I spent most of last week in downtown Montreal covering the annual Montreal International Game Summit for Gamasutra. Since there isn't much other content going up on this website at the moment and since we didn't do a roundup on Gama, I figured I'd bust out a coverage roundup here on Idle Thumbs. Maybe you guys will find this stuff interesting:

- Asking 'Why' Will Keep Games Out Of The Ghetto, Says Hecker: Chris Hecker warns that, without proper attention from the game development community, games could end up in the same culturally irrelevant position long held by comic books. This isn't technically MIGS coverage. Chris did, however, deliver an essentially identical address during his MIGS keynote, so we can just act like it's MIGS coverage and everyone can be happy.

- Hecker: Indies Can't Do All The Heavy Creative Lifting: ...but Hecker did do a Q&A after the Montreal version of his talk, and in response to one question, he stressed that we can't just look to indie developers to address that issue. Mainstream game developers, with their wider reach and accessibility, must do their part as well.

- Randy Smith: Do Games Need To Be Fun?: "Games need to be fun" is one of the industry's most ubiquitous sentiments, across all disciplines and genres and audiences. It's become so prevalent that it is also becoming increasingly meaningless. Surely there are other valuable and valid goals besides "fun," and former Looking Glass and ION Storm Austin designer Randy Smith has some thoughts on the matter.

- Valve's Holtman: Digital Direct Gives Developers More Pricing Freedom: Just about every time someone from Valve gets up on a stage to talk about the studio's own design and sales strategies, they hammer home the importance of treating the online PC space in the experimental and fluid way the platform inherently allows. In this talk, Jason Holtman demonstrates how developers can completely abandon traditional retail beliefs about pricing.

- Valve: Devs Should Experiment With Post-Release Content Using Digital Distribution: ...and in this piece, Holtman takes the same attitude towards downloadable content (free or paid), which come in all shapes and sizes, from long-term expansion-level additions to quick, experimental bits of content -- even content that borders on jokes shared with the audience.

- Rolston: Physical And Virtual Artifacts Crucial To Narrative Designer's Job: Ken Rolston, now of Big Huge Games, has decades of RPG design experience spanning from early pen-and-paper titles to Bethesda's recent Morrowind and Oblivion. In a talk whose rapid-fire entertainment value I failed to adequately capture, he discusses how physical and virtual artifacts are crucial to designers of narrative-driven games, for the benefit of both the designer and the player.

- David Sirlin: Keep Interface Design Simple, Concise, Efficient: Considering games are inherently interactive, it's consistently surprising and frustrating to me that more attention isn't paid to making interface elements as streamlined and usable as possible. Sirlin offers some examples of games that do it thankfully right and instructively wrong.

- Assassin's Creed 2's Plourde On Why 'Fail Early, Fail Often' Is The Wrong Approach: To me, Patrick Plourde's talk about the document-driven design of Ubisoft Montreal games like the Assassin's Creed series may demonstrate both why the first Assassin's Creed had so many seemingly dead-end design decisions, and why its sequel (which I haven't yet played) apparently gets it so much more right.

- EA Montreal's Schneider: Who Do We Make Games For?: Reid Schneider, who heads up the ultra-macho Army of Two franchise at EA Montreal, discusses the reality of the industry having to increasingly address audiences that may not be as on board with traditional Gamey McGamer settings and themes.

- Wada: Too Much Diversification Will Confuse Game Consumers: Square Enix's CEO is understandably concerned that the seemingly neverending introduction of brand new meanings of "video game" will just confuse and scare away as many people as it attracts.

- Square Enix's Wada Talks Going Beyond Globalization: ...and he also noted that the term "global" may be tossed around too often, and that it's more important to aim for many different cultures than it is a monolithic global approach.

That's a lot of articles, I know. I did it all by myself!