Next in a series of critical somethings written from a background of almost total ignorance on my part: Why there are no indie video games.

This essay seems to have a few oddities. To start with the nitpicking:

Thanks to powerful new consoles, their graphics are approaching CGI quality.

Movie quality CGI, he presumably means. The better observation is that games look more like their cutscenes.

Richard Garriott peddled Ultima, the first major role-playing title, in plastic bags. Sid Meier's Civilization and Westwood's Dune II cracked open the strategy genre. Id Software's John Carmack and John Romero created the pioneering first-person shooter Doom. Will Wright gave us SimCity and open-ended "sandbox" simulations.

What happened to these pioneers? Garriott never produced another breakthrough like Ultima; he now works for online multiplayer giant NCsoft. Meier has spent most of the last decade updating his previous hits at a company owned by Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive. Id Software has clung to its independence but produced nothing further in the way of milestone games. Perhaps the lone indie superstar to retain his auteur status is Will Wright, who now has his own "studio" within Electronic Arts.

Well. Isn't the rise and fall of Richard Garriott a little more convoluted than that? And as for id, well, it seems to me that has less to do with a market and an industry that dislike innovation than it does the fact that Carmack likes to build 3D engines (and rockets) and only 3D engines (and rockets). There's not much else to the company. It seems like the larger story is that video game creators seem to really only have one or two big ideas in the course of their career.

Having said that, O'Brien is absolutely right about there being nothing but sequels and little hope of anything different ever. Except that there is an independent video game movement, of sorts. And that some of those updates of classic games seem more like fairly radical reinterpretations. (Ocarina of Time, Prince of Persia)

He concludes:

The video game now holds much promise as a cultural mover. If the big studios stay in charge, it may return to its former status: the pastime of teenage boys and middle-aged nerds at gaming conventions.

But isn't it just that course that led to the vast video game market of today? Wouldn't pursuing edgy neatness scare off the casual masses? Are games like Katamari Damacy expanding the appeal of games, or does an expanded video game market simply make for more room for such games?

Which is to say, I grant the diagnosis, but what are the reasons for it?