Art by Zee

The Independent Games Festival, which opened today in San Francisco, bills itself as a sort of Sundance Festival of independent game development.

Now in its 12th year, the IGF allows indie game developers a chance to get together with professional peers and aspiring applicants into the industry to show off their skills, learn new techniques and technology advances, network and compete for prizes. Highlights of the festival include the Independent Games Summit which includes discussion on such topics as indie game distribution and guerrilla marketing techniques and the IGF Awards, honoring an outstanding set of finalists from all over the world with over $40,000 of prize money for categories including he prestigious Seumas McNally Grand Prize, the Audience Award, and the ‘art game’-centric Nuovo Award.

This year’s IGF Awards ceremony will be streamed live for anyone not able to get down to the festival in person. The ceremony begins Thursday, March 11, at 6:30 pm Pacific time and is available on GameSpot as well as TV network G4.

A complete list of finalists can be seen on the IGF website.

Happy Fat Tuesday!

Cities all across America celebrate Mardi Gras but no one does it quite like New Orleans. Huge floats in huge parades attract revelers for one of the biggest parties on the planet. One of the most popular features of these parades is a tradition that dates back to the 1830s: the tossing of beads from float goers to their clamoring audiences begging: “Throw me something, mister.”

This simple plea used to be enough to have a chance at scoring some of the highly-prized beads, but as Tom Jacobs reports in this piece for Miller-McCune, University of Louisiana, Lafayette criminal justice department head Craig Forsyth took his toddler son to Mardi Gras and couldn’t figure out why no one would give the kid some beads until a nearby woman explained that there’s no catching beads when the female flashers are around.

Forsyth interviewed 51 women and 54 male float riders about stripping for beads. His conclusion? “Some forms of deviance apparently do ‘work,’” he concluded, “and parade stripping is one of them.”

Check the story’s links for more details on the social science tied to Mardi Gras.