hamburg (I <3 model villages & railways)

+ @rexbox ’s retro projector presentation  (took me back to sitting at the front of assemblies at primary school and having to move the hymm sheets up and down  and usually back to front).

+ The way the lights reflected on the balloons at the end of the day creating evil smiles. Can’t find a photo to adequately demonstrate this so here is a doodle I did during the day.

Highlights so far (in order of appearance)

+ Keita Takahashi acting like a naughty school kid by playing random videos of Boy George on the Jonathon Ross Show, an ice hockey game and someone cleaning a goldfish bowl at the end of the playground announcement (which reminded me of the Friend’s with You one from a few years back)

+ 3rd place in a Canabalt tournament (even if my score ‘1800′ was still a bit shameful) resulting in some nifty over-sized shirts.

+ “Find something that allows you to build a game over a weekend or you’ll loose your mind. If its taking you any longer then whatever you’re doing, its too complicated.” – Adam Atomic on rapid prototyping and the origins of Canabalt. (coincidently it was announced elsewhere in the universe that Unity’s indie level software is now FREE… but also worth noting that Adam’s Flixel is also open source and free too)

+ Adam Atomic then explaining how he created the sound effects for ‘running on a crane’ using his macbook, a saucepan and some sneakers whilst his wife was out of the house.

+ Lord Puttnam commenting on how the game industry needs to be lead by the creatives and not the technology, and how he sees this coming from the independent and bedroom coders.

This week saw another fresh set of  indie game challenges cast upon a crowd of eager developers by the Experimental Gameplay Project and 2-Bee Games . And of course these two are not the only US based indie game projects which have popped up on my radar in the past year…

artxgame Attract Mode and Giant Robots collaboration that teams up artists & developers. Current projects include Jottobots a collaboration between  J.Otto Seibold and Kyle Pulver.

Gamma – Kokoromi’s annual contest, which last year ran with the too cool for school theme of stereoscope 3D giving birth to games such as Papermoon

Experimental Gameplay Project – a group of indie games developers running monthly competitions around a given theme (this month ‘bare minimum’), with the stipulations that they must be the work of one person and worked on for no longer than 7 days.

B2 (2Bee) And finally 2-Bee games who are running their second indie game competition – perhaps the most incentivised of all the offerings with a cash prize and ‘publishing deal’ for the winning game (which last time was the  visually and auditory stunning Auditorium)

So as I coo over these projects and their amazing output I’m always left wondering, why don’t I know of any thing similar based in the UK? Although there’s nothing preventing us Brits from taking part or engaging with most of those listed above, we still lack the fun and inspiring sense of community, collaboration and direct motivation that comes from events such as Kokoromi and artxgame.

And even with all the fluffy and loveliness of community aside these events have encouraged the creation of not only some amazing and well known games (some which have gone on to be fully developed), but they also form excellent PR platforms for the regions and developers involved.

So am I wrong, am I missing some amazing competition or event? The closest I can think of was the recent X48 challenge, or even at a stretch the pervasive games community brought together through Sandpit?  Or am I correct that there is a definite gap for a big monthly/bi-monthly indie game challenge and event- nothing big, just something lo-fi, fun and inspiring.

Well either way I’m not one to sit here and complain and wait for something to pull itself together, no I think its about time something needs to be done… hmmm where to start…