Partly seguing off GSW's recent post showing the 'Innovation In Indie Games' panel at IGS, and also using a post from GarageGames' Jeff Tunnell as inspiration, The Artful Gamer blog has a thought-provoking post named 'A Game Begins With An Idea' - complete with stars-reaching William Blake illustration.

As is noted, completely sensibly, up front: "While many people assume that independent game developers, by virtue of being unconstrained by publishers, auto-magically have creative, interesting ideas. However, as I hope to demonstrate - creative innovation is far from guaranteed simply because we’re ‘indies’, and requires a certain kind of developer or team to come up with something worth playing."

There then follows some of Tunnell's and the panelists' attitudes to games, before a smart conclusion: "Making meaningful games is not so much about making games that we ‘like’ or we find ‘entertaining’ necessarily (since feeling angry or depressed doesn’t fit into either of those categories very well) - it’s more generally about finding meanings that accord with human experience. Engineering, tweaking, and re-design all come after we allow our imaginations to roam freely."

Such depth of thinking about games can only be good, however our experiences vary. Comments?