Has the time of indie games come? New York magazine presents four such games and puts them in the following context of industry change:

“Independent, low-budget movies changed Hollywood. Niche cable shows revolutionized television. Digital music toppled record labels. But for decades, console video games have remained overwhelmingly corporate—dominated by safe franchise sequels (Madden, Pokémon, Halo) and sponsored by three gatekeeping corporations (Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft). Until now. Over the last couple of years, the cost of developing games with lush graphics and soundtracks has plummeted—and since the major gaming consoles are all connected to the Internet, distribution and advertising expenses are nearly nonexistent. Game designers can now post their games on Nintendo’s WiiWare service, Sony’s PlayStation Network, Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade, or Apple’s iPhone application store for instant downloading. The result? Unshackled from the blockbuster-or-bust mentality of the big corporations, these indie designers are ushering in a new golden age of smart, beautiful, and really weird games. Like the downloadable PlayStation game PixelJunk Eden (above), a game from Kyoto’s Q-Games studio that feels more like a Paper Rad art installation than the latest Mario Bros. Below, we’ve selected four more of our favorites.”

Here’s what we already have in our wiki encyclopedia of open and free gaming developments:

(you’ll find the individual articles at the bottom of that page)

– under the rubric ‘free’:

# Free Game
# Free Game Arts
# Free Gamer
# Free Roleplay
# Free and Open Source Game Development

and under the rubric “open”:

# Open Game License
# Open Gaming
# Open Gaming Foundation
# Open Roleplaying
# Open Source Game Development
# Open Source Game Player
# Open Source Metaverse