When has a video game ever made you cry?

The game puts players in control of a father figure and begins by having you toss a ball back and forth with your child. The more you play with the child, the more your view of the game world expands and the higher you can jump. The higher you can jump, the farther away from your child and your home you can travel, acquiring more and more stars, which fall to earth as blocks of ice.

But spend too much time pursuing stars and you’ll return home to find your child blocked off  by a wall of ice. Spend even more time away from home and you may return to find your child gone from you forever.

The metaphor is clear — we are inspired to pursue our ambitions by those we love most, and yet the pursuit of our ambitions can close us off from the very people who inspire and love us. (Cue tear rolling down cheek.)

The Sundance effect
But that’s not to say that all the games at IndieCade or that all independent games in general insist on taking players on deliberative journeys of great human import.

“The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom” — also on display at IndieCade — references the silent black-and-white films of yore and asks players to manipulate time as they help a mustachioed character pursue his love of nothing more important than pies.

Meanwhile, the gorgeous point-and-click adventure game “Machinarium” takes players to an entirely different universe, a place of rusty machinery and elaborate contraptions where players help a robot save his robot girlfriend and stop his robot enemies. (While you wait for the full game to launch, check out the developer’s excellent earlier work “Samarost 1” and “Samarost 2”).

The Odd Gentlemen Recalling old silent films, “The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom” uses time manipulation to tell the story of a mustachioed man and his love of pies. The game won the IndieCade Story Award for the way it combined story telling with gameplay.

“There’s something here that’s interesting to everybody,” says Stephanie Barish, the founder of IndieCade.

Barish hopes the festival will help bring independent games to mainstream audiences the way Sundance helped bring independent film to the mainstream.

Sam Roberts, the festival director, believes the general public would embrace independent games if they only knew they existed. In fact, he believes that non-gamers would probably be more open to independent games than longtime gamers — after all, they haven’t been hard-wired by a life spent playing games to think of them in a narrow way.

He also believes that the way independent games dare to tread into more expansive emotional territory will appeal to a broader audience.

“A film buff sees films that entertain, films that cause laughter, films that cause tears, films that educate and everything in between,” he says. “The same is true of the committed reader of literature or the passionate music fan. By expanding the possibilities of what a game can do, indie games better serve a general public that is interested in diversity in their media diet.”

MORE FROM CITIZEN GAMER

Citizen Gamer Section Front

Game programming made easy Ready to unleash your inner creative genius? Motion controls move games into the future Citizen Gamer: Are you good? Or are you eeeevil ? 7 iPhone games worth paying for Is the Nintendo DSi gimmicky ... or gaming gold? Games for toddlers? Readers say yes — mostly How young is too young for video games? The undead have invaded our games — again Take heart: There's still hope for gamer movies Citizen Gamer Section Front   Add Citizen Gamer headlines to your news reader: