On terminology: We kind of confuse the issue. There's two different things that tend to get conflated: Indie versus Big house publishing, and game styles. The first is very much about how the game was produced and has a broad band of different things: From the biggest (Wizards of the Coast) to the smallest (a whole bunch of individual designers, such as Danielle Lewon and Cream Alien Games). The second isn't even a sliding scale, it's a whole freaking plane. Scott over at the New Style has used a reference of different historical waves of players. You could use the Big Model to try and classify games based off of how well they serve different creative agenda's. Or you could classify them on genre: You guys talk about "Investigative games," you could just talk about "Improv games" and "Thematic games."
All that said, it's hard to keep all of that in order. The Trad versus indie split makes it possible for us to talk about the historical perspective. it's not accurate, but it works.
