IN SPITE OF the fact that the video-game industry's earnings now rival that of every other entertainment industry, there's a lot of malaise and gloom. "The attorney general and Senate are after us," developers say. It now costs upwards of two million dollars to develop an A-list game, which will, in all probability, wind up being more or less indistinguishable from any other game in the genre. Nobody's making any money anyway, except for the few (and getting fewer all the time) big publishers. The garage developer, the dream that the industry nurtured for years, is dead. And as consoles, with their insanely high licensing fees, get bigger, the DIY dream dies a little more.

That's the talk on one side. On the other side, you have Lonnie Flickinger. Flickinger is the creator, proprietor, and sole employee of ChiselBrain Software. ChiselBrain is home to Pencil Whipped, the game that thrashed the critically acclaimed, multimillion dollar American McGee's Alice in the competition for gaming site Old Man Murray's "Edgy PC Game of the Year" award. Not that you'd know from the ChiselBrain Web site. Instead of evil clowns or children with red glowing eyes or WWF wrestlers or any of the other stuff traditionally associated with edginess, there's just the front door to the site, telling you to "click here."

Once past the first page, however, you see these words: "Welcome to ChiselBrain Software. Destiny has smiled and our games have chosen you." Anyone who has ever seen a John Waters or Ed Woods movie or listened to Daniel Johnston, should recognize the tone here. Easily confused with either arrogance or lunacy, it's the voice of someone who has fallen so deeply in love with a particular vision that they just have to share it with the rest of the world. In this case, that vision is a game that, in spite of the fact that it's essentially another first-person shooter among hundreds of other first person-shooters, manages to be pretty original just the same.

Flickinger accomplishes this neat trick by being the first -- and, so far, only -- person to import the self-taught artist aesthetic into a video game. Pencil Whipped (which is up to version 2.4 by now) is completely black and white and, in spite of being 3-D, looks almost entirely 2-D, as though you had fallen into the doodles of someone who is either troubled or on drugs or not on the drugs they so desperately need. All the sound effects sound like Flickinger making gun noises, or door-opening noises, or fart noises with his mouth. There is good reason for this: All the sound effects are Flickinger making noises with his mouth. Enemies are all simple line drawings featuring practically no animation at all. They appear out of nowhere, for no particular reason, and wobble toward you. Shooting them generates either a little flurry of stars, or occasionally little red dots. And when, after getting shot a sufficient number of times, they finally "die," they do it instantly, the monster-drawing replaced with another drawing of a little campfire or monster-shaped mound of ashes.

In spite of this simplicity, there's still a lot of variety here in terms of things that try to kill you: There are little, knee-biting thingies that are insanely hard to dispose of; gigantic mounds of crap that float around making farting noises and flinging smaller mounds of crap at you; guys who wield sabers, yelling stuff like "You think you're tough?" and "I'm gonna carve you a longer ass crack!"; and their pals who look like nothing so much as tailless beavers with battle axes. Flickinger is up to eleven enemies so far, with more on the way.

He did the project, he says, because "I wanted to create something that was mine only, and that I could possibly sell" -- which is as pure a distillation of the DIY credo as you'll find anywhere. Erik Wolpaw at Old Man Murray, who (as far as I know) discovered Pencil Whipped, described the feel as "a link between genius and complete incompetence," which puts him a long way from the "the pointy Frank Frazetta style that dominates the industry." Appropriately enough for the only "outsider artist" game in existence, Pencil Whipped came to Flickinger in a dream. "I dreamt I was making this weird pencil sketch drawing and wanted to move something I drew to a different place, so I picked one of the objects up off of the paper and moved it to a different part of the sheet and everything else moved out of the way like they were alive. Then I picked up the page and looked at it while turning it and I could see around stuff like it had 3D depth deep into the sheet of paper." The next day, he "woke up and started Pencil Whipped using the GCS software he got from a company called PieInTheSky, which sells what they call "a complete game development platform for people who don't know how to program."

If you were a particularly optimistic sort, you could look at Flickinger and his game and events like the recent Independent Games Festival and feel a little swell of hope that someday soon games will become the art form everybody says they already are. You could think that as more people make original games like Pencil Whipped, more game companies might get past their obsessions with sequels and franchises and purely technological improvements and start thinking about things like content.

You could think all that. But you'd probably be wrong. As Wolpaw observes, "at this point, the technical barriers to making a game are so huge that anyone who has both the skills and the kind of compulsive determination necessary to do it can pretty much find a job [with an established game company]. It also seems that the people making games aren't having their 'vision' corrupted. They're…making the games they want to make, all variations on either Star Wars, Blade Runner, or The Matrix."

Not Flickinger, though. He's trying to finish what he started, going "from one weird thing to the other, never knowing what to expect next." Awake after his family has gone to bed, sketching little monsters, making noises with his mouth, Flickinger's in it for love, and he's got edge for miles.