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IndieCade Showcases at E3 Summit (left) and GameCity Nottingham (right).

IndieCade encourages, publicizes, and cultivates innovation and artistry in interactive media, helping to bring visibility to and facilitate the production of new works within the emerging independent game movement. IndieCade does this by producing international showcases and festivals highlighting the latest, most creative, and most innovative independent games. IndieCade produces an annual juried Festival, and has also produced indie game showcase events for E3, E for All, Nottingham Game City, Penny Arcade, and SIGGRAPH. IndieCade 2009 will be held in Culver City, California, October 1-4.www.indiecade.com

Second Life's Uru Island, created by fans, and reopened through Gametap to promote Myst Online: Uru Live

As “Uru Anthropologist” (the credit I received in the game), I drew from my previous two years’ research studying refugees from the 2004 closure of the Uru: Ages Beyond Myst , and assisted Gametap in a phased process of strategically reconvening players in a test shard to make a market case for the re-release of the game. After successfully bringing 3000 to this test shard, I then helped Gametap and Cyan Worlds to develop a new instantiation of the game, Myst Online: Uru Live (MOUL) that was responsive to the cultural practices that had emerged in the intervening two years. I also helped to support Uru refugees in the virtual worlds to which they had immigrated in grassroots marketing, including instigating the reopening of Second Life’s Uru-themed island as a promotion for the re-release of the game. The project also included ethnographic research and development of a fan community survey, the findings of which were factored into development aspects of the new game. Sadly, MOUL closed after a year of operation, but the work we did during that period contributed to the current open source initiative to turn Uru over to fans for content creation. Visit http://mystonline.com for more info.