If there is one man to take my faith in the modern gaming scene and restore it, that man is Trent Reznor. In a recent interview with Joystiq, Reznor and longtime Nine Inch Nails art director Rob Sheridan, it was revealed that the duo had been trying to get a gaming project off the ground for some time now. With NIN going on hiatus for the foreseeable future, Trent's focus has become bringing their idea to fruition.

It seems the duo had held meetings with some gaming bigwigs in the past, only to discover that the head honchos of the companies are less gamers and more businessmen. While that's not the world's best kept secret, you can take solace in knowing that there are now alternatives to these faceless corporations interested only in pumping out sequel after sequel, and Trent Reznor and company fully intend on taking advantage of it, and hopefully, many more to follow.

This new era of gaming is important, and not for the Blu-ray incorporation, HD graphics, motion control or multimedia connectivity. Sure, those things are all glorious, exciting advancements, but the real innovation of this generation is the unlimited potential of the Xbox LIVE Arcade, WiiWare, and PlayStation Network platforms. These are the arenas that will provide the most diverse, visceral, and artistically sound games in the coming years. With these platforms, independent developers are left to their own devices, free of the conglomerate publishers that very much act like a movie studio when it comes to their games. With this format, artistic geniuses like Reznor, who are lifelong avid gamers, are able to bring their ideas to a gaming environment with their integrity intact, something that may not have been possible using the traditional order of business in the video game industry.

In comparison to films and television, games are a new medium that have yet to explore their full artistic potential, mostly because until now, it's been a medium founded on business and business alone. Like independent cinema, games produced cheaply and without the interference of non-gaming bigwigs hold the potential for a personal work of art, akin to Braid, instead of another brainless cash-in game like Halo: ODST. Using the XBLA and PSN as distributors, like independent filmmakers often wind up using the major studios' independent film divisions (Fox Searchlight) to get distribution, independent developers have more of a chance than ever to share their personal pet projects with the rest of the world, and potentially, make some money back to keep their development going.

We're seeing more and more media go the way of the Internets, with distribution becoming easier than ever before. Films, television, music and now games are all being cheaply distributed, and the artists have been able to cut out the studio system more frequently than in the past. Using NIN's own instrumental epic Ghosts as a prime example, Trent was able to release the album, free of any record label, from his website digitally at a minimal cost to fans, let alone the fact that a purely instrumental record from one of their top acts would never fly at a major label. Mere months later, he released NIN's next LP The Slip, free of cost.

Though it's obviously easier for one who has made his money navigating the jurassic label system to fund his own projects, the independent gaming scene is certainly a step in the right direction to keep gaming alive not as just a business, but as an artistic form of expression for its creators. I'm not usually such an extremist, but I know there are hundreds of extraordinarily talented developers working at a corporate level, wasting their talents. If they all quit tomorrow to found their own independent studios, and IPs as we knew it crumbled around us and "mainstream" gaming crashed and burned, I would be ecstatic. While that certainly doesn't bode well for those of us that write about such things for a living, sometimes art is more relevant than money.