9am
Trying to give myself a bit of a break after a couple of fun but exhausting days, I hung out at the hotel playing NBA Street 2 instead of getting an early start to the conference.

10am
One of the most enigmatic people that you can listen to is Will Wright.  The maker of "The Sims" and "Sim City" has been a definite innovator in the world of games.  The session that we listened to was a background look at how Will does his mental aspects of game design.  Actually he took the opportunity to show off some of his pet projects and hobbies, but I don't believe anyone was complaining.  One of the more interesting things that he showed was some robots that he and friends worked on in their spare time.  He showed a couple of videos where they had introduced the robots into situations where they would interact with humans, to see how the human beings reacted.  If you were thinking that Will is really some sort of sociologist scientist at heart you probably right on.  A little more about the robots can be read here.

11am
I went straight from watching Will Wright to meeting with nVidia.  I had decided to give them a shot at my time based on the work that they had done in the past to help further Indie gaming.  Notable was last year's help in Bridge It! That game was really just Pontifex II with a different graphical face, and the graphics are absolutely wonderful, from what I could see from the screen shots.  Unfortunately, my meeting with them seemed to not go so well.  They started by stating they could fix my problem with not actually being able to play Bridge It! due to its intense video requirements.  They went on to talk about all the great things they do for developers and how they have helped in getting people video cards, systems and laptops.  However when I asked a bit more about it, they pulled way back from that claim stating that it is only something they do on rare occasion.  Anyway, after about an hour with nVidia I left not knowing much more than I did when I came in.  They are trying to help indie gaming and innovation in general.  However, it does appear that they may be offering more invisible carrots than real ones.

12 Noon
I finally made it to the Indie floor with no more sub-plots to pull me away.  I got to chat more with most of the teams on the floor including the guys at Chronic Logic, Seth Robinson from RTSoft.com, Iain McNeil from the Spartan team, and a whole bunch more.  I even managed a couple of photographs finally (the pic here of me with the Chronic Logic guys was taken by Edmund the artist behind their newest game Gish). There is a large part of me that wishes I'd been able to spend more hours of the conference hanging out engaged in conversation with the finalists.  I believe that in the end I was able to do more of that last year than this year despite spending more than twice as much time at the conference this year.

4pm
I had made it a point on my schedule to make it to the last of the Indie Roundtable discussions, and so we ended in a large room in the back-most corner of the conference center.  The discussion was actually quite a bit better than the previous Roundtable I attended, and there was a key piece of knowledge handed down.  If you read the Articles for Independent Developers on the Dexterity website you'll find that they often refer to doing some market research.  People have asked just what that meant and how to apply that to Indie gaming, and during this roundtable Steve explained how he settled on doing Dweep.  He stated that he went to tucows.com and looked at where the majority of games were being downloaded from based on numbers.  He then cross-referenced that with how much of a mainstream commercial connection there was.  So for example, Sport games were among the most downloaded, but also they had the highest commercial percentage of games.  He then found that there were a large number of Logic/Puzzle game downloads, but relatively few high-quality games in the group.  Thus he then focused on that area.  It was certainly interesting to hear how he actually went about it.

5pm
With the end of the roundtable we headed for dinner and then to the hotel for a nice night of 4 hours of sleep before heading out to the airport.  It was sad to have another IGF come to an end.  I can only hope that I am able to make it again next year.

Highlight of the day
During the roundtable discussion Brian Wane, a would be Indie developer said "I'm an indie developer because I have a problem with authority."  Having talked to as many indie developers as I have, I have often gotten the same feeling about some of them.  The real reason they broke off and did it on their own was because they had trouble working with those above them.  It was fun to hear someone fess up to it.

General Impression:
I got way to involved in being at the conference this year and think that I missed out on some of the things that would have been the most enjoyable, namely chatting with more of the Indie guys.  The GDC is mostly what you make of it, and I'm not sure I made the most of it this year.  One thing that was definitely clear for those who played games like Viewtiful Joe is that Indie doesn't have a corner on the market on innovation.  All of gaming is innovating and changing all the time, and I believe that it is for the better and will lead to more enjoyable games that stretch the player as much they do the developer.