Gamasutra - Is the Industry Ready for Its "Game Noir"?
 

It's a bit quiet out there so we're roaming further from home. Gamasutra has a piece that asks if it is time to break away from the industry's hit reliance and establish a "B" game movement, like Film Noir:
More information.

Don't we already have our film noir developers? Jeff Vogel, Bay 12's Dwarf Fortress, the recklessly original hybrid games coming out of Eastern Europe, Matrix Games and Battlefront.com…

Of course, but perhaps the author was too busy playing Bioshock or another AAA title to notice this.

I think the issue is that those games do not function as a part of the industry, they work outside of it. They're like independent films, while film noir as a sub-genre was not a part of independent filmmaking.

I fully acknowledge this quotation from above.

We need such a thing. Definitively.

And I do hope that with this absent of anti-risk game development/policy, we might see fun again, a thing that got lost beneath heaps of money.

i don't know i think its kind of already there with 'budget' games which have been released lately that are much less buggy and have alot more potential than those of the past. in the past couple of years i've played a number of theses games which are much more niche games kind of like a b movie than wide reaching big budget games. some examples of these games are: neuro hunter, shadowgrounds, alien shooter vengeance, alpha prime. all of these are akin to the cheesy b sci fi movies out there except these excel in the fact that while they may be just as unrealistic they actually have some really good gameplay which i'm not sure what a movies equivalent would be.

While B-games certainly exist, just like B-movies, Brother None's point about those games existing outside the mainstream industry rather than being part of it is spot-on. The B-games are out there in droves, but they are not incorporated into mainstream coverage and consideration, which is the point I believe the article is trying to make, they don't exist on the mass audience radar.
I think the mainstream press could certainly find room for these games, and in small ways it does happen here and there (GfW magazine often has coverage of lesser-known games for example), but it's not all up to the press. The audience needs to recognise the games as well, and all the press coverage in the world won't matter if people don't care. Which is kind of the tricky part, people need to look outside the latest flashiest AAA graphics extavaganzas. Once that happens, "game noir" has a fighting chance of acceptance and acknowledgement.