This last week, I took my second annual trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It’s a big international gathering of many people in the video/computer games industry giving speeches, showing off products and meeting each other to try to score some money.

I don’t design games, but every year I go, I come back wishing I did. There was a lot of inspiring work that I was able to see/play there, especially at the Independent Games Festival (IGF), where small games by small teams are put on display for public play. The beauty of these small projects is that few enough resources go into them that they cannot be made compelling on a romantic level, and thus, are usually made compelling more as ideas than as impressive technology.

I wish all of the games were available for free play online, but a lot of the designers want money, so I’m going to direct you to two games (or prototypes thereof) featured at this year’s conference, available online for free download, that are both worthwhile to check out as creative statements and simple enough that with under 10 minutes of play, you should have a feeling for the ideas the game is conveying.

The first is actually a prototype of the game that won the Grand Prize in the IGF: Crayon Physics (the prize winner being the Deluxe edition). Available at www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/crayon, it’s an interesting experiment that treats your “drawings” as physical objects and has you solve puzzles that involve drawing squares and circles that interact with each other. This prototype isn’t quite as slick as the final version—for instance, if you don’t close a shape you’ve drawn, sometimes it will change it into something else that the game engine can deal with more easily—but all of the ideas are there, and it’s a great little piece of software to toy around with.

Narbacular Drop won the same IGF Grand Prize two years ago. But, more immediately relevant, a game called Portal won Game of the Year at the big awards ceremony (which celebrates corporate, rather than independent, games) this year. Portal was developed by a Valve, a company that put out a game called Half-Life about a decade ago. Valve liked Narbacular Drop when it was showcased in 2006, so they hired the team to make it a mainstream game. It’s an environmental puzzle game, where the core mechanic involves placing two portals at any place in a room. When you go in one, you come out the other. It’s a mind-trip, and it can be found at www.nuclearmonkeysoftward.com/narbaculardrop.html.

These both just work on PC, so if you’ve just got a Mac OS (like me), you’re out of luck. Try these out, though. They’re short, simple, and they might have you looking at the world in a new way, if only slightly.