Aha, time for more videos from this year's Independent Games Summit, which took place at Game Developers Conference 2007 last March as part of the Independent Games Festival - we're just starting to prep the next IGS, actually.

The seventh 2007 Independent Games Summit lecture is a key panel from the event - 'Innovation in Indie Games', featuring Kyle Gabler from the Experimental Gameplay Project (World Of Goo); Jenova Chen, ThatGameCompany (fl0w/fl0wer, pictured); Jon Mak, Queasy Games (Everyday Shooter); Jon Blow, Number-None (Braid); and moderator - Steve Swink, Flashbang Studios (IGS/IGF organizer).

It starts with a short and neat Powerpoint presentation from each panelist, and onward into some interesting discussions of whether 'innovation' actually matters, or whether it's gimmickry for gimmickry's sake. I think this was the Independent Games Summit talk that made me re-evaluate the most what I thought about video games as art - and reminded me that intoning 'innovation' all the time with regard to games, above all else, is a distinctly bad idea.

Here's a direct Google Video link for the lecture, plus a higher-res downloadable .MP4 version and an embedded version:

Here's the original session description: "Join the luminary creators of the Experimental Gameplay Project at CMU, IGF-winning Braid, and the brilliant Everyday Shooter as they dissect innovation in indie games. How do we generate Earth-shattering ideas that will change the face of gaming? Can small teams innovate? Is 'innovation' really what we want?"

(Other IGS 2007 videos posted so far are Matt Wegner on physics, alongside the Gastronaut founders on 'Small Arms' for XBLA, the Telltale folks on Sam & Max/episodic gaming, Gamelab's Eric Zimmerman on 'The Casual Cash Cow', and Braid's Jon Blow on indie prototyping, as well as Russell Carroll on 'indie marketing'.)