Indies, Collectives, and an Underdog Manifesto

There is an interesting article in Gamasutra yesterday by Tanya X Short on "Indies, Collectives, and an Underdog Manifesto" http://ubm.io/NhNnxQ

Gamer communities are an important piece to evolution of this ecosystem, empowerment of creative people, and innovation in the experience economy. To the extent this claim is true, there are interesting connections between this article by Tanya and Mike Rose's article on Feb 10 about videogames and violence:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/210322/video_games_and_gun_violence_a_.php

One of the many quotes from Mike Rose's article that are instructive for this continuing public discussion is "It's now about moving past that, into studying it on a much more phenomenological basis -- more of a motivational basis," he tells me. "What is it about video games that attracts people? Why do they play them? What do they get out of it? How is the user a much more important part of that process?" (quoting Ferguson).

Instead of focusing on violence, our TED conversation is addressing questions like Ferguson's by exploring the community context for gamers within which relationships and interpersonal behavior are visible and have meaning, why gamers play online games. This is a context for open innovation with gamers and game developers. Citizen game developers?