Showcasing these flashy graphics requires bigger teams and more money, which has guided the industry toward safe prospects like licensed properties and sequels. Even when working on more original fare, the enormous teams that create today’s video games dilute artistic intention. There are exceptions like Will Wright, whose legacy includes The Sims, but they stand out because they are exceptions. “For the most part,” Rohrer said, “there’s no single person trying to bring a specific vision to life.”

Making matters worse, according to Rohrer and others, video games fall into the trap of using the wizardry and craft of those big teams to emulate movies — bad movies at that. The narrative elements in today’s big games tend to be retreads of film-genre clichés. Or they’re extensions of actual film brands, like “The Godfather.” Rohrer calls this cinematic approach to video games “asymptotic”: in his view there’s no point in making video games as good as movies, because we already have movies. “Just as early film production copied the stage,” he said, video games have yet to escape the influence of film. “Eventually film figured out editing, camera movement — the tools that made movies movies. Video games need to discover what’s special and different about their own medium to break out of their cultural ghetto.”

This is something that Eric Zimmerman, an independent game designer, has been thinking and writing about for years. Zimmerman, who studied painting as an undergraduate, co-wrote “Rules of Play,” a well-regarded textbook on game design. “Maybe games are not about communication the way movies are,” Zimmerman says. “They’re about interaction — with a system or other players, with rules.”

At the Game Developers Conference, the avant-garde assembled itself around the Independent Games Festival, a patch of convention floor where more than two dozen idiosyncratic titles were on display. Not far away, cheers rose as gamers played blockbuster releases like Street Fighter IV, but there was still healthy traffic around whimsical, mostly two-dimensional games with titles like I Wish I Were the Moon. Because of their lo-fi graphics, these titles might look like kids’ games to the casual viewer. Or they may not look much like games at all, abandoning conceits like competition and levels, winning and losing. Osmos appeared to be an amoebic adventure in space. Coil begins by piloting a sperm in search of an ova. Blueberry Garden, a floor favorite that was named the best game in the festival, looked like a surreal moving storybook with a flying, beaked protagonist.

Billed by its programmer, Erik Svedang, as a game of “curiosity and exploration,” Blueberry Garden features little instruction and no puzzles — other than the question of what exactly to do next — but roaming among the garden’s flora and fauna to the sounds of a Debussy-like soundtrack is captivating. “Dude, you just kind of float around and get those blueberry power-ups,” one player explained to his friend. But the directionless dream world of the garden turns out to be a seductive trap. The garden is slowly filling with water; only once it’s inundated do you realize how to escape. Blueberry Garden’s quick denouement makes it more of a clever ruse than a great game, but the emotional arc — being lulled into a dream and then forced awake for survival — was original. Most important to the indie admirers, the game demonstrated what one person can do to make something new and sell it for just $5.

Simplicity prevails among indie games and not just because developers lack the resources for complexity. Stripping to the fundamentals, indie game designers say, allows them to innovate. “Designing a game can be like a Japanese garden,” Jenova Chen says. “It’s not what you put in but how much you take away.” In 2005, while at the University of Southern California’s graduate program for interactive media, Chen and Kellee Santiago created Cloud, a daydream of a game where a boy stuck in a hospital imagines himself floating in the sky, corralling clouds into shapes of his choosing. When Cloud went online, it was downloaded 500,000 times. “It crashed the school’s server several times,” Chen says.

Chen and Santiago formed their own boutique developer, Thatgamecompany, and signed a three-game contract with Sony. Their company now has 10 employees. Flower, the second title from Thatgamecompany, was released this year over the PlayStation Network. There is some debate in the indie scene over whether a deal with Sony means that you’ve moved on to the mainstream, but Chen says indie gamers should be happy that companies like Sony are starting to respond to the movement’s successes. “Flower is like an ambassador for the rest of the indie world,” Jason Rohrer says. “It shows you that what we’re doing can appeal more broadly.”