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IndieCade is an international festival of independent games. We have one event a year that’s a main festival. It’s kind of based on a film festival model.

The easiest thing that I always go to is that it’s the Sundance of games.

IndieCade is a wide tent festival that includes all sorts of games and play that challenge our ideas, both in medium and our ideas of play.

Any kind of game, any way of approaching looking at games, we’re very open to that.

It’s really about interactive experiences.

Make sure you’re doing those tasks! Or management is gonna have a fit! Also, if your phone rings, answer it.

Hi, hello, thank you for calling—

We both have had office jobs and so that definitely fit into it. Uh, we also, uh, like to joke around at home, like, I’m working really hard, by pretending to bang on the keyboard and we thought, what if that was a game mechanic, which we did that so…

Yeah.

Ghosts of Miami is a visual novel. It’s set in 1986 Miami and stars a young Cuban American detective who notices like all of the drug related violence, uhm, immigration, and race violence that’s happening in her community.

We’re looking for things that are innovative, but we know that’s an empty phrase, and so it’s kind of what do people all perceive to be innovative and so then who is chosen to be involved with this process. Um, it matters a lot what their opinion is of that.

You know, this is supposed to be a safe space, so who thought I’d be into this women from the DMV? My name is Anne Dark and I’m a media artist and game designer. Uh, I created a card game called Objective. It’s basically a game about the kind of challenge standards of beauty and the relationship between race, gender, and beauty.

I’m Lishan AZ and I am exhibiting Tracking Ida, which was my main thesis project. It’s an alternative reality game about Ida B. Wells.

Especially with things that involve like awards and nominations, there is a need to have clear values.

Our jury is primarily people who’ve shown games at the festival. It’s like, thank you for being part of the community, thank you for coming and showing, you are a part of this community. We want that community to sort of reinforce and shape itself.

We’ve seen a lot of diversity and it comes out of that original thought about setting up IndieCade in a way that we’re showing games that we care about ourselves, that we want to play ourselves.

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