Entries for the 2nd Annual Independent Games Competition at Slamdance are due October 24 and require a $40 fee (or submit by Sept 30 to save $10). The competition, held in January in Park City, Utah alongside the Slamdance and Sundance film festivals, includes a category for student work. Check out last year’s finalists and winners.
While a game competition may seem an unusual news item for the ELO website, this year’s rules make it clear that Slamdance is particularly interested in literary forms such as interactive fiction and drama. The rules also make clear what “independent” means in this context. To wit:
Developer(s) cannot have sponsorship money exceeding $25,000.
Games published or distributed for profit before the final deadline of October 24, 2005 are ineligible.
Innovative and unusual formats, such as interactive fiction and drama, are encouraged to apply. Games must display interactivity, and be in an electronic format to be considered for the competition.
The author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics has invented several new comic forms for the Web. In “The Carl Comics,” McCloud offers an “expandable” comic and a “Choose Your Own Carl” that branches and recombines at numerous points, offering different horizontal and vertical paths. More than a thousand readers offered suggestions, participating in developing this “fully interactive, multiple path, reader-written, death-obsessed comics extravaganza.”
afternoon, a story is one of the most widely-discussed works of electronic literature. It is the story of Peter, a technical writer who (in one reading) begins his afternoon with a terrible suspicion that the wrecked car he saw hours earlier might have belonged to his former wife: “I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning.” See the 
Short’s all-text simulation lets the interactor converse with a statue that has come to life. Depending on how the conversation affects the mood of Pygmalion’s creation, and where the conversation goes, different secrets will be unfolded and different (sometimes incompatible) backstories will be revealed. Galatea won the 2000 IF Art Show and set the standard for compelling characters in interactive fiction. See the 
Façade, a finalist 2004 Independent Games Festival, is an interactive drama that is visually rich and dramatically deep. A first-person-shooter interface accepts typed conversational statements and allows the animated characters, Trip and Grace, to speak back to this drama’s “player” as their marriage dissolves.