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GAMBIT in the Press

GAMBIT is making some waves in the popular press. Below are links to and excerpts from a few of the things that they're saying about us!

If you yourself are a journalist and have recently published an article about us, please let us know! Press inquiries can be directed to gambit-inquiries AT mit DOT edu.

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Rich "Disasterpeace" Vreeland On Fez, His Love Of Music, And Videogame Soundtracks
Nicholas Yanes   |   GameSauce   |   September 5, 2013

GAMBIT Intern Rich Vreeland on his experience at the Game Lab:

Taking place from June 2009 to August 2009, Vreeland's internship at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab involved him being placed into a team that, as he told GameSauce, "worked together to create games that solved specific educational problems." One game that his team created "attempted to help teach math concepts like acceleration and velocity." Moreover, he continued, they "created two versions as a side effort to determine if narrative had any impact on the success of such an experience."

...

This internship proved to be more than just a line on his resume, but rather an experience that would help him throughout his career. "Above and beyond anything else, I think I learned a lot about working with others in a creative environment," he says.

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Movers & Shakers Nominated as a Finalist for IndieCade 2013
Kris Ligman   |   Gamasutra   |   September 11, 2013
IndieCade has announced its 36 finalists for this year's festival, including Fullbright Company's Gone Home and Cardboard Computer's Kentucky Route Zero.

The 36 finalists represent only a fraction of the total number of games to be exhibited, which will include top picks from the inaugural VR Jam and over 120 non-finalist selections including Zoe Quinn's Depression Quest.

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Phantomation named Best in Show at International Serious Play Awards
Kris Ligman   |   Gamasutra   |   August 28, 2013
The annual Serious Play Conference at the DigiPen Institute of Technology has announced the winning entries for its International Serious Play Awards, honoring serious games geared toward teaching, business, health awareness or advocacy.

MIT Game Lab's educational game Phantomation, designed to teach animation students fundamentals of both key framing and real-time animation, was named Best in Show. Other studios were awarded medals for their submissions, including the Canadian Space Agency and Schell Games.

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Announcing the SGS&C 2012 Finalists!
Serious Game Showcase & Challenge   |   Serious Game Showcase & Challenge   |   October 31, 2012

Movers & Shakers accepted as finalist in the Student Category

"Serious Game Showcase & Challenge (SGS&C) is pleased to announce its 2012 finalists. Finalists are currently being reviewed by an esteemed panel of evaluators to determine the winners in the Business, Government, and Student categories. Six of the finalists are also competing for the Best Mobile Game Award.

Six of the finalists are being evaluated for the Adaptive Force Award (this year's Special Emphasis Award). Adaptive Force games encourage the player to repeatedly try new or different strategies to solve problems while considering feedback with the purpose of improving overall success.

All of the games will compete for the coveted People's Choice Award to be decided by attendee votes at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) 2012 held December 3-6. The Showcase and voting will be in Booth 3263."

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A Closed World - The JRPG Where You Fight To Be Yourself
Siliconera   |   Siliconera   |   October 8, 2012

"Out of all the games I saw at Indiecade, A Closed World was my favorite. We've seen plenty of JRPG heroes struggle to be themselves, but A Closed World makes that the core of the game. The main character leaves his village debilitated by self doubt and enters a forest filled with demons. Instead of using a sword you can defeat these "demons" by making passionate pleas or logical arguments. "Demons" fight back by wearing down your mental state. You can restore your composure (read: life) by taking a deep breath."

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MIT Game Lab explores the potential of games and play
Andrew Whitacre   |   MIT News Office   |   October 23, 2012

MIT has established new game research facilities in the Karl Taylor Compton Laboratories (Building 26), where MIT's first computer game, Spacewar!, was developed 50 years ago. The MIT Game Lab inaugurated its premises with a symposium on Sept. 21, "Games in Everyday Life and Why That Matters to You." The symposium brought together academics, students and professionals from varied industries such as games, health care and finance to discuss the role of research in game development and vice-versa.

The MIT Game Lab is a research group of MIT Comparative Media Studies in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. It was originally established as the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in 2006. A full report on the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab international initiative is available at http://gambit.mit.edu/finalreport.

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Inside The Last Symphony's harmonious narrative experiment
Leigh Alexander   |   Gamasutra   |   September 25, 2012

Experimenting with new genres and time constraints can yield surprising successes. Let's say you've only got eight weeks to try something completely new with storytelling -- what if you tried the hidden object genre?

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In Boston, strong community means resilience in the face of change
Leigh Alexander   |   Gamasutra   |   September 24, 2012

September 22 is now Independent Game Development Day in Massachusetts, by proclamation of the governor. This year, the day also played host to the first Boston Festival of Indie Games, a free all-day event welcoming and celebrating the local gaming community.

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MIT & Becker College Rank as Two of the Top 10 Schools for Video Game Design
Lauren Landry   |   BostInno   |   Mar., 2nd. 2012

Looking for a career in video games? Well, we hope you're headed to MIT or Becker College, because the two Massachusetts-based schools have just been named two of the top 10 undergraduate schools for video game design by the Princeton Review.

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Seminal Computer Video Game Spacewar! Lives Again
Martin LaMonica   |   cnet   |   Feb.,11th. 2012

MIT engineering students and faculty this week showed off a simulation of Spacewar on campus and at the MIT Museum to mark the 50th anniversary of the video game's release. Written by four students in their spare time, the video game influenced how many later games were designed and was part of a broader shift in how people viewed computers.

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MIT's Spacewar! Computer Game Celebrates 50th Anniversary
Brendan Lynch   |   BostonHerald   |   Feb., 8th. 2012

MIT has recreated "Spacewar!" -- one of the world's first computer games -- to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the influential precursor to today's video games. MIT researchers developed the game, which was finished in 1962, after Digital Equipment Corp. donated a closet-sized PDP-1 computer to MIT in 1961. Philip Tan, the U.S. executive director of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, described the game as a two-player "Asteroids." "It was a way to test every single thing a machine could do in the 1960s," Tan said.

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Cold, Comfort, Harm: The Snowfield
Adam Smith   |   Rock, Paper, Shotgun   |   Jan 26th., 2012

It's quite warm here this morning for the first time in days and I was dangerously close to enjoying the sun's gentle caress, which would be a terrible betrayal of mistress moon. Thankfully I keep a stock of chilly and chilling games behind glass for just such an eventuality and today I've broken out The Snowfield, from brainy chaps at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, whose output we've covered previously. This third-person adventure runs in browsers through the magic of Unity and it's quite conventional to play in some ways, though shot through with atmospheric and narrative weirdness. Best to play it rather than listen to me, or read a little more in the icy depths below.

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Educated Play: A Closed World
Tom Curtis   |   Game Developer Magazine   |   Jan 1st., 2012

It's rare to see games wrestle with complex and perhaps controversial social issues, A Closed World, which comes from a team of researchers at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, does just that, and openly explores LGBT and queer themes in a JRPG format. In the game, players take control of a young person who decides to enter his village's forbidden forest, along the way, the protagonist must battle internal demons that question what we consider "normal" and what it means to be true to oneself. We spoke to product owner Todd Harper to learn more about this introspective title.

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Local Game Developer Tops The Charts: Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab's iPad Game Dark Dot Downloaded Over 448,000 times
Hiranand Sunny   |   Today   |   Dec 22nd., 2011

A local game developer has done in two-and-a-half weeks what other app developers can only dream of. When the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab launched Dark Dot on Apple's iTunes app store in October, it became the top action game in 48 countries including the United States, China and Singapore.

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App Of The Day: Dark Dot - An Innovative Touch Based Attack
Trevor Sheridan   |   AppleNApps   |   Nov 9th., 2011

Sometimes games come along that truly take advantage of the touch screen to change up a genre, and provide a unique experience. Dark Dot is one such game that provides drawing and shape manipulation by pinching and rotating to command an army of dots. It's a shooter game like no other as it's mixed with strategy combined with the unique controls. You draw the initial shape for your unit, and then you can pinch, rotate, and drag to move your dot unit around the screen.

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Robotany Awarded Excellent Student Winner Prize at IGF China 2011
Staff   |   Gamasutra   |   Nov 12th., 2011

Robotany, created at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab was named the IGF China Excellent Student Winner for 2011. The winners were chosen by a panel of expert jurors, including Kevin Li (CEO, TipCat Interactive), Monte Singman (CEO, Radiance Digital Entertainment), Xubo Yang (director of digital art lab and assistant professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University's School of Software), Haipeng Yu (producer, Tencent Shanghai), and jury chairman Simon Carless, IGF Chairman Emeritus and EVP of the GDC shows and Gamasutra.

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Dark Dot Doesn't Last Long, But It's a Blast While It Does
Mike Thompson   |   Gamezebo   |   Nov 4th., 2011

Evil-doers these days just don't know how to be proper villains. Their schemes are all about revenge, or greed, or they're simply bad guys because life forced some sort of tragedy on them. Nobody is evil for evil's sake anymore. Nobody goes out and tries to just take over the world. That's a shame: conquering the world is becoming a lost art. That's why it's so refreshing to play Dark Dot, a game that not only has you taking over the world, but doing so in style.

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This Week's Best Free PC Games: A Closed World
Lewis Denby   |   PC Gamer   |   Oct 1st., 2011

A Closed World is a simple JRPG-style adventure about what life can be like if you are homosexual. That's quite a rare thing in games, and I could probably reel off an entire column's worth of words on that alone. In this heavily metaphorical game, you venture into the woods to battle demonic versions of those who've caused you trouble in real life: your family, your partner's family, and your partner him/herself. After each face-off a beautifully drawn cutscene plays out, advancing the story as it does.

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Interview: How GAMBIT's A Closed World Tackles Sexuality, Identity
Leigh Alexander   |   Gamasutra   |   Sept 26., 2011

But at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, tackling game design's less-explored challenges is often the order of day. This past summer, a group of interns from Singapore were led by project owner Todd Harper in the creation of a game that aims to tackle sexuality and identity issues.

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G4U: The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Video Game Program Wants To Teach You Game Design
Dennis Scimeca   |   G4TV   |   Sept 15th., 2011

You may have seen men and women in white lab coats under extremely large, orange banners from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab if you attended PAX East 2011. They were a contingent showing off the results of their collaborative efforts meant to promote and discover inventive directions in game design.

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Interview: MIT's Matthew Weise on the GAMBIT Game Lab
Evan Amos   |   Game Career Guide   |   July 5th, 2011

In this interview, Matthew Weise, the lead game designer for the GAMBIT Game Lab at MIT, talks about their game design lab, including what it is and how it helps students prepare for the real world of game design. Weise sat down with Charles Pratt and Evan Amos from the Another Castle podcast to explain the course.

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Improviso Review
Andrew Williams   |   Bytten   |   June 24th, 2011

It's difficult to really summarize Improviso. It's a game, but it's also an experiment. It's fun, but largely because you invent it. You won't get a huge amount out of it just by yourself - what you get from it with a friend (or even a random stranger on the internet) is entire up to the two of you. But give it a go if you can. You'll have a bit of fun, and you'll be helping research better AI for future games. And who knows? Maybe that Oscar nomination isn't so unlikely...

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CarneyVale: Showtime : Get into the swing of things with WP7
Cris Rowlands   |   Best Windows Phone 7 Games   |   May 22nd, 2011

I may have never fulfilled my childhood dream of running away with the circus & lived a life of mystery, traveling from town to town doing shows, but I can still have a bit of circus based fun on my phone thanks to CarneyVale : Showtime.

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Beautiful Aesthetics, Reinterpretation of the Original Greek Text, and Thoughtful Game Play Make This (Yet One Word) a Unique and Personal Experience
A New Day's Work   |   A New Day's Work   |   May 13th, 2011

Introducing "Yet One Word": a game based on Oedipus at Colonus, the least well known of the Oedipus trilogy. "Yet One Word" interprets and expands the themes of the text, hoping to inspire self-exploration and self-reflection through the game play. Beautiful aesthetics, reinterpretation of the original Greek text, and thoughtful game play make this a unique and personal experience.

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Improviso: Gambit Game Is Drama School For AI
Jim Rossignol   |   Rock, Paper, Shotgun   |   March 18th, 2011

The Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab is intended for clever types to make clever games, and look, they done gone done that with Improviso. It's a 2D multiplayer acting game, where you take on a role, play it, improvise, and use your own dialogue chat and even props in the game world. A neat enough idea, but the actual purpose of the game is a bit deeper, as Gambit explain: "The longer term goal is to train an AI system with data collected from thousands of people telling stories together with the same characters, sets, and props. Once trained, this AI system will be able to play the role of one or more characters that can converse and interact with other AI- or human-controlled characters."

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PAX East, Day 2: MIT's Hate Speech project, Portal 2, Powerglove and Video Game Orchestra
Maddy Myers   |   The Boston Phoenix   |   March 12th, 2011

My second day at PAX East began in the expo hall with an intense, emotional video. The Gambit Game Lab of MIT gathered some data about hate speech in gaming communities, and then they recorded actors performing the collected comments out loud. The video doesn't analyze the data collected or attempt to argue with the hate speech in any way, and the presenters at the booth told me they considered it to be more of an art project to increase awareness rather than an official study. The project was inspired by the Dickwolves Debacle, and you can read more about the project and watch the video yourself at their website. Even though I think of myself as having become desensitized to most of the gaming community's hate speech, I found watching the video to be a sobering and disturbing experience.

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Contribute To The First Major Study Of Sports Video Gamers
Owen Good   |   Kotaku   |   March 12th, 2011

The games development research lab GAMBIT, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has launched a study of sports video gamers, one a researcher believes will be the first comprehensive, independent examination of a very large video game segment, but one often seen as an outlier to the wider culture.

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Symon Wins Kongregate Award at 2011 Indie Games Challenge
Kyle Orland   |   Gamasutra   |   Feb 12th, 2011

Kongregate's Jim Greer came on stage during the ceremony to present a special award to Symon, a procedurally generated puzzle game set in the dreams of a paralyzed man. The award comes with prominent placement on the Flash game portal and one million sponsored views provided by the site.

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Carneyvale: Showtime is # 5 On List of Top Twenty Essential Mobile Phone Games
Stace Harman   |   MSN Games   |   Nov 11th, 2010

Help Slinky the circus acrobat fling himself through arenas filled with lethal hazards in order prove he's number one. It's a dangerous way to make a living. A visual treat, the game offers optional objectives, secret levels and star ratings to entice you back. A slick ragdoll platformer with Xbox LIVE support.

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GAMBIT US Director Philip Tan Quoted in USA Today About Controversial new "Medal Of Honor"
Mike Snider   |   USA Today   |   Oct 10th, 2010

It's unfair that the game was judged before its release, Tan says. "The game may be making a very poignant and important point about war with the Taliban," he says, "but the majority of people who are commenting haven't engaged with the game itself. ... It also seems like we are judging modern combat games by the visual and audio fidelity. These are things that actually push games in the direction of Hollywood. What they are trying to be is more like movies, and movies are allowed to do that."

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Planet XBox 360 Picks CarneyVale Showtime As One of The Top Ten XBox Indie Games You Should Be Playing
Gerry Holt   |   Planet Xbox 360   |   Sep 22, 2010

CarneyVale: Showtime - GAMBIT: This game puts the life of Slinky, a CarenyVale highflyer, in your hands. It's a game polished enough that one would expect to see it on Live Arcade or the Steam platforms. The art and presentation of the game is really a treat. CarneyVale: Showtime is only 240 MS points and I highly recommend at least trying the demo. It is worth your time.

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Dealspwn Enjoys The Replayability of Symon
Matt Gardner   |   Dealspwn   |   Sep 13, 2010

Symon is a point and click adventure game from Gambit, running as part of a series of summer prototypes, in which you play a bed-ridden hospital patient whose only deliverance from the nightmare of his reality is through dreams. Cue an incredibly curious little game, if pretty short, that strives for something PnC games rarely achieve: replayability.

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IndieGames.com Elude Review
Tim Wee   |   IndieGames.com   |   Sep 11, 2010

At PAX 2010 there was an awesome panel that highlights a couple of indie games which you may not know about (unless you're a regular Indie Games blog reader!) This video features indie superstars like Robin Hunicke (thatgamecompany), Eitan Glinert (Fire Hose Games), Nathan Vella (Capybara Games), Dylan Fitterer (developer of Audiosurf) and Andy Schatz (Monaco) recommending some of their favorite indie games to the audience.

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CTV News Recommends Symon
Kris Abel   |   CTV News   |   Sep. 3., 2010

It's Friday and that means its time to lock you away inside one of the many puzzle rooms scattered across the internet. Can you find your way out in time to enjoy the weekend?
Symon has a great deal to do, but lying in a hospital bed all he can do is dream. This is fascinating point-and-click adventure from the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab where the puzzles are designed to follow the logic of dreams, meaning that they make sense, but not quite. You can choose to "wake-up" during the game, but if you do the game generates a new set of puzzles, the idea being that you can return and play again, even if you've finished it. It has a wonderful, interpretive feel, making it easy to fall into Symon's world and want to stay there for the whole weekend. Good luck.

Indiegames.com Symon Feature
Tim Wee   |   Indiegames   |   Sep. 3, 2010

Symon is a puzzle game that tells the story of a bedridden hospital patient who sorely misses his home and family. The only thing he can do is to sleep and dream, which leads him to a place inside his imagination that is populated by a cast of unusual characters to meet and run errands for.

Repeated playthroughs of Symon is advised, since players are usually presented with the opportunity to collect a different piece of our protagonist's personal effects after every fruitful visit to the dreamworld.

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Philip and Marleigh, Tech and Learning Top 100 Important People
Matt Bolch   |   Tech and Learning   |   Aug. 25, 2010

As part of our 30th-anniversary celebration, Tech & Learning has compiled the first two of three lists of the 100 most important people: those leaders from the PAST who have shaped today's edtech environment, and those leaders from the PRESENT who have been instrumental in the creation and advancement of the use of technology in education. These first 60 honorees appeared earlier this year. We now feature leaders in our last and possibly most challenging list, the FUTURE. These include students doing ground-breaking work in edtech, young entrepreneurs shaping the future of edtech, and those teachers changing classrooms around the nation. (Features Philip Tan and Marleigh Norton from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)

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CarneyVale Showtime Demoed at PAX 2010
Ricardo Torres, Editor-in-Chief, Gamespot   |   Gamespot   |   Sep. 5, 2010

We break away from the PAX 2010 show floor for a quick look at Windows Phone 7.

GameAxis on 2010 Summer Games
Mr. Toffee   |   GameAxis   |   Sep. 7, 2010

In case you're wondering what's up with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, it's still going strong if last Thursday's presentation of the seven new game prototypes from the new MIT-GAMBIT interns at the Science Centre is of any indication.

So what games were on tap during last week's showing? Here they are...

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Singapore MIT Game Lab Interns In High Demand
Editor   |   website   |   Sept 2nd., 2010

In its fourth year of running the annual summer internship programmes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab (GAMBIT) continues to see high demand for its interns who have benefited from the programmes. Not only have 86% of its interns from the 2008 and 2009 batches found employment in the Singapore games and media industries despite the gloomy economic outlook last year, some of the GAMBIT alumni have also gone on to win international awards and set up their own games companies.

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CarneyVale on Pocket Gamer
Joe Mundy   |   Pocket Gamer   |   Aug. 18, 2010

Finally there's CarneyVale Showtime, which is possibly the most exciting prospect of the lot. It's a conversion of a well-received indie title on Xbox 360, which could point to a new avenue for independent game developers.

The App Store was built on the ease with which small developers could get their work published, so Microsoft would be well advised to continue encouraging a similar environment - perhaps with a little more quality control (which they've already promised for their top-tier games).

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Immigration Jam Photos
David Bolton   |   BostInnovation   |   Aug. 23, 2010

We all know that game development is a 24/7 job. Creative minds never sleep and this weekend at MIT-Gambit, 30 indie developers gathered together for Immigration Jam, a 2 day development session to produce games based around the hot topic of the moment (according to Glenn Beck).

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BostInnovation Interviews Philip Tan
Kyle Psaty   |   BostInnovation   |   May 19th, 2010

At it's core, GAMBIT is a collaboration between the Singaporean government and MIT that researches the future of gaming -- touching on theories and methodologies not yet well-developed enough for the private sector to pursue. The group is at the cutting edge of gaming and has been since its inception in 2006.

Said Tan: "What we hope to be able to do at GAMBIT is take some of the risks the gaming industry would like someone to take but not themselves. We can try things because we're not afraid of failing. And then, the gaming industry can take a look at our ideas, play our games and decide what they want to rip off. Then they can go forth and prosper, because we're publicly funded."

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CarneyVale Showtime on Game Career Guide
Tim W. Boon   |   Game Career Guide   |   Fall 2010

CarneyVale: Showtime was created by students from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab --- a ragdoll platform game which won Microsoft's 2008 XNA Dream-Build-Play challenge. Shortly after arriving on the Xbox Live Indie Games service in December 2008 (known as Xbox Live Community Games back then), CarneyVale: Showtime picked up a nomination for the 2009 IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize, and was also chosen as one of Penny Arcade's PAX 10 showcase selections that same year.

GAMBIT is quickly becoming a center for the birth of many creative game development projects in the South-East Asia region as IGF main competition entries have begun to come in from Singapore as well.

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William Uricchio and Philip Tan Interview
Editor   |   IAHGames   |   Aug. 5, 2010

Games. Research. Can these two actually exist together? One initiative, like a small handful of others sprouting up around the world, is paving the way. Welcome to the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, where ground-breaking games are designed for the world of tomorrow.

IAHGames.com presents this exclusive two-part interview with no other than the key members of GAMBIT: Mr Philip Tan (US Executive Director; project manager with Media Development Authority of Singapore) and Prof.William Uricchio (Lead Principal Investigator; Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies)...

GAMBIT addresses important challenges faced by the world's game researchers and industry players, deploying a multi-disciplinary approach to tackle research problems. In short... they play a LOT of games, are allowed to wax lyrical about them, and are paid for it.

Read on for what games research is all about and what awaits you if you want to pursue a career in it!

Clint Hocking GAMBIT Talk
Alec Meer   |   Rock, Paper, Shotgun   |   Aug. 2, 2010

Ubisoft's Clint Hocking once again demonstrates the pulsating mega-brain that will hopefully soon result in a game that isn't a weird Far Cry sequel, in this rather special Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab talk. It's from last October, but seems no less relevant for it. Discussed: war movies, hockey fights, Gears of War, Duke Nukem breaking the fourth wall without breaking immersion, how online functionality can augment immersion, and blurring the line between real and fake.

S'pore games make global splash
Kenny Chee   |   My Paper   |   June 23, 2010, Home - A4

At least five games made by Singapore indie developers are available on [Xbox Live Indie Games], namely Armor Valley, Avalon Legend, CarneyVale: Showtime, Crimson Blues and Tobe's Vertical Adventure. They sell for between $2 to $10.

One of the most successful is action-puzzle title CarneyVale, with a sales rate of 8.8 per cent in the past year. It was the first Singapore game to debut on the Xbox portal in December 2008. CarneyVale is currently among the top 50 rated games, as rated by users, on the Indie Games portal.

CarneyVale's developers, government-funded Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, signed a deal that will see Microsoft distribute the game for personal computers to be sold later this year, a first for a home-grown game.

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Video Games radio panel
Xu Qindao, Thomas Rippe   |   CRI Today   |   July 22, 2010
Video games have been with us for decades. With the advancement of technology, they are getting even more popular. Today will take a look at how video games has evolved culturally. Featuring:
  • David Guida, Interactive Media Specialist and Senior Producer at g-NET Media, also co-host/co-producer of 'The Game Show,' a video podcast distributed through the Revision3 Network.
  • Dr.Li Jidong, The School of International Communication, Beijing International Studies University.
  • Matthew Weise, Lead game designer for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, MIT Researcher.
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Akrasia review
Greg Costikyan   |   Play This Thing!   |   May 17, 2010

Akrasia ("acting against one's better judgment" in Greek) is a visually beautiful game with pleasant music in which you, a rotund character manipulated by arrow keys or WASD maneuver about a maze.

In the maze are "pills". Eating a pill increases your score, but reduces your life. At various points along the life bar, which is in the shape of at tree branch, are icons representing a house, a pet, people (family or friends?) and a heart (love, presumably). As your lifebar decreases, these icons fall away.

Boston Indie Showcase on Bytejacker
Nick Robinson   |   Bytejacker   |   March 17, 2010

Next weekend, PAX East debuts in Boston, which is exciting for about fifty different reasons. One of them is the Boston Indie Showcase, displaying a half-dozen indie titles local to the Boston area on the show floor. The coolest part? The showcase exists specifically to support indie start-ups who usually can't afford booth space - meaning all these games will be exhibited free of charge to their creators.

The six games are:

Slam Bolt Scrappers (Fire Hose Games) - "A unique combination of engaging in building challenges while fighting off wacky, cartoon baddies in a beat 'em up brawler"
AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! (Dejobaan Games) - "Jump off buildings floating above Boston performing stunts and making split-second decisions as you weave around buildings to score points."
Dearth (MIT Gambit Game Lab) - "Save the Tribal Lands from monsters and drought playing as a great shaman in this exciting co-operative action-puzzler."
Waker (MIT Gambit Game Lab) - "Players are challenged to use both mind and reflexes to solve puzzles, creating platforms to form a path in this puzzle/platform game set in the world of a child's broken dream."
Turba (Keith Morgado) - "A puzzle game where each song played will generate unique game boards on which players much create combos of 3 or more of the same color."
Miegakure (Marc ten Bosch) - "A platform game where you explore the fourth dimension to solve puzzles."


Congrats to all the winners!

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On One's Own: The Boston Indie Showcase
James Bishop   |   DIYGamer   |   March 30, 2010

After AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! came Dearth and then Waker. I lump the two together here as they were both developed by MIT Gambit Game Lab. If you can't already tell, this means that both games have somewhat ulterior motives: academia. It's all so ingrained, however, that you'd be hard-pressed to know that they were trying to gather data if they didn't tell you so up front.

Dearth is full of sketched out Egyptian or Mayan imagery wherein you and a partner can control tiny fish people and run around in circles attempting to get the water beasts chasing you to crash into each other. You heard me. The express intent of the game is to reach the next level but the game is actually trying to gather data on how to make artificial intelligence. I'm not entirely certain how it works, but it does. And my playing through of a couple of levels with another human, dubbed Random Stranger #117, further proved to me that having two brains trying to solve one puzzle at the same time leads to confusion, hilarious confusion that has only bad consequences.

The second of the two MIT games, Waker, has two versions: one with and one without narrative. Otherwise, they're exactly the same. The idea is to see if gaming narrative actually helps engage children and have them learn easier. The game follows a little black shadow of a thing with a tail as it tries to make it from one end of a stage to another. Imagine Braid but instead of time puzzles, it all depends on how fast your little creature is moving. The intent is to help kids learn about velocity and all that good stuff on a mostly observational level. See how it works, understand it better and therefore be able to use the concepts more easily later. You run, and drop the orb when you want to solidify the line you've created so you can traverse it to the next stage.

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GAMBIT Mentioned in MA High Tech
Rodney H. Brown   |   Mass High Tech   |   March 3, 2010


For Scott Macmillan, founder of the three-man studio Macguffin Games, the real exciting community activity is happening among the small, independent game companies like his own, and that is why PAX East will feature the Boston Independent Showcase. Like the PAX 10 in the Seattle conference, the Boston Showcase will feature independent games chosen from a crowd of submissions to the Penny Arcade staff. Macmillan's game, as it turns out, didn't make the cut.

"I have actually entered into it and they didn't accept it, which is fair because I don't think ours is developed enough," he said. But that doesn't mean he won't be showing of the game called "All Heroes Die" at the show.

"We are going to be exhibiting on the floor, and that is courtesy of the MIT Gambit lab," Macmillan said.

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Penny Arcade Comes to Town
Jessica J. Pourian   |   The Tech   |   March 30, 2010

Running from March 26 until March 28 in the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center, the convention featured plenty of new games and demos, humorous panels, and several concerts. Game developers from all over the country, including MIT's own GAMBIT lab, had a chance to show off their games to the crowds.

The MIT GAMBIT Game lab ran a large booth at PAX displaying two of their games, Dearth and Waker. Stephie Wu '10, a researcher in the MIT GAMBIT lab, was busy teaching attendees about Dearth, a cooperative game that requires players to coordinate to destroy the monsters chasing them.

"Every game we make has a research objective," she said. "In this case, our objective was to study the way humans played in two player mode to further our computer players' AI in one player."

Asked if she had gotten a chance to explore PAX herself, Wu laughed and nodded.

"It's pretty cool," she said, "lots of swag, could definitely pick some up."

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Negative Gamer Video Interview
John "Wardrox"   |   Negative Gamer   |   March 31, 2010

One of the coolest stalls at PAX East (at least in my opinion) was the one for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. The Game Lab brings students from MIT and 40 of the best students from Singapore together to make some very cool games. They also work with a lot of the smaller indie game makers in the local area to, in their own words, "become a hub for the Boston indie gaming community."

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GAMBIT on NPR/WAMU: Kojo Nnamdi Show
WAMU   |   Kojo Nnamdi Show   |   April 6, 2010

11 minutes into the program, PAX East and GAMBIT are mentioned on the NPR/WAMU radio Kojo Nnamdi Show.

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Philip Interview on Games are Evil
Eric Wall   |   Games are Evil   |   April 6, 2010

Situated in Cambridge, above the oh so tasty Legal Sea Food (Which I had my way with a lobster...a very tasty lobster), is the MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Created as joint-venture between MIT (The Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the government of Singapore, the GAMBIT lab represents the first step in filling the largely ignored academic space of the games industry by specifically focusing on the creation of new gameplay experiences and research as it directly pertains to video games. Over my Spring Break holiday I was given the opportunity to talk and get a tour of the studio from the director of US Operations (The GAMBIT lab is split between facilities in Boston and Singapore), Phillip Tan.

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SavyGamer Interviews
Lewie Procter   |   SavyGamer   |   March 31, 2010

SavyGamer interviews with Sara Verrilli and Andrew Grant about Waker and Dearth respectively.

Dearth
Of all the games that made up the indie showcase, this one was the least like a 'proper game', and more just the result of an experiment. I think the process that created the game, and the experimental AI that it was designed around is more interesting that just the game on it's own. I'd suggest playing the game first, then listening to this. Click here, and either grab a friend to play coop, or play single player and see how good a job the AI does in the role of sidekick. I spoke to Andrew Grant, who is technical director at MIT Gambit lab, who lead the project that ended up being Dearth.

Waker
Another MIT game, this is a educational game that pretends to not be, shhh, don't let the kids know. It's a very clever way of teaching about speed, distance and acceleration, and how they are connected. It is a puzzle platformer, and I won't spoil the puzzles, you go play it for yourself here. I spoke to Sara Werrilli, development director at MIT, who lead the project. She talks about how the game came about as part of Singapore-MITs summer program, and what the goals were:

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Escapist PAX East Reviews
Tom Goldman   |   The Escapist   |   March 27, 2010

Playing Dearth made me feel like a labrat in a maze. The designer's intent is for it to be a co-op action-puzzler, but a few levels could also be played in single-player mode. After playing these, which made me drag water-filled creatures over to an AI creature trying to do the same, I didn't quite get it, but once I convinced a nearby girl to play it in co-op mode the game clicked. Dearth is partially an experiment relating to the creation of better AI, but it became most interesting when playing with this fellow human. After multiple, somewhat embarrassing failures, the early challenge we had just figuring out how to complete the game's goals became second nature as we began to complete levels without speaking. Dearth was a little different than the other games in this list, as it seems designed more as an experiment than game, but it stimulated my intellect like the other games did not.

Waker is a puzzle-platformer unlike anything I've played before, and it really racked my brain. Players control a cat, and the main gameplay aspect involves forming a path that will allow the cat to reach the end of the level safely. The way this is done by having the cat pick up a glowing orb, after which moving in a certain direction or speed will start and form a path within a specific space. Sprinting to the right might make the path rise sharply, while walking left would make it lower with a more average slope. Once you drop the orb, the path will form. Every level has different rules in regards to how the orbs alter the path. A decent puzzler with a new angle.

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Build a Totally Unique Game in Nine Weeks
Kyle Psaty   |   BostInnovation   |   March 31, 2010

Each summer, students from Singapore and MIT get together at GAMBIT to create totally unique (and generally educational) video games during a nine-week period. I caught up with a few students involved with GAMBIT at last weekend's PAX East event at the Hynes Convention Center.

"Innovation. That's what we're all about," said Stephie Wu, a computer science student at MIT I spoke with. "Every game is linked to a research topic. We just want to do things in new ways."

Another student I met was Anna Loparev, a senior at MIT and the designer behind a pair of twin games developed at the lab last summer called Waker and Woosh.

"Each team has a research goal. The goals are based on proposals that the game lab receives earlier on. They decide which ones they want to do for the summer and give those goals to us," said Loparev. "Generally, a team consists of a designer (Loparev), quality assurance, programmers, artists and some teams have an audio artist. We also had a graduate student and an embedded staff member on our team."

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GAMBIT PAX East Coverage in Boston Globe
Hiawatha Bray   |   Boston Globe   |   March 26, 2010

In addition, Massachusetts has become a center for academic training in video game design. The Princeton Review last month listed the nation's eight best colleges for video game training, and three are here: Becker College and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, both in Worcester, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge.

USA Today
MIT, GAMBIT #8 Ranked Game Design School
Mike Snider   |   USA Today   |   Feb. 28, 2010

The Princeton Review's Top 50 Undergraduate Video Game Design Programs
Mark Snider

No. 8: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

"Our core mission is providing parents and students with good admission advice," says David Soto, director of content development at The Princeton Review. "We're hoping this can add legitimacy to an emerging market."

After The Princeton Review collaborated two years ago with game developer Ubisoft on its own My SAT Coach game for the Nintendo DS and subsequently released test-prep apps for the iPhone, "we got the idea that this seemed to be an emerging field," Soto says.

In all, The Princeton Review surveyed 500 schools before arriving at its top 50 with game design studies. (See the full list at gamehunters.usatoday.com.)

Programs were evaluated on four main criteria: academics (courses and skills fostered), faculty (especially the percentage who had worked in the industry), infrastructure (technology and game laboratories) and career (internships, job placement). "The schools that scored exceptionally well, the top eight, were really top-notch when it came to all four," he says.

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GAMBIT PAX East Coverage in Boston Herald
Paul Restuccia   |   Boston Herald   |   March 26, 2010

Khoo said Greater Boston boasts major video-game makers - such as Harmonix, maker of "Rock Band," 2K Boston, creator of "Bioshock" and Turbine, which created "Lord of the Rings Online" and "Dungeons & Dragons Online." Also, he said, the area has the Gambit Game Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and scores of indie game developers who will have their own showcase at the convention.

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MIT Lab Helps Designers Reimagine Video Games
Mark Baard   |   The Boston Globe   |   March 8, 2010

Don't bother asking Abe Stein whether he believes video games qualify as art.

"The answer,'' he said, "is an obvious 'yes.' ''

Stein's office at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab in Cambridge reflects his commitment to the medium. Guitars line one wall in the long, windowless workspace. A piano and several PC work stations fill the rest of the room. It is where Stein, GAMBIT's audio director, creates scores and sound effects for games that researchers develop in the lab.

GAMBIT - an acronym for gamers, aesthetics, mechanics, business, innovation, and technology - could be minting superstar developers, much in the way the University of Southern California turns out big-budget filmmakers. Stein's studio work, for example, has been featured on the Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim.'' And before he joined GAMBIT at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he was a sound designer for Blue Fang Game LLC, in Waltham.

And it's not like GAMBIT's game designers are turning up their noses at the prospect of making money.

CarneyVale: Showtime Swings To Games for Windows Live
Eric Caoili   |   Game Set Watch   |   March 4, 2010

Another exemplary downloadable console game is making its way to PC! CarneyVale: Showtime, an Xbox Live Indie Games title that sister-sites Gamasutra and GamerBytes named the #1 release for the service in 2008, will arrive on PCs later this year thanks to an exclusive distribution contract with Games for Windows Live.

CarneyVale: Showtime headed to PC
Jim Sterling   |   Destructoid   |   March 5, 2010

You may not have heard of CarneyVale: Showtime. I actually reviewed it back in 2008 when it launched on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel and my thoughts were nothing but positive. It's a fantastic puzzle game in which ragdoll physics and force of momentum are used to reach a goal. If you missed it, don't worry, for it is coming to PC.

Singapore Games today announced that it had finalized a deal with Games for Windows Live to distribute the game on PC, with modified controls to fit the new format. Showtime is still one of the best offerings that the Indie Games service has, and if you haven't played it before, I highly recommend that you give it a go when it hits the PC. Truly, something that should be played.

CarneyVale Seals Deal With Microsoft's Games For Windows-LIVE
Mr. Toffee   |   GameAxis Online   |   March 8, 2010

Remember the Singaporean-made CarneyVale: Showtime game that got a ton of awards in 2008 and was also a blast because of the amount of fun it generated by letting you fling a literal ragdoll clown high up in the air for points? Turns out that the game has become the first Singaporean game to close a distribution contract with Microsoft's Games for Windows-LIVE on the PC platform. This means that it'll be coming out for the PC platform later this year; this version will have extras like a built-in map editor (something that was definitely needed to prolong its replayability), and the ability to share these custom maps with anyone online and worldwide.

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Jesper Juul on Another Castle Podcast
Charles J. Pratt   |   Game Design Advance   |   Oct. 28, 2009

Just in time for the publication of his new book A Casual Revolution, we sit down and talk with Jesper Juul. We discuss his career as both a theorist and a game designer, as well as his first book Half-Real and his opinions on the "founding conflict" of game studies: ludology vs. narratology.

Matthew Weise on Gamecritics Podcast
Tim Spaeth   |   Gamecritics   |   Nov. 23, 2009

Bonjour class! Welcome to Ludology 101. Matthew Weise of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab talks about his work and his experience on the academic side of games. Is ludology as sleep-inducing as it sounds? No sir, and in fact criticism and academia may have more in common than you think. With Chi Kong Lui, Brad Gallaway, Mike Bracken, and Tim Spaeth. Happy Thanksgiving to all our listeners!

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CarneyVale Showtime: Video Interview
Electric Playground   |   Electric Playground   |   S19E275

A video interview with Bruce Chia about CarneyVale Showtime on Electric Playground.

CarneyVale Interview of Pixelsocks
Adam Niese   |   Pixelsocks   |   Sep. 23, 2009

We caught up with Bruce Chia at the CarneyVale: Showtime booth. He's one of the four programmers who worked on Showtime as undergraduates at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab. If you missed the game's preshow summary, you can find it here. Otherwise, read on for a peek at the inspirations, problems, and future for CarneyVale: Showtime.

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CarneyVale Showtime Review
XnocreativityX   |   The Life of an Ex-Hardcore Gamer   |   Sep. 23, 2009

CarneyVale Showtime is the kind of game that makes me happy that Microsoft made the Indie Games channel open to everyone instead of just XNA members. Here you have an original and addictive game easily available on your console that may never have come out for it otherwise.

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CarneyVale on Random Access Podcast
Antony Low   |   Random Access Podcast   |   Aug. 30, 2009

Bruce Chia from the CarneyVale team was interviewed... he's the first interview out of a bunch of PAX 10 finalists.

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IGF Submission Picks: "Shadow Shoppe"
Arsen Nazaryan   |   DIYGamer   |   Feb. 1, 2010

Where is fat? I can't find fat in this list of adjectives.

That's because Shadow Shoppe is not centered around physical descriptions. Well, in a sense, it is: you are shown a shadow and must select whatever trait you believe describes that shadow. After going through a number of them, the game will provide you with the trait(s) you chose and you are then tasked with picking out the shadow you originally applied them to. Sounds easy? At first, maybe.

When you make it through the first couple stages of the game, however, you realize that it truly is a difficult task. For one thing, the adjectives aren't words such as short, fat, thin, etc. (for the most part, at least) but instead are along the lines of wealthy, sloppy, frail, etc. These are characteristics and traits of somebody that aren't easily described or attained through the physical shape of a shadow. Obviously, Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab's creation shines for this one very reason: it's an experiment and an assessment. Shadow Shoppe was created "with the intention to collect data on how people associated character traits with body shapes." That being said, this is the easiest way to take part in an experiment. How's that for experimental gameplay?

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Abandon and Berklee - Boston Globe
Joseph P. Kahn   |   The Boston Globe   |   Jan. 19, 2010

Berklee has forged additional working relationships with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a hotbed of young game designers, and with the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Media Division. While MIT has plenty of capable game designers, "There aren't as many great musicians around as Berklee has," notes GAMBIT audio director Abe Stein, who commissioned the class work on Abandon. Sweet's students had to sign a licensing agreement granting MIT rights to their music, providing the game isn't later sold or licensed for a fee.

A Casual Revolution - Wall Street Journal Review
Jonathan V. Last   |   The Wall Street Journal   |   Dec. 15, 2010

The Wii is the most recent, and most successful, example of what Mr. Juul calls "casual games"--that is, videogames intended for people who wouldn't ordinarily consider themselves videogamers. Of which, it turns out, there are quite a few. Since its launch, the Wii has outsold the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 combined. There are all sorts of other "casual" games, of course. Remember that the term "videogame" is not confined to sprawling, elaborate games such as World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. Anyone who has played Solitaire or Minesweeper on his personal computer--or Tetris or Bejeweled on her cellphone--is a gamer.

The success of casual games, Mr. Juul writes, "is due in part to the fact that they do not require players to know video game history." You don't need know the Contra Code or master the 10-finger art of the Xbox controller to pick up a casual game, like Guitar Hero, Wii Tennis or Dance-Dance Revolution. They are all easily learnable, in large part because they are based on activities with which most people are passingly familiar.

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A Casual Revolution - The Guardian Review
Keith Stuart   |   The Guardian   |   Dec. 8, 2009

Also from MIT is A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Videogames and Their Players (£18.95) by Jesper Juul. As the title suggests it's trenchant look at the rise of casual gaming, taking in everything form PC titles like Zuma to the Wii and Guitar Hero. Juul wants to know what defines a casual game, where the genre comes from (considering everything from chess to computer solitaire) and what make an experience instantly accessible to 'non-gamers'. There's interesting analysis of the 'matching tile' game genre and of mimetic interfaces (i.e. the Wii Remote or Rock Band guitar), and the study rounds of with a selectionof interviews with casual game denizens and designers.

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A Casual Revolution - The Independent Review
Pat Kane   |   The Independent   |   Jan. 15, 2010

These "casual" games, purchased cheaply or downloaded freely, and played across the screens that occupy not just our living rooms but our pockets and laps, are the subject of Jesper Juul's The Casual Revolution. In its way, this delightful, straightforward book is an exercise in what they used to call in my English course "practical criticism" - a theory-light disassembling of the essential components of an art form. We are introduced to robust concepts like "juiciness": the visual and aural rewards that these simpler games give their mildly distracted users.

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Interview: Come To The Circus - Making CarneyVale Showtime
Jeriaska   |   website   |   Jan 12th., 2011

Developed by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, CarneyVale: Showtime was the recipient of the Grand Prize in the 2008 Dream-Build-Play competition and was also a finalist for the PAX 10 independent games showcase in 2009. Last month the game saw its first portable iteration when it was released for Windows Phone 7.

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Global Game Jam
Andrew Whitacre   |   MIT News   |   Jan. 5, 2010

The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab will play host to Boston's developer community for the 2010 Global Game Jam, as participants worldwide try to design ground-breaking games in just 48 hours.

The Jan. 29-31 weekend event, organized by the International Game Developers Association, features volunteer teams of video game designers across six continents, working together for two days and nights as they create games from scratch. In the process, they uncover new possibilities for game styles, execution, and collaboration that future designers can utilize.

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NPR: Video Games and Participatory Culture
Heather Chaplin   |   NPR   |   Dec. 22, 2009

Matthew Weise, and Henry Jenkins interviewed on NPR's All things considered:

Many video games let you create (your own levels in a first-person shooter, your own creatures in an adventure, for example) and upload these creations so you can share them with other players. It's called participatory culture, where consumers are not couch potatoes but rather active participants and creators themselves. But some argue we're merely being tricked into thinking we're being creative.

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99 Free Games from 2009
Christopher Hyde   |   Critical Distance   |   Dec. 24, 2009

The following is a list of 99 free games (in no particular order) that I've enjoyed this calendar year, nearly all of which have been released in 2009 or very late in 2008. So why don't you take a break from funding corporate overlords and see just what a feast there is out there in the wide world below the big ticket level--all you can lose, really, is just a little bit of time.

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Epic Fail! Games Gone Bad and the People Who Love Them
David Thomas   |   Crispy Gamer   |   Nov. 30, 2009

...sometimes talking about what makes games good just isn't as much fun as thinking about what makes them bad.

"Videogames tend to be considered 'bad' due to technical problems or design problems. Technical-bad games are often broken such that you cannot play them as intended, while design-bad games will run fine and look fine but are frustratingly bad, hard to control, break design conventions for no reason, or are just way too derivative," says Jason Begy, a co-presenter on Juul's panel.

As a masters student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, and research assistant in the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, Begy ought to know better. But he too finds perverse joy in bad games.

"There is certainly a sweet spot between bad and broken. I find most of the enjoyably bad games are playable in that they are not technically broken, but have some very odd elements, design choices or interactions," he says.

Eliot Pinkus Gamasutra Blog Link
Ben Abraham   |   Gamasutra   |   Nov. 19, 2009

Elliot Maximillian Pinkus writes for the MIT Gambit Lab, in a piece called the 'Confessions of an Impatient Cheater', noting that:

"Braid requires 100% mastery just to progress to the ending. If the player wants to see the mind-blowing twist at the end, they are supposed to just tough it out....But what if the player isn't as affected by fiero, if it isn't their personal "ultimate Game Emotion"? What if their biggest emotional reward is curiosity or relaxation or excitement?

Well then, we would cheat, naturally. Or stop playing the game, which is what I did.

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Rosemary, A Graphic Adventure Based on Memories
Azel_Dragoon   |   Nations of Videogames   |   Aug. 12, 2009

Translated:

Some time ago I learned of Rosemary, an indie graphic adventure which called my attention because of its solid animation and graphic detail. I let it go, and I did not talk about the game, although I bookmarked the download link for a rainy day.

This Rosemary, as I said, it's a point and click graphic adventure, but with some differences with respect to the genre it develops. As their creators well say, instead of using the extremely trite premise of the protagonist who lost her memory, this adventure plays with memories in a totally original way, since the girl we control wants to discover her childhood memories after seeing a photo.

Childhood memories, and checking whether they are real, is something fascinating to every individual, because it is a time of life full of lacunas and we never get to know whether the products of our imagination have filled the gaps. This is the central theme of the game, and it is very appealing a priori, since everything we discover will get us closer to finding ourselves, and to our initial search of our forgotten friend.

In Praise of Hard Games
Leigh Alexander   |   Kotaku   |   Oct. 29, 2009

He paraphrases some research from Jesper Juul of MIT's Gambit Game Lab: "Players are more critical of a game that's too easy than one that's too hard. The player can improve and make a difficult game fun, but short of handicapping oneself, there's no way to make a game that's too easy harder," Anderson continued. "However, as soon as players feel they don't have any way to improve, their assessment of difficulty turns much more negative."

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Philip Tan quoted in NY Times Article
Douglas Quenqua   |   The New York Times   |   Oct. 28, 2009

"The whole concept of 'I'm sick of this modern, urban lifestyle, I wish I could just grow plants and vegetables and watch them grow,' there is something very therapeutic about that," said Philip Tan, director of the Singapore-M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab, a joint venture between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore to develop digital games.

Flytrap on Shadow Shoppe
Edwin   |   Flytrap Games   |   Oct. 14, 2009

We like the people at GAMBIT, and not just because they laugh at our jokes. GAMBIT exists to study what happens to your grey matter when you play games, basically, and they do it by giving you lots of free games to play.

Shadow Shoppe is comparatively old news, unveiled all the way back in August, but it's awesome so let's blog it anyway. Your character lives in a town where people have mysteriously lost their shadows.

Reclaim Your Game: Abandon
Ulysses Mockett   |   Reclaim Your Game   |   Oct. 4, 2009

Behind the intent to answer GAMBIT's research question of churning out animated models within a specific timeframe is a game developed with the sole intention of ensuring those long-hour lunch breaks end up drawn out and productive in the fun and satisfying case. Abandon is straightforward: take your comfortably-clothed heroine through the oppressively bleak, wintry dreamscape of neglected buildings and debris towards an exit-portal without of course, succumbing to the menacing, light-consuming household objects and furniture that loom predatory behind an aura of darkness.

CarneyVale Write-up at PixelSocks
pixelsocks   |   PixelSocks   |   Aug. 31, 2009

It has been years since a notable pinball game surfaced on any platform. CarneyVale:Showtime isn't the revival that purists might hope for, but it shares the same core and shakes up the formula.

Pixelsocks Review of CarneyVale
katiegreen   |   PixelSocks   |   Feb. 23, 2009

Description: You play as Slinky, the magically-animated puppet acrobat, in his quest to become the best acrobat ever. You use the ragdoll physics to navigate through perform tricks in vertical platform levels. Grand Prize winner of the 2008 Dream Build Play Challenge.

CarneyVale on G4TV
G4TV   |   G4TV   |   Aug. 31, 2009

PAX 10 Preview
Adam Sessler

Adam previews the top games coming to PAX 10 this year including 'Carneyvale: Showtime', 'Closure', 'Liight', 'Fieldrunners', 'Osmos', 'Puzzle Bloom', 'Machinarium', 'Trino', 'What is Bothering Carl?' and 'Tag: The Power of Paint' in this PAX 10 Preview.

Bytejacker: Indie Game of the Week
admin   |   Bytejacker   |   Sept. 17, 2009

Bytejacker nominated Waker for "Indie Game of the Week."

Razor TV Interviews
Razor TV   |   Razor TV   |   Sept. 2009

Three video segments, courtesy of Razor TV.

Gaijin (BIT.TRIP BEAT) CarneyVale Review
Gaijin   |   Gaijin   |   July 30, 2009

For the record, we quite like BIT.TRIP BEAT.

...Carneyvale is one of the rare gems you'll find among mountains of total crap in the "Indie Games" (formerly "Community Games") section of the Xbox Live Marketplace. For five measly bucks-roughly what you might pay for two bags of potato chips-you can have a gameplay experience like none you've ever had before.

ZDNet Asia
S'pore games growth 'encouraging'
Vivian Yeo   |   ZDNet Asia   |   Sep. 17, 2009

...CarneyVale: Showtime, developed by a group of Singaporean students from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, was the first made-in-Singapore game published on Microsoft's Xbox Live XNA Community Games Channel.

Waker in Lianhe Zaobao
Zhao Qianyu   |   Lianhe Zaobao   |   Sep. 3, 2009

A Singapore and MIT project produced a maths teaching game which has plans to be used in local schools in future.
The game "Waker," is very similar to the classic game Super Mario. Players move the character around while avoiding dangerous objects and to obtain rewards. Velocity and acceleration concepts are taught at the same time.

The Games of Summer 2009 GAMBIT Lab
Mayerson   |   GamekultBLOG!   |   Aug. 28, 2009

A collaboration between Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Singapore government, the laboratory GAMBIT explores new directions for the development of video games. Its members create game prototypes in addition to traditional publications.

google translation

Waker on Unigamesity
Calin   |   Unigamesity   |   Sep. 3, 2009

Waker: finally, the last game recommended today is a really fun yet strange one that puts you in the shoes of a cat-like creature that has just one goal in life: to re-create the roads used by dreamers to return to their daily lives. Never thought about the process like that, but now after playing Waker, I will certainly will. Add to that just a tiny bit of educational purposes and you have a hell of a game. See for yourself by following this link.

The Future is Bright
Nawira Baig   |   Youth.SG   |   Sep. 4, 2009

Youth.SG met this year's promising batch of Singapore-MIT GAMBIT (Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation and Technology) Game Lab students in a recent sharing session.

Fresh from their summer internship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), some 40 students presented the six game demos they did in the duration of their internship and shared their experience.

Pierre on Japanese Blog
Kotaro Buro Gu   |   Kotaro Buro Gu   |   Aug. 31, 2009

A Japanese blog linked to Pierre: Insanity Inspired, with a short description of the gameplay.

Pierre: Insanity Inspired

It's a game about gathering materials for your artist master so that he can complete his works of art!

Run around the circular stage, collect the amount of materials specified in the middle while avoiding spiked iron balls.

You can only get items when they're lit up, and be warned that it gets mad at you when you try pick up items when they're not (lit up)

The game is simple, and there aren't many stages, but I like the visual appeal of the world and the punchline at the end.

Don't Waste Your Fiction
Mike Darga   |   Mike Darga's Game Design Blog   |   Sep. 3, 2009

I read today on Rock, Paper, Shotgun about an experiment that sounded like a brilliant idea. A group of researchers created the same game twice - once as a completely abstract set of game mechanics, and once with a fiction and narrative layered on top of those same mechanics.

Fantastic Flash: Waker
Sgt. Sausagepants   |   GayGamer   |   Sep. 3, 2009

Having a stressful day? Try out this flash game from GAMBIT, which is Singapore-MIT's game design lab. It's a great little puzzle-platformer about a little shadow monkey whose job is to repair dream roads, allowing lost dreamers to make it back to their bodies.

The art is gorgeous, the gameplay is fun. The whole thing oozes style. Check it out! (oh, and sound warning, for those killing time at work, there is narration right off the bat)

GAMBIT's Got Game Again
Mr Toffee   |   GameAxis   |   Sep. 3, 2009

While the people behind CarneyVale get to savor the glory of the indie gaming scene with their prototype game, it's time we check out the recent entries of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab program of this year. Fresh out of the presentation held on September the 1st, here is what's on tap from these bright young game designing stars:

Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Waker/Woosh
Kieron Gillen   |   Rock, Paper, Shotgun   |   Sep. 3, 2009

This is a nice analysis of Waker/Woosh, and a pretty interesting conversation in the comments.

Oh, the humanity. More seriously, this is quite a fun experiment which Master Denby lobbed at me. The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab have made a pair of games. In terms of actual mechanics, they're identical. But one - Woosh - uses purely abstract art and the other - Waker - uses a narrative story, with cut-scenes, voice-overs and an art style which supports its theme. From examining how the responses to the games differ "Researchers will study whether either the narrative or abstract form of the game is more effective in promoting student engagement with, and understanding of, the physics topics". Which, as far as high concepts go, is a fun one - and it helps that both games are neat little platform puzzlers, and worth playing.

Flytrap on Abandon
Doree   |   Flytrap Games   |   Sep. 1, 2009

Oh go on, here's another game before we call it a day. Created as part of on-going experiments in the field of coolness at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, Abandon casts you as the lone, vulnerable source of light in a world of light-hating, supernaturally animated objects.

30 Reviews in 30 Days, Day 21: CarneyVale Showtime
Eric Bouchard   |   Everyday Gamers   |   Aug. 23, 2009

One of the nice things about the Xbox Indie games is some of the developers are really trying some unique things. I have already reviewed a couple of games that fit the bill with Groov and Artoon. CarneyVale Showtime is another game that falls under that category. An unusual platformer, CarneyVale Showtime will keep you coming back for more.

Gaming Internship Pays Off
Chua Hian Hou   |   The Straits Times   |   Sep. 1, 2009

A GROUP of budding game developers on Tuesday launched six games they have created as part of their summer internship programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The games include one that will be used in American high schools from this month to teach science concepts like velocity and displacement -

New Gambit Benefits Game and Media Students
AsiaOne   |   AsiaOne   |   Sep. 1, 2009

Since running yearly summer internship programmes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2007, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab (GAMBIT) has trained 77 students from various local tertiary institutes in games research and development.

Of these, 41 of them have since found employment as artists, programmers or game designers in games and media companies such as Ubisoft, Boomzap, Double Negative and NexGen Studio.

Woosh/Waker in Resolution Magazine
Lewis Denby   |   Resolution Magazine   |   Sep. 1, 2009

This odd little pairing is more than a bit interesting to talk about. Woosh and Waker are puzzle/platform games developed by Poof Games for Gambit, which is a collaboration between MIT and the Singapore government. Woosh and Waker are part of an experimental, educational project, to see how players respond to different presentations within videogames.

ZDNet Asia
Games Pay Off for Tertiary Students
Sol E. Solomon   |   ZDNet Asia   |   Sep. 1, 2009

The Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab (Gambit) initiative--a collaboration between the country's Media Development Authority (MDA) and MIT--focuses on identifying and solving research problems that can be applied by the island-state's digital game industry. It involves a summer internship where students are attached to MIT to create innovative games based on research topics.

Teo Chor Guan, Singapore program director of Gambit, said that since the program began in 2007, two prototype games--CarneyVale: Showtime and Backflow--have gone on to be commercialized.

Physics game turns US teaching aid
Sia Ling Xin   |   My Paper   |   Sept. 2, 2009, My News - A7

The annual summer programme, which is in its third year, is organised by the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, a five-year initiative by the Media Development Authority and MIT.

The initiative is focused on building collaborations between Singapore institutions of higher learning and MIT in research and development in areas which include gaming, mechanics, business and technology.

Waker had impressed the students' mentors so much that they decided to promote it for use in schools in the US, said an MDA spokesman.

Schools here may use it as well, she added.

Mr. Chuang Xuejin, 25, a National University of Singapore undergraduate and a member of the Waker team, said that the team members were very
happy to have the game put to actual use.

''It's a huge honour, and it's very encouraging for all of us,'' he added.

Waker on Casual Gameplay
DanTheArcher   |   Casual Gameplay   |   Sep. 2, 2009

A very nice review of Waker on Casual Gameplay. Thanks for playing!

Some people believe dreams are memories collected over the day's time, assembled into a sort of psychic collage that defies description. Others believe that they are prophecies, glimpses of fates not yet transpired in a time when our minds are free to sail to such distant shores. We can attempt to understand them with REM and our so-called science, but when it comes right down to it, the vast majority of us have absolutely no idea what dreams are. We submit to them come bedtime, we perform on their strange stage, and then we awaken in the morning, unmarked but not always unscathed. Sometimes the process is not quite as simple, however, and many times has a dreamer lost sight of the path to morning. What becomes of these people, and where do they wander? This is the realm of the Waker, the star of Poof Games' latest concoction.

Shadow Shoppe - Italian Style!
Angelantonio Citro   |   Indie Vault   |   Aug. 28, 2009

Check out this Italian Shadow Shoppe mention:

"Tanto tempo fa, gli abitanti di una piccola città persero le loro ombre. Semplicemente scomparvero, e non tornarono mai più. Decisero allora di chiedere aiuto: scrissero una lettera e la affidarono alla notte. Una mattina arrivò in città un uomo con un'ombra: 'Sono qui per ridarvi le vostre ombre' disse. Costruì allora un negozio e si mise a fabbricarle".

Waker - Italian Style!
David Romano   |   Indie Vault   |   Sep. 2, 2009

Check out the Italian mention Waker received:

Benvenuti nel mondo dei sogni... Waker, sviluppato dai ragazzi di Poof Games, vi proietterà in un mondo onirico, nelle sembianze di un waker, una sorta di guardiano del dolce dormire simile a un gatto. Il vostro scopo sarà quello di ristabile il continuum del sogno di una bambina, permettendole così di risvegliarsi da un sonno ininterrotto. Dovrete intraprendere un viaggio lungo tre mondi, ciascuno dei quali è formato da molteplici sottolivelli che garantiscono un'esperienza non certo da mordi e fuggi.

Waker (Browser)
XSportSeeker   |   XSP.   |   Aug. 29, 2009

Waker is an interesting platformer puzzle game with a nice story:

... it has an interesting mechanic where you'll have to draw the paths to read the room end by dragging an icon around.
It's fairly easy and short... the image was taken from the last level, I just finished it.

Agile spirit cat required for mental roadworks
Edwin   |   Flytrap Games   |   Aug. 28, 2009

Dreaming is more hazardous than most people suspect. Every time you sleep, a path forms behind your dreaming self to guide you back to the waking world.

On occasion, however, that path breaks, leaving the dreamer to stand forever stark naked in front of the sixth form girls while Billy Connolly plays the banjo. Or whatever private delusions are appropriate to your particular mental setup.

(Note: We here at the lab loved this title and post! Thanks Flytrap!)

Free Games News: Waker
FreeGamesNews   |   FreeGamesNews   |   Aug. 28, 2009

Waker is a puzzle / platform game set in the world of a child's broken dream. "As the Waker, you uses both mind and reflexes to solve puzzles, creating platforms to form a safe path through the dream worlds."

Browser Game Pick: Pierre - Insanity Inspired
Tim W.   |   Indie Games: The Weblog   |   Aug. 27, 2009

Pierre: Insanity Inspired tells the story of a cat with an eye for art, who has to run around circular platforms and acquire items to finish his masterpiece. Items can only be collected when they align with the right symbols on the platform, indicated by a bright glow around it.

Browser Game Pick: Waker
Tim W.   |   Indie Games: The Weblog   |   Aug. 27, 2009

Waker is a puzzle platformer in which the player has to build their own platforms to reach the goal. To create a new path, you must first reach a magical orb and grab it with the action button. You can then control how the platform is to be drawn by moving the creature around the screen.

Rosemary
Dora   |   Casual Gameplay / Jay Is Games   |   Aug. 9, 2009

[Rosemary is] lovely while it lasts, with its storybook artwork full of rich amber hues and the subtle sound effects that blend with the music to create a touchable environment. So much effort and cleverness has been put into this one, that if it were longer it would easily become a classic instead of just an afternoon treat. The team behind it is immensely talented, and I have no doubt at all that all of them are going to go far. There's a love and sensitivity in Rosemary's whole design that speaks well for any future projects that they may undertake, whether together or apart.

Remembering Adventure Games: Rosemary
John Walker   |   Rock, Paper, Shotgun   |   Aug. 4, 2009

[Rosemary's] central premise is a fantastic idea. Of course many games have used the two time zones dynamic, but there's something very special about transferring between today's day's run-down and dulled reality, and the brightly coloured optimism of Rosemary's remembered past. It's also the device used to puzzle, recalling objects from the past in order to find them in the present day, and vice versa.

Game Career Guide
Postmortem: Akrasia
Louis Teo   |   Game Career Guide 2009   |   pp. 22-30

Team Aha! was one of seven teams formed for the 2008 summer program at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. The team, which was made up of students from various tertiary institutions in Singapore as well as MIT, was assembled to create a game based on an abstract concept without the use of cut scenes.

The Design Behind Carneyvale Showtime, 2009 IGF Finalist
IndieGamePod   |   Indie Game Podcast Show   |   June 14, 2009

Interviewer: Hi, I'm here at the GDC at the IGF Main Competition. With me today is our two special guests. How about you introduce yourself?

Desmond: I'm Desmond Wong. I'm the lead artist and designer for the game.

Interviewer: What's the game?

Desmond: Showtime, CarneyVale Showtime.

Interviewer: And you?

Bruce: I'm Bruce Chia. I'm the lead programmer for the game.

Interviewer: What's the game about?

Desmond: Basically, the game you play as a circus acrobat. You are supposed to use your environment to swing you to the top to a ring of fire to win the game. So, along the way you go through many cool stuff like rockets, electric fires, balls of flame, just cool stuff.

Rosemary
Ulysses   |   Reclaim Your Game!   |   July 22, 2009

The smell of lightly-scented candles, the sound of trees swaying against the unseen wind, the taste of freshly-squeezed orange juice - our senses, taken for granted almost every day, can unconsciously activate even the most repressed and faded of memories. Some evoke idealised events of euphoria and exuberance. Others can exaggerate our moments of grief and trauma. Clara Fernández-Vara and Sarah Sperry, game designers and conceptual writers of this reinvented point-and-click adventure, utilises these unassuming senses in their short, but emotionally-driven story of Rosemary: a curious twenty-something-year old in pursuit to find the whereabouts of her long, lost childhood friend, Tom.

PAX 10: CarneyVale: Showtime
Nick   |   Bytejacker   |   July 23, 2009

CarneyVale: Showtime is a fantastic vertical platformer from GAMBIT Game Lab, a collaborative project by MIT and the government of Singapore. In CarneyVale, you manipulate a ragdoll circus acrobat around obstacles and into a ring of fire, whereafter you're immediately rated on your performance and awarded one star for each of five factors (completion, time taken, balloons collected, picking up the bonus star, and whether you achieved a 'perfect run' by taking no damage).

You'll be indirectly manipulating Slinky primarily through the use of Grabbers, which are sort of 360-degree mechanical robot-arm trapezes that you control entirely by pressing the A button. The Grabbers are perpetually aimed at Slinky, and if you activate one when he (she? it?) is within range, it grabs him and begin to spins him in the direction he was already heading. You then fling him further in the level by letting go of the button, and so on until you reach the level's end. It's a difficult mechanic to explain, but the concept makes a lot of sense when you see it in action and even more sense when you actually play it.

2009 PAX 10 Selected From Over 150 Submissions
Leigh Alexander   |   Gamasutra   |   July 16, 2009

Organizers have chosen the 10 best games from over 150 submissions to be showcased at Penny Arcade's PAX consumer event this year, including CarneyVale: Showtime and Osmos.

Now in its second year, the PAX 10 is designed to highlight the efforts of indie game creators working on original, self-funded and self-published, fully playable, non-mod game projects across all platforms.

The developers of the top ten games will be given four exhibitor passes each to the Penny Arcade Expo to be held September 4 to 6, and will showcase the games in a special booth at the show.

Singapore animation piggybacks on government support
Money Sharma   |   Bollywood Hungama   |   July 8, 2009

Another coup was scored when CarneyVale: Showtime, a game fully developed by a group of Singaporean students under the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, beat 350 entries from around the world to win the top prize in the Microsoft XNA Dream-Build-Play competition. The GAMBIT Game Lab is an initiative announced in 2006 and is aimed at promoting research and development in the interactive and digital media space. It went on to become the first made-in-Singapore game on the Xbox Live Community Games Channel. Game developer portal Gamasutra voted Carneyvale the No.1 XNA Community Game of 2008, winning praises for its high fun factor.

Indie Game Review: CarneyVale Showtime
ExL Studios   |   ExL Studios   |   June 16, 2009

CarneyVale: Showtime has some of the most impressive indie graphics on the Xbox Live Indie Game Marketplace. From the character animations and physics, to the particles and flames, the game does not disappoint in this department. With my time playing the game I have never encountered a graphical hiccup or file failing to load (or lagging). The colorful art scheme just screams circus style down to the very lighting effects in the buildings. Every building, menu, and screen has been created with the circus theme in mind, as have the levels.

GameSetLinks: The Smell of Rosemary
Simon Carless   |   GameSetWatch   |   July 3, 2009

As we saunter happily into a long weekend in the States (yep, that July 4th thing in full effect), let's bust out a new set of slightly extended GameSetLinks, headed by the latest GAMBIT/MIT Game Lab student title, which continues their customarily interesting attitude to experimental student games, with an oldskool adventure twist, even.

Indie Nation: Rosemary
Anthony Burch   |   Destructoid   |   July 2, 2009

I have a confession to make: I'm not really a fan of the indie adventure game scene. Apart from the odd deconstructionist works like Snow, most indie adventures belong to the charming, but oft-frustrating school of Sierra and LucasArts design: their interfaces needlessly separate the simple act of interaction into a dozen different verbs, and their puzzles often require the player to read the designer's mind.

It was with some skepticism, then, that I played Rosemary at Nick Chester's suggestion. I entered the game fully prepared to exit and delete it at the slightest sign of an unnecessarily complicated inventory puzzle.

I found something much cleverer, and much more unusual than what I expected. Yes, you use inventory items on other inventory items, and talk to characters who speak through dialogue trees. That is where the similarities between Rosemary and other adventure games end. As much as I love a good round of insult swordfighting, Rosemary is something far more clever, meaningful and subversive than most of the adventure games I've played, indie or not.

Innovative Casual Game Design: A Year in Review
Nick Fortugno, Juan Gril   |   Gamasutra   |   June 19, 2009

For the past two years, Nick Fortugno and I (Juan Gril) have worked in a session at GDC where we talk about the casual games that impressed us the most during the past year. We don't give Oscars away, as it's not a "best games of the year list". Rather, it's a list of games we think are innovative, and we group them in trends. These trends are usually genres which are not stagnating (new games come out constantly with new design ideas in them), or are new to the market (a game or group of games which creates a new genre).... [CarneyVale: Showtime is] an almost one-button game. Your objective is to make your character (a clown) jump from platform to platform performing acrobatic stunts. Very clever game mechanic.

Indie Review: CarneyVale Showtime!
Michelle Gonzales (Cleaner7)   |   360 Junkies   |   June 25, 2009

The official Xbox Live Marketplace page of CarneyVale Showtime describes it as a "vertical ragdoll platform game". While that description is accurate the game is so much more than that... Honestly, I couldn't recommend this game enough. The short trial was so fun that I kept coming back for more. It is this simple, yet addicting gameplay that convinced me to buy the full game. That's saying a lot coming from someone who is an achievement whore and therefore doesn't really buy Community Games. Overall, I'd say this game is easily worth the $5 asking price and felt that a developer that obviously put a lot of work into this game deserved to be rewarded with a purchase. And I can say that I got an awesome game out of it!

Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned From the Godfather II Videogame
Jamin Brophy-Warren   |   The Wall Street Journal   |   May 20, 2009

"With a game you can see how previous decisions affect future choices. Players get emotionally invested and they want to do well," says Jason Begy, producer of Tipping Point, a puzzle board game based on a paper by MIT Sloan professor Nelson Repenning called "Past the Tipping Point: The Persistence of Fire Fighting in Product Development." The game, which is being developed into an electronic version, requires four players to plan together to manage the process of prototyping and production. Each player places game pieces on the game board to create projects and manage work flow through creating balance between "concept work" and "production work." The game ends when the projects move too far past the "deadline."

"If someone tells you a story, that may or may not have an impact, but we learn better from our own mistakes than the mistakes of others," says Mr. Begy.

Edge Magazine
Creation Myths
Edge Magazine   |   Edge Magazine   |   June 2009, pp 79-85

Microsoft promised to put the indie back into independent development. Six months after launch, have Xbox Community Games delivered?

...What has happened is that, despite the surfeit of bad games, a few early efforts make excellent arguments for CG's existence. Carneyvale Showtime is a simple concept brought to vivid life that sees you throwing an acrobat from pole to pole using just his own quirky momentum. It's colourful stuff with a polished control mechanic, and would raise no eyebrows as an XBLA release.

Video Game Factory Line
Andrea Peterson   |   CNN's iReport.com   |   April 1, 2009

This video features GAMBIT's Clara Fernández-Vara, Matthew Weise and Marleigh Norton speaking about the process behind making video games. It was produced by Andrea Peterson from Boston University and submitted to iReport.com, the user-generated website from CNN.

"What is it that we want to do? We have a world, what has happened in this world? And from that, what does the player have to do in order to discover that story?" notes Fernández-Vara. "The imagination has no limit. The limit that we have is time."

"I actually joke about how the game industry doesn't like to talk about the 'F' word, which is 'fun'," says Norton. "We all agree that everyone plays games for fun, but it's hard to quantify what that means."

Endless Loop: TWC's academic study of chiptune history
Brandon Boyer   |   BoingBoing: Offworld   |   April 16, 2009

From the good things in unexpected places dept.: academic journal Transformative Works has devoted its latest issue to the subject of games, and chief amongst its best pieces is MIT students Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz's exhaustive look at the history and rise of the chiptune genre.

From the earliest hardware hacking days of the Atari 2600, to the landmark creation of the SID chip (right, used most famously in the Commodore 64) to the concurrent Amiga cracking/tracking/demo scenes, Driscoll sets up the aesthetic roots of what would later be embraced by the likes of upstart (and still prolific) netlabel micromusic.net.

Indie Week: Day Two - The First Five IGF Nominees
Meagan VanBurkleo   |   GameInformer   |   4/21/2009

CarneyVale Showtime highlights the potential for entertainment and innovation in the XNA community games space. The title unfolds in the world of CarneyVale, a place tucked away between reality and dreams, where the entire world is enraptured by the circus. Here is where we meet a performer named Slinky. Slinky isn't human, instead he is one of the hundreds of puppets animated by the raw magic of CarneyVale. However, unlike all the other lifeless puppets, Slinky can dream and he dreams of being the greatest acrobat that has ever lived.

"The world of Carneyvale actually began with a summer project done in Gambit," explained Desmond Wong, the level designer and lead artist for CarneyVale Showtime. "A small group of students were tasked to develop a whipping game, and the idea of being a ringmaster in a circus performance soon came into play. The game was called Wiip, and we thought that it had so much potential that we decided to develop another game set in the same universe."

Playing Around at MIT
Marlene Genovese   |   Boston Cyberarts Blog   |   April 7, 2009

If you are curious about how video games are made you will want to add the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab to your list of events to see. This isn't a commercial lab so they are inviting you right in to show you how it's done.

In the development phase, video games are a nascent combination of graphics and programming, all which will run on an engine platform (video and engine processors) which originate the interaction between the programmed content and the player(s). Game theorists, artists and programmers collaborate on a medium that is interactive, fun, visually pleasing while trying to achieve a technically smooth experience. The grad students at the lab are doubly busy this spring as they each have a thesis to complete and part of the exhibit to design for the opening day on May 1.

At the exhibit you will be able to view a plotted history of video game craft in the Boston/Cambridge area. There will also be plenty of opportunities to sit down and enjoy some of the local games that have a place in this history.

10 Reasons to Hate Every Console
Mikel Reparaz   |   Games Radar   |   March 28, 2009

No Achievements in community games: There's a very good chance that some of you are completely unaware of the Xbox Live Community Games service, which enables independent developers to upload and distribute their games through Live. There are numerous catches, of course, one of which is that the developers can't add Achievement points to anything they create.

While it's understandable that Microsoft would think some "developers" would immediately abuse the system and go nuts inflating gamerscores, there are a lot of great Community games that are being completely ignored just because Achievement whores don't think they're worth the time or money. You'd think it'd be worth it if a modest 50 or so points could convince more people to buy games like CarneyVale Showtime, but Microsoft apparently disagrees.

Wired
Big Games From Small Developers
Chris Kohler   |   Wired   |   March 27, 2009

At this year's Independent Games Festival, small development teams swung for the fences, bringing us some innovative, clever and fun indie titles for 2009.

(Note: this is a video report from the IGF section of GDC 2009. CarneyVale: Showtime shows up at the 1:20 mark.)

The Games of the 2009 Independent Games Festival: Part 6
The Zombies   |   Video Game Zombies   |   Mar. 21, 2009

[CarneyVale: Showtime] proves to be a rather enjoyable yet challenging variation on platformers. The Grabbers make you have to decide between the speed needed for higher and longer tosses of Slinky and the accuracy needed occasionally to reach specific areas and targets. The controls are simple and give you all the control you need for maneuvering Slinky throughout the varying levels. The graphics are clear and tend to have the classic slightly fanciful look that circuses are known for using, which lends a touch of a sideshow feel to the title. Although I did not get a chance to try out too much of the game, when I was finished, I found myself wishing I could have played more. The game allows you to pass the levels relatively easily, but requires more time, effort, and skill to accomplish the objectives in each successive level. The inclusion of those objectives, which help unlock concept art and secret levels, give players a series of goals to shoot for and increase possible replay value. Since XBL Community Games don't have achievements, these objectives serve much the same purpose.

GDC09: IGF showcases 'the next great mobile game' concepts
Randy Nelson   |   Joystiq   |   March 24, 2009

Another spin on the competitive photo-taking concept was Picopoke, which is being developed by Singapore-MIT's GAMBIT Game Lab. It's different in that it "lives" on Facebook, calling a mobile device into the equation simply to snap pictures. Each week, a new target image is displayed via the app, but it's not an absolute -- the winner is chosen based on community votes. So, for example, if the original image is a jack-in-the-box, a user could take a photo of their friend Jack in a box and it just might win.

AVC at GDC '09, Day Three
Chris Dahlen and John Teti   |   The Onion's AV Club   |   March 26, 2009

CarneyVale Showtime by the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab
Showtime is all about the kinetics. A circus acrobat, who you control with a single button and the D-pad, flies from trapeze to trapeze in a circus tent, trying to make it to the ring of fire at the top, and maybe collecting some balloons on the way. It's a mundane concept; the unrelenting, fluid movement is what makes this game.

This Isn't a Game, People!
Dan Pink   |   danpink.com   |   March 13, 2009

A good project manager is worth her weight in gold. But how can someone learn the sophisticated skills of planning, budgeting, executing, and keeping on deadline a complex project?

The gurus at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab have an answer: a board game. They call it Tipping Point. And if you've got scissors and tape at the ready, you can download it here for free.

Downloads of Fun
Steve Tilley   |   London Free Press   |   March 5, 2009

For the past few weeks I've been sifting through these offerings, looking for diamonds in the rough. Microsoft's recent Dream-Build-Play competition has helped in that regard by highlighting a crop of top-notch community games, including the old-school side-scrolling shooter Weapon of Choice and the brain-tickling, soothing puzzler Blow.

Then there's CarneyVale: Showtime, designed by a seven-person team from Singapore's GAMBIT game lab. It challenges players to fling an acrobatic clown up through a variety of intricately designed and peril-fraught levels, combining ragdoll physics with addictive and challenging gameplay.

CarneyVale: Showtime ate up so much of my time this week that I had to shelve a planned review of F.E.A.R. 2 because I just didn't get around to it. Who wants to shoot soldiers and chase a demonic little girl when you can fling a hapless acrobat up, up and away through a bunch of circus-themed levels?

Selling for roughly the same price as a venti latte at Starbucks, CarneyVale: Showtime is so good it feels almost like finding a copy of Action Comics No. 1 at a garage sale for 25c ... after you've dug through a stack of mouldy, crumbly Archies. Viva la independents.

Game Theory
Erica Naone   |   MIT Technology Review   |   March/April 2009

It's Halloween night and I am a pirate, with gold rings in my ears and a wide, unwieldy hat on my head. I'm paying no attention to the colorful characters that surround me at the costume party--the SpongeBobs and Joe the Plumbers. Nothing matters except the plastic guitar in my hands, the color-coded notes streaming down the television screen, Betty Crocker on drums, and Richard Simmons on vocals. Deaf to the din of party conversation, my ears are trained on every note of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter."

We go on that way all night, the characters swirling in and out of our imaginary band. I play every part. My bandmates are Alan Moore's V, Richard Nixon, Cupid, and a sexy ladybug. I don't need to know their real names--the camaraderie is there the moment they pick up their instruments. When the party thins out, I look up to find that it is 4:00 a.m. That's the kind of thing that can happen when you play Rock Band.

MIT's Game Lab
Erica Naone   |   MIT Technology Review   |   March/April 2009

On a computer screen in the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab at MIT, a bubble- blowing redhead leads a parade of gum-chewing followers through village streets, pied piper-like. Suddenly, police officers attack the parade. The gum girl fights back, trapping the officers in her bubbles.

A sly commentary on politics in Singapore, where bubble gum is sold only in pharmacies for medicinal purposes, the game known as Gumbeat is just one result of a collaborative effort between MIT students and their counterparts in that country. Founded in 2006, the GAMBIT lab fosters a hybrid community of academics and industry professionals, who explore new directions for video gaming.

Collaboration with MIT Gaming Lab Fosters Industry Development in Singapore
Knowledge@SMU   |   Knowledge@SMU   |   Feb. 3, 2009

Singapore aims to be a seedbed for the computing gaming industry. One educational initiative to develop in-country capacity is an ongoing gaming laboratory with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) known as GAMBIT (Gamers, Asethetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, Technology). GAMBIT is one of several initiatives aimed at developing a complete ecosystem for computer game development in Singapore - an industry estimated to have been worth US$55.6 billion in 2008.

Postmortem: Singapore-MIT GAMBIT's CarneyVale: Showtime
Bruce Chia and Desmond Wong   |   Gamasutra   |   Feb. 24, 2009

In this Gamasutra-exclusive postmortem, the creators of IGF Grand Prize finalist and XNA Community Games standout CarneyVale: Showtime discuss what went right and wrong during its creation.

The fun of gaming has come to a whole new group of people!
John Tesh   |   The John Tesh Blog   |   Feb. 16, 2009

Wow! Do you find yourself amazed from time to time with new developments in technology? I definitely do, and I loved this: Science Daily reports a new computer game developed by MIT and Singaporean students that makes it possible for visually impaired people to play the game on a level field with their sighted friends- joining in the fun of gaming!

The game, called AudiOdyssey, simulates a deejay trying to build up a catchy tune and get people dancing. By swinging the remote-control device used by the Nintendo Wii, which senses motion, the player can set the rhythm and lay down one musical track after another, gradually building up a richer musical track.

CarneyVale Showtime: The circus comes to your Xbox
Darren Zenko   |   The Toronto Star   |   Jan. 31, 2009

Well, that's it for another January...and not a moment too soon. While most folks save their calendrical opprobrium (kids, it pays to enrich your word power) for February, winter's dismal endgame, it's January that hard-core gamers (and game reviewers) most dread. After the holiday rush, the stream of new releases freezes up, leaving us desperately panning for novelty in a trickle of also-rans and future bargain-bin staples.

One bright spot this year, though, has been Microsoft's Community Games channel, the crowd-moderated "YouTube of video games" that's been providing a steady flow of indie titles. With a modest fistful of MS points, Xbox 360 owners can while away the winter with an eclectic and ever-growing stable of platformers, puzzles, board games, strategy games, top-down shooters, you name it. There's even room for plenty of strange non-game content: soothing ocean-sound screensavers, a digital version of the ever-popular video fireplace, a utility that repurposes the vibrating controller as a massage accessory. Amid all this, nothing has brightened my January like CarneyVale Showtime.

Xbox LIVE Community Games (Mini-Reviews)
Robert VerBruggen   |   Cheat Code Central   |   Feb. 13, 2009

Score: 4.6/5

CarneyVale: Showtime's developers bill the game as a "vertical ragdoll platformer," but the idea is much more interesting than that name would imply. You play as Slinky, a ragdoll and aspiring circus performer. You are incapable of jumping, but you can swing around the various trapezes strewn about each level and move left and right through the air. The main goal is to make it from the bottom of each course through the ring of fire at the top.

...The game boasts a polished presentation, with colorful 2-D graphics and the expected circus music. Its short length is a definite downside, but you can complement the built-in stages with your own. It would be even better if you could share your levels with friends; maybe that's in the cards for an update or sequel?

Video Game Technology Could Fuel Mass. Recovery
Steve LaBlanc for AP   |   WHDH 7 Boston   |   Feb. 8, 2009

Like other struggling states, Massachusetts is looking anywhere it can for jobs and cash-- including the virtual world of video game technology with its mix of fantasy and rabid fans.

While Boston is home to top gaming companies like the developers of the hugely popular "Rock Band," "BioShock" and "The Lord of the Rings Online" it's just fourth or fifth on the list of top video gaming clusters behind locations like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Austin.

Political leaders like Gov. Deval Patrick are hoping to move the state up in the ranks, by coaxing more companies to Massachusetts.

Flying Through the Air with the Greatest of Satisfaction
Brad Gallaway   |   Gamecritics.com   |   Feb. 2, 2009

A perfect example of the old adage that good things come in small packages, the unassuming, overlooked, practically invisible CarneyVale Showtime from the GAMBIT Game Lab is one of last year's best titles that nobody played. Located in the user-created Community Games section of the new Xbox 360 dashboard, there's not really anything to distinguish CarneyVale from the dozens of uninspired games tucked away there--but only after a minute or two of play, it's clear to see that it stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Although initial impressions might be deceiving, CarneyVale Showtime is in fact, an extremely elegant and clever design that requires a good degree of hand-eye coordination. Its challenge is nicely complemented by the absolutely spot-on controls and impeccable level of polish present everywhere throughout the game.

Independent Games Festival Finalists Roundup
Jim Rossignol   |   Eurogamer   |   Feb. 4, 2009

[CarneyVale: Showtime] is a kind of ragdoll acrobatics-meets-Peggle versus pinball, in which you control a magical puppet who intends to be the world's greatest acrobat. The levels are a mixture of centrifugal devices and trampoline-like surfaces off which you can bounce. Performing tricks, hitting particular highs, and then completing the level pushes you forward, and opens up increasingly complex acrobatic puzzles.

While it appears straightforward to start off with, it rapidly becomes clear that it's a highly unusual game, blending action timing with some puzzle-solving elements. (Just how do you get through this level, or that? How do you maximise your points with a convoluted route to the final somersault?) The small amount of balance control you have over your tumbling puppet means the game rewards extended time spent with it, as it's possible to become increasingly skilled over many sessions, manipulating your charge through some serious split-second stunts. CarneyVale: Showtime is fantastically presented, and possibly the most polished-looking of the games on this Grand Prize list.

Hak5 Episode 416: Independent Games
Shannon   |   Hak5   |   Dec. 17th, 2008

In this extensive episode Matt shows us how to setup SSH tunneling to securely transmit HTTP traffic and more while on the go. Shannon checks out some student entries to the 2009 Independent Games Festival, including City Rain, Glitch, Froggle, Blazar, and Akrasia. Darren puts together a PHP script that, in conjunction with Ping.fm, allows you to update multiple blogs at once including your own hosted Wordpress. Plus this weeks LAN Party, revamped Trivia and viewer questions.

(Note: skip to around 31:45 for Akrasia.)

CarneyVale Showtime Tops List of Best 2008 XNA Games
Steve Watts   |   1up.com   |   Dec. 30, 2008

With the end of the year approaching quickly, it's customary to see various sites ranking top games of the year, but Gamasutra took a different approach and ranked their top 10 of the XNA Community Games for the Xbox 360. The very top of the list went to CarneyVale Showtime, a ragdoll physics arcade game that comes complete with its own level editor for 400 MS Points ($5 USD). Ultratron, Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp, Duotrix, and Hexothermic round out the top 5 games listed. These might be good choices for those strapped for cash, as every game on the list can be purchased for 200 ($2.50) or 400 ($5) MS Points. Check the full list if you're looking for a little extra XNA gaming to kick off the new year.

Destructoid review: CarneyVale Showtime
Jim Sterling   |   Destructoid   |   Dec. 30, 2008

When I first started challenging Community Games developers to submit their work for review on Destructoid, I had hoped that some real gems would come out of the woodwork and prove their worth. I had not, however, expected CarneyVale Showtime.

At the risk of spoiling the whole review before you even read it, let me say that if you're at all interested in the potential of XNA games, then you really, really, really need to check this one out. A breath of fresh air? This is more like a gale of the stuff.

MIT students create AudiOdyssey, a musical game for the blind
Jeremy Hill   |   GamerTell   |   Jan. 4, 2009

It's good to see someone working on games for those who are disabled in some way.

The Singapore M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab's main goal is to make games that can be distributed globally from the start instead of producing games from one continent, then later translating them for other continents. A student named Eitan Glinert thought it would be a good idea to make a game catered to people who are visually impaired for his Master's thesis.

Along with the help of seven other students and a professor, the team created a game called AudiOdyssey that allows the blind to play alongside with those who can see.

Local Studios, Global Audience
Sherwin Loh, Oo Gin Lee   |   Straits Times Digital Life   |   Jan. 16, 2009

Established in 2007, the lab is a five-year research partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Media Development Authority's Interactive Digital Media R&D office. It looks into game research and development.

Top Circus Act
Sherwin Loh   |   Straits Times Digital Life   |   January 14, 2009

Clowning around can definitely get you places. Created by the local Gambit game lab, CarneyVale Showtime is an illogical yet fun-filled romp that is both frustrating and fulfilling at the same time.

Got Game Podcast: Jesper Juul.
Got Game?   |   Got Game? Podcast   |   Jan. 18, 2008

Jesper Juul, a lecturer and researcher at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, discusses some of his "big picture" ideas around video games.

Игры для слабовидящих людей
Технодром   |   news.gala.net   |   Jan. 8, 2009

Организация Gambit Game Lab (совместное предприятие американских и сингапурских учёных) выпускает AudiOdyssey. Это очень смелая и хорошая инициатива, направленная на создание игр для незрячих, пишет expert.

В проекте юзерам надо стать клубным ди-джеем и крутить винилы. Чтобы разогреть толпу и привлечь на площадку побольше людей, в музыке должен совпадать ритм. Совмещать два трека нужно используя Wiimote или простую клавиатуру. Играть можно ориентируясь только по звуку. Очень интересная идея.

(Or, if Yahoo's Babel Fish is to be believed:

Games for the weaklying-see people

The organization Of gambit Of game Of lab (the joint venture of American and Singapore scientists) lets out AudiOdyssey. This is the very daring and good initiative, directed toward the creation of games for the blind, it writes expert.

In the project to [yuzeram] it is necessary to become club di- Jay and to turn vinyls. In order to heat crowd and to draw on the area a little more of people, in the music the rhythm must coincide. Combined two tracks must be using Wiimote or simple keyboard. To play it is possible being oriented only on the sound. Very interesting idea.)

Jesper Juul - a GameZombie.tv Exclusive Interview
GameZombie.tv   |   GameZombie.tv   |   August 6, 2008

GameZombie.tv presents an exclusive video interview with Jesper Juul, video game ludologist.

Independents' Day
Dan Amrich   |   Official Xbox Magazine   |   pp. 32-36

CarneyVale: Showtime is a sequel to a game you'll probably never play. Last year, students at the MIT-backed GAMBIT game lab in Singapore created a circus-themed PC game in Flash, where players trained circus animals by whipping a Wii remote. Rather than port the cheekily named CarneyVale: Wiip over to 360 for this year's DBP contest, the team kept the circus theme and created a brand-new game in the same world, this time based on acrobatics.

(Note: For more, download the PDF below or visit www.oxmonline.com.)

Best of Casual Gameplay 2008
Psychotronic   |   Jay is Games   |   Jan. 12, 2009

Once again, a year has passed. We've tried our hardest to recommend the very best online games and downloadable casual games available on the Web, and now it's time for you to have your say. Yes, it's time for the fifth annual Jay Is Games "Best of" feature. Help us out by voting for your favorite games of 2008!

(Note: GAMBIT's summer 2008 prototype Akrasia is nominated in the interactive art or puzzle category.)

Game Career Guide
Ragdoll Acrobats: An Interview with IGF Finalists CarneyVale: Showtime Team
GameCareerGuide.com   |   GameCareerGuide.com   |   Jan. 12, 2009

CarneyVale: Showtime, a student-made game about a circus acrobat, was just named a finalist in the IGF 2009 main competition. GameCareerGuide caught up with the students and spoke to them about developing the game, from how they optimized the code to the use of ragdoll physics. Programmer Bruce Chia, a student at National University of Singapore, whose professional affiliation is with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, spoke on behalf of the team.

Mixing Music in a Video Game for the Blind
Owen Good   |   Kotaku   |   Jan. 4, 2009

Video, of course, takes its root from the Latin word for "see." So a "video game" for those who have lost their sight might look like a paradox, but it doesn't sound like one.

Gambit Game Lab, a collaboration of developers at MIT and Singapore, have developed AudiOdyssey as a proof-of-concept that games can be created for the disabled to enjoy, too. (You might remember Gambit as the winner of the grand prize of Microsoft's Dream-Build-Play game development contest.)

Gambit's mission is to develop games for a global market, rather than build for one language/culture and translate it elsewhere. One MIT designer got to thinking about markets in something other than a geographic sense, and wondered if a game could be built to include both blind and sighted gamers.

See Me, Hear Me: A Video Game for the Blind
Abby Ellin   |   New York Times   |   Dec. 26, 2008

The Singapore-M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab ("gambit" for gamers, aesthetics, mechanics, business, innovation and technology) brings together computer geeks of Cambridge and computer geeks of the Asian city-state. The point: to develop video games for the global market from the outset, not translate them from one continent to another.

Eitan Glinert, there as a master's candidate in computer science, got to thinking about one market lost in translation. "People with disabilities were being left out of progress in the gaming market," says Mr. Glinert, 26. For his master's thesis, Mr. Glinert wanted to make a game that would work equally for the visually impaired and for the seeing, so they could play together.

Gamasutra's Top 20 Trends of 2008
Christian Nutt   |   Gamasutra   |   Dec. 17, 2008

#10. Game Schools Birth Hit-Ready Titles

Game education at universities isn't a new trend -- but it's interesting to see just how directly these students are transitioning into fully functioning professional teams directly from their educational careers... The Dream-Build-Play winner, CarneyVale: Showtime, was created at MIT's GAMBIT lab in Singapore.

Best Of Indie Games: Melancholic Naked Assassin Musings
Tim W.   |   GameSetWatch   |   Dec. 6, 2008

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

Game Pick: 'Akrasia' (AHA! Studios, freeware)
"An experimental game which features multiple endings, where players can arrive at a different conclusion based on the number of pills they collect and the state they are in when exiting a maze."

MDA collaborates with Microsoft to fuel Made-in-Singapore game content through Xbox LIVE Community Games
idm.sg   |   idm.sg   |   Dec. 15, 2008

...Along with the launch [of the Xbox LIVE Community Games Channel] is the debut of CarneyVale:Showtime, the first Singapore game set to be published on the Xbox LIVE Community Games Channel. Developed by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the multi-agency Interactive Digital Media R&D Programme Office (IDMPO) hosted by MDA, the game had earlier beaten 350 entries from around the world to win the top prize of US$40,000 at the 2008 Microsoft XNA Dream-Build-Play competition. With the deployment, millions of Xbox gamers in the world will now be able to purchase and enjoy CarneyVale:Showtime for about S$8 or 400 Microsoft Points.

GAMBIT Game Lab Showcases Results
GameAxis   |   GameAxis   |   Oct. 2008, p. 8

GAMBIT (Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, Technology) is the result of a five-year collaborative effort between Singapore's Interactive Digital Media R & D Programme Offices and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project was conceived as a way of establishing Singapore as a core in the growing International Game Industry, and 30% of the students involved in last year's GAMBIT internship are now employed by major game companies in Singapore.

Let's Look at IGF Mobile's DS Entries
Eric Caoli   |   Tiny Cartridge   |   Dec. 7, 2008

This coming Independent Games Festival Mobile competition -- an event designed to "promote innovation in portable games" -- features five Nintendo DS entries, three of which I've never seen before... [GAMBIT] put together some really interesting prototype Wii games last year, several of which I remember seeing featured in some Brit gaming mag's sidebar. You can see more screens and even a trailer [for Oozerts] on GAMBIT's site.

Weekend Download: Akrasia
JohnB   |   Casual Gameplay @ Jay is Games   |   Nov. 29, 2008

Akrasia (Windows, 36MB, free) - An experimental art-style game based on the abstract concept of addiction, Akrasia was created to make the player think. Set in a maze that represents the mind, you will experience two different states, one normal and one not-so-normal. Collecting pills pushes your life meter to the left, while running into the ghost will trigger the maze's exit. Depending on your behavior the game will have a number of different outcomes, and the meaning of each is entirely up to you. Play through it several times, experimenting with different strategies each time you do, and see just how much the game can make you think.

Freeware Game Pick: Akrasia
Tim W.   |   Indie Games: The Weblog   |   Nov. 27, 2008

Akrasia is sort of an experimental game which features multiple endings, where players can arrive at a different conclusion based on the number of pills they collect and the state they are in when exiting the maze. One for the art game lovers.

2009 IGF Mobile Competition Reveals Record Number Of Entries
Gamasutra Staff   |   Gamasutra   |   Dec. 3, 2008

The organizers of the Independent Games Festival Mobile have revealed a total of 107 entries for the second year of the event, more than doubling the amount of entries seen in the inaugural competition. ...A diverse set of entries have come from many different mobile formats and multiple continents, with the diversity of mobile platforms being reflected in some of the following entries:

Picopoke [MMS] (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)
"Picopoke is an interpretive photo game which brings flexible play to a new level. The game revolves around weekly challenge rounds, involving fulfilling challenges by taking photos and voting to determine winners. Picopoke takes advantage of the social networking community. Picopoke can also be played with mobile phones via multimedia messaging service (MMS), capturing moments spontaneously with camera phones."

Singapore Team Wins Microsoft's Global Xbox Game Development Challenge
Channel NewsAsia   |   Channel NewsAsia   |   Oct. 31, 2008

A Singpore team has won Microsoft's global Xbox Game Development challenge. Team GAMBIT beat 7,800 participants from 100 countries and they won forty thousand U.S. dollars for their winning entry, which was CarneyVale: Showtime, an acrobatic puzzle game where players have to complete various circus stunts.

(Note: link will load a 976KB .wmv file.)

Gambit Their Way to Global Game Win
Hederman Supian   |   Today   |   B13

A local team of students has earned a place in gaming history by winning Dream-Build-Play 2008, Microsoft's global game development competition.

Team Gambit's winning title, CarnyVale: Showtime, beat 350 games submitted from 100 countries to win the top prize of US$40,000 ($58,800) in this annual event.

The team is made up of seven students from National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Polytechnic and Nanyang Technological University, and is part of the Singapore-MIT Gambit (Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, Technology) game lab.

Showtime! S'pore Game is 1st
Kenny Chee   |   My Paper   |   Page A4

It's a national achievement to crow about: A Singapore team have beaten nearly 350 other groups in a global video-game development contest to come out tops.

Team Gambit scored the highest marks for fun, innovation and production quality for their wacky circus-themed game called CarneyVale: Showtime.

The seven-member team, comprising students from various tertiary institutions, developed the game from June to September.

Local Game Wins Competition
Tham Yuen-C   |   The Straits Times   |   Oct. 30, 2008

A LOCALLY-MADE video game could soon debut on the world stage after it beat almost 350 other entries in a global game development competition.
The puzzle game, made by a team of seven young local developers from the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, came out tops at a contest organised by tech giant Microsoft.

Along with a cash prize of US$40,000 (S$60,112), it also gets a stab at being launched on the online store for the Xbox game console. The service, which gamers use to download titles directly onto their system, has 14 million members around the world.

MIT News Office
Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab students win Microsoft Dream-Build-Play Competition
MIT News Office   |   MIT News Office   |   Nov. 3, 2008

A video game developed by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab has won first prize in the 2008 Microsoft XNA Dream-Build-Play game development competition.

The winning game, "CarneyVale: Showtime," was developed by a team of seven Singaporean students working in the Singapore office of the international game lab. The prize includes $40,000 and consideration for publication on the Microsoft XBox LIVE service.

My #1 Favorite Dream-Build-Play 2008 Winner: 'CarneyVale: Showtime'
Patrick Klepek   |   MTV Multiplayer   |   10/29/08

Today we have exclusive hands-on impressions with Microsoft's 2008 Dream-Build-Play winners. Of the six winners, we've picked our three favorites...

You should be jealous that I've played "CarneyVale: Showtime." There is no reason the game isn't on Xbox Live Arcade right now.

Thankfully, eventually it should.

Microsoft awarded "CarneyVale" the Dream-Build-Play 2008 grand prize. I agree with them. It's one of the most unique games I've played.

XNA Dream-Build-Play Winners Announced - Check Out These Videos
Ryan Langley   |   GamerBytes   |   10/30/2008

If you've been following us for the past few days, the XNA games have been a fairly big topic. Today, Microsoft have announced the winners of their Dream-Build-Play competition. Four lucky people were able to grab over $70,000 worth of prizes for their game and an invitation to release their title for Xbox Live Arcade.

Below is each title that won a piece of the prize, along with a video showing them off. They all look very interesting and very different to anything else on Xbox Live Arcade.

Microsoft Reveals Dream Build Play Competition Winners
Gamasutra   |   Gamasutra   |   10/30/2008

CarneyVale: Showtime is a vertical ragdoll platform game. In the game, you play as Slinky, a circus acrobat trying to rise up the ranks by performing acrobatic tricks and death-defying stunts through increasingly complex arenas. Chia even built-in a circus map editor for players to create their own obstacles to overcome, bringing user-generated content to a new a level.

Microsoft reveals XNA compo winners
Tom Bromwell   |   Eurogamer   |   10/30/2008

Microsoft has announced the winners of the Dream-Build-Play competition for 2008, all of whom will now be invited to publish their XNA-based games on Xbox Live's Community Games channel, which launches with New Xbox Experience on 19th November.

Of the four winners, the Singaporean Team GAMBIT got USD 40,000 for their CarneyVale: Showtime puzzle game, where players complete circus stunts, and which even has a map editor for users to create content. Very 'now', Team GAMBIT.

Microsoft Announced Dream-Build-Play 2008 Winners
Kat Bailey   |   1up.com   |   10/29/2008

Now here's one we haven't seen before - a game based on completing crazy circus stunts. Apparently Microsoft was equally bemused and impressed, because they named it the winner of their Dream-Build-Play 2008 game development contest.

Over at the Gamerscore Blog, Microsoft announced that CarneyVale: Showtime was the big winner of the competition's second year, which asks hobbyist and independent developers to create innovative games using Microsoft's XNA Game Studio. The kicker? It even included a built-in circus map editor so players could create their own obstacles. Developer Team GAMBIT of Singapore earned $40,000 for taking home the grand prize.

Singapore Strength in Games
Lianhe Zaobao zbNOW   |   Lianhe Zaobao zbNOW   |   Sept. 17, 2008

This is a feature story on the Games Convention Asia (GCA) which opened on 18 September. Some 30 companies from 13 countries showcased their latest games products and the organiser expect a turnout of 100,000. The feature also profiled three local groups and their products. These include a student team from GAMBIT Games Lab, a team of lecturers and students from Nanyang Polytechnic and a furniture firm. The feature also quoted Ms Teo Chor Guan, saying that two of its seven games have demonstrated potential and MDA would explore commercialising them after the GCA.

GCA 2008 has growth, students optimistic
Xin.sg   |   Xin.sg   |   Sept. 20, 2008

This online report noted that this year's Games Convention Asia would have free talks by industry experts catered more for students interested in games. The report added that there is a growing trend of students taking up games-related courses. The report also quoted MDA saying that the games industry in Singapore is growing and there are now 35 foreign and local games companies here. (Note: linked PDF is in Mandarin.)

GAMBIT Reaps Results
Singapore Media Fusion   |   Media Fusion eNewsletter   |   Issue 18

Imagine you have been hired as an intern at a candy reclamation plant and your job is to dispense Oozerts candy bars into candy wrappers and ensure each one has the precise number required by each monster.

Or imagine being able to draw your own game character and watch it morph into a 3D being with attributes connected to its shape - longer legs for jumping higher, shorter arms for strength or a longer tail for swimming faster.

Called Oozerts and Phorm, these are two of seven new games that Singaporean students have helped develop recently.

GameSetLinks: Gumbeat and Moki Combat
Simon Carless   |   GameSetWatch   |   September 25, 2008

We gots to provides the GameSetLinks, and this time, there's a whole random knot of them - starting out with some impassioned, video-strewn backup for a recent controversial Game Developer magazine editorial. But also in here - a couple more games created by the Singapore/MIT Game Lab, the latest 'Dash' franchise addition from PlayFirst, some rare prototype info from a canceled Atari 2600 game featuring The Residents, an attempted Lester Bangs game rant, and much more besides.

R.age on Tech and Gadgets
Bryan and Daryl   |   Straits-Times RazorTV   |   Sept. 19, 2008

Bryan and Daryl review the latest gadgets and games, from Singapore-initiative GAMBIT to the Monotine Bicycle. With contributions from Yeong Ah Seng.

Game Development Not as Easy as ABC
Sharon Lynn Chu and Paul Yang   |   TODAY   |   Aug. 18, 2008

You've just blasted through three levels of your favourite game, and you're thinking: "This is such a simple and fun game! It probably was an easy game to develop." You couldn't be more wrong. Game development is never an easy process. Many people see the game industry as a fun sector to work in. It is fun, but the path to gamemaking is rocky. As students participating in the Gambit (Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, Technology) Summer Programme 2008, we had the opportunity to experience the thrills and heartaches of creating a game.

GameSetLinks: Akrasia
Simon Carless   |   GameSetWatch   |   September 12, 2008

Serious art game weirdness: 'The team decided to make a game about INNER DEMONS and coming to terms of who you are. It would take place in the mind and the mind would be symbolized by a maze - a common metaphor but through its spatiality particularly well-suited for a game.'

Fun from 'political oppression' ?
Chua Hian Hou   |   The Straits Times   |   September 9, 2008

USE THE cheery pink power of bubblegum to convince your fellow citizens to join a popular revolt against a repressive government.
While doing so, you stop policemen by popping bubbles in their faces.

This is the premise of Gumbeat, a new video game developed as part of an annual joint collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Singapore's digital media students.

How does it work?

Well, the heroine chews on candy and blows them into big pink bubbles beside unhappy citizens in the unnamed country in which the candy is banned.

This cheers them up enough to entice them to join the protagonist in a revolution, mustering enough angry citizenry to overthrow the oppressive government.

This is the aim of the game, said National University of Singapore undergraduate Sharon Chu, who presented her team's game to reporters earlier on Tuesday.

Gumbeat: Fight Oppression with Bubble Gum
GamePolitics.com   |   GamePolitics.com   |   September 9, 2008

Gumbeat is a Flash game being developed as part of a cooperative effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and digital media students in Singapore. So how does Gumbeat play?

GAMBIT Media Day Shows Off Student's Interactive Handiwork
Mr. Toffee   |   GameAxis   |   September 10, 2008

In the morning of the 9th of September, the local media was invited to GAMBIT's Media Day event in the prestigious halls of the Singapore Management University, the hive of scum and villainy birthplace of many budding entrepeneurs of Singapore. A short bit of context: GAMBIT is the result of one of the Interactive Digital media R & D Programme Offices, hosted by the MDA and Massachusetts Institute of Technology which makes budding game designers from different institutes to team up and make games based on the restrictions and theme they are given, as well as learn the process of the game industry.

Seven games from seven teams were on display, ranging from Facebook-type games to the download-for-free variety (for now, according to a few of the students). These games are still work-in-progress, but here are a few highlights, based on my very llimited time in playtesting these games and hanging around the booth.

New Digital Technologies on the Centrestage
Lim Yann Ling   |   AsiaOne   |   Sep. 8, 2008

The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab is a five-year research initiative between Singapore and MIT that sees over 200 students and 30 faculty and post-doctoral researchers involved in developing six or more games each year. Their task is to turn research concepts into playable implementations. Its executive director, Ms Teo Chor Guan says: 'The strong support from the government for both new start-ups as well as for students has made it possible for them to bring their ideas into reality.'

The second batch of tertiary stdents in Singapore presently on attachment at the MIT laboratory in Boston, USA, is working on the game 'Backflow', a networked mobile phone game that allows multiple players to engage in the game.

In its first year, Backflow - a project by students during the summer programme at Gambit Game Lab - has emerged as a finalist in the Independent Games Festival Mobile Competition for Best Game and Innovation in Mobile Game Design last year.

Edge Magazine
Region Specific: Singapore Time to Build
Edge Magazine   |   July 2008   |   pp. 108-113

"In 2006, the GAMBIT Game Lab was set up to foster talent and technology in Singapore. Have you seen any benefits?

"Allan Simonsen: ...The great thing it did was pick up the top 30 students in games from Singapore and put them through this pressure cooker at MIT, matching them up with 30 MIT students. I've personally hired one student out of that course who was pretty amazing.

"Alex Goatcher: We've hired two. Superb. One's in an assistant production role, the other's an associate producer, doing a lot of game design." (p. 112)

Boing Boing
Vidgame for blind and sighted players
David Pescowitz   |   Boing Boing   |   July 2, 2008
"AudioOdyssey is a prototype for a Wii remote game that enables visually impaired people and sighted people to play together. Developed by students at MIT and the Singapore-MIT Gambit game lab, it's a music-based DJ simulaton game that requires the players to make crowd-pleasing dance tracks. The next rev will enable online play."
Chronicle of Higher Education
This game evens field for visually impaired
Catherine Rampbell   |   The Chronicle of Higher Education   |   June 10, 2008

"Students from Singapore and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently created a video game for the blind.

"AudiOdyssey, developed by the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, has players layer audio tracks as if they were DJ's trying to get friends dancing. Sighted players can view animation that goes along with the game, but AudiOdyssey relies more on audio quality than visuals. The game can be played with a keyboard or a Wiimote."

the star
This game evens field for visually impaired
Marc Saltzman   |   The Toronto Star   |   June 7, 2008

"A new computer game created by MIT and Singaporean students is taking the 'video' out of 'video games.'

"AudiOdyssey is unique in that it lets visually impaired or blind players control the action just as well as a sighted player, as the music-based rhythm game relies solely on audio cues.

"Specifically, players assume the role of Vinyl Scorcher, an up-and-coming club DJ who must layer sounds to build up a great song in the hopes virtual partiers remain on the dance floor."

The Register: Hardware
WiiMote game launched for visually impared
James Sherwood   |   The Register Hardware   |   June 5, 2008

"Gaming boffins from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a Wii-style videogame designed to help visually impaired players virtually thrash their 20/20 competitors.

"AudiOdyssey sees the player become Vinyl Scorcher, an up-and-coming DJ on a mission to get clubbers shape shifting with merriment. Players must swing the Wii's remote in time with the virtual beat, but as Scorcher lays down more phat beats, gamers must continue to swing the Remote in time so that party goers don't desert the disco."

Boston Herald
Blind can play MIT group's video game
Jay Fitzgerald   |   Boston Herald.com   |   June 5, 2008

"AudiOdyssey will never match the popularity of the hit Guitar Hero game.

"But a group of MIT students thinks its recently released music game could be a groundbreaking experience for those with visual impairments, who often can't play alongside friends with sight."

USA Today
New PC game designed for visually impaired
Marc Saltzman   |   USA Today   |   June 4, 2008

"A new computer game created by MIT and Singaporean students is taking the "video" out of "video games."

"AudiOdyssey is unique in that it lets visually impaired or blind players control the action just as well as a sighted player, as the music-based rhythm game relies solely on audio cues. Specifically, players assume the role of Vinyl Scorcher, an up-and-coming club DJ who must layer sounds to build up a great song - in the hopes virtual partiers remain on the dance floor."

Discovery Channel
AudiOdyssey: MIT Helps Visually Impaired Get Game
Clark Boyd   |   Discovery Channel   |   June 4, 2008

"I'm partial to new and different kinds of video and computer gaming, so I really love to pass along stories like this one.

"AudiOdyssey was developed in Flash to run on Windows PCs. If your PC has Bluetooth, and you happen to have a Nintendo Wii controller, or Wiimote as it's called, then you can play the game that way."

Wii fanboy
New PC game accessible to blind players, uses Wiimote
Chris Greenhough   |   Nintendo Wii Fanboy   |   June 4, 2008

"AudiOdyssey is the work of the folks at MIT's GAMBIT Game Lab, and is designed to be playable for both visually-impaired and sighted users. It's not alone in this respect -- in 2006, Nintendo released Soundvoyager for the GBA in Japan, a title that featured exclusively sound-based gameplay -- but AudiOdyssey is the first Wiimote-compatible title to be designed with both groups in mind."

Gizmodo
MIT Brings Nintendo Wii To The Blind, Rhythmically Inclined
John Herrman   |   Gizmodo   |   June 3, 2008

"The guys at MIT's gaming lab just unveiled AudiOdyssey, a game for the Wii that doesn't require sight to play. The game is sort of a musical composition tool, in which players create layered beats for an imaginary crowd of dancers. The game does have a minimal visual component but for the most part just relies on your ears and your beat droppin' (or for the less whimsical, Wiimote swinging) skills."

Crunch Gear
Games for the blind or visually impaired, designed on Nintendo's Wii
Jason Mosley   |   CrunchGear   |   June 3, 2008

"The guys at MIT's gaming lab just unveiled AudiOdyssey, a game for the Wii that doesn't require sight to play. The game is sort of a musical composition tool, in which players create layered beats for an imaginary crowd of dancers. The game does have a minimal visual component but for the most part just relies on your ears and your beat droppin' (or for the less whimsical, Wiimote swinging) skills."

(Note: AudiOdyssey was designed on, and runs on, the PC using Bluetooth connectivity to a Nintendo Wii controller, not on the Wii console itself.)

C-Net News.com
MIT Wii game aims to put visually impaired on level playing field
Daniel Terdiman   |   CNET News.com   |   June 3, 2008

"If some researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Singapore-based Gambit Game Lab have anything to say about it, gamers with serious vision problems won't have to take a backseat to their 20/20 friends anymore. On Tuesday, the lab unveiled AudiOdyssey, a game for the Nintendo Wii that is based solely around sound and tasks players with mimicking a DJ trying to create a catchy beat that people can dance to."

(Note: AudiOdyssey is a game for the PC that can use a Wiimote, not a game for the Nintendo Wii.)

MIT News Office
Singapore-MIT game lets visually impaired share the fun
David Chandler   |   MIT News   |   May 13, 2008

"A new computer game developed by MIT and Singaporean students makes it possible for visually impaired people to play the game on a level field with their sighted friends.

"The game, called AudiOdyssey, simulates a deejay trying to build up a catchy tune and get people dancing. By swinging the remote-control device used by the Nintendo Wii, which senses motion, the player can set the rhythm and lay down one musical track after another, gradually building up a richer musical track."

ZDNet Asia
Microsoft gives S'pore schools developer tools
Victoria Ho   |   ZDnet Asia   |   Apr. 10, 2008

"Microsoft on Thursday launched a program to give schools in Singapore free access to some of its developer tools.

"Termed Microsoft DreamSpark, the global campaign started its Southeast Asian roll out in Singapore with two universities--the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University.

"Microsoft hopes to spread the program's outreach across some 120,000 tertiary students in the country this year."

Gamasutra
Designing Games that are Accessible to Everyone
Eitan Glinert   |   Gamasutra   |   Feb. 13, 2008

"Every year more and more people join the ranks of gamers, and new and innovative products are created to feed this influx. However, despite all this progress, disabled gamers have been routinely left behind.

"Many of the most popular games and systems are inaccessible to various forms of disability, such as visual impairments. Equally troublesome is that the games that are accessible are generally not playable by the mainstream market, due to the very design quirks that made the game accessible in the first place!"

Gamasutra
Road To IGF Mobile: Singapore-MIT GAMBIT's Backflow
Mathew Kumar   |   Gamasutra   |   Dec. 19, 2007
"Innovative mobile games? The inaugural IGF Mobile is showing that independent games for handheld platforms can still stand out, and we talk to Neal Grigsby about Backflow, a cellphone-based blend of casual puzzle, city-building, and moral message created as part of a Singapore-MIT student game lab."
Xconomy
Gamers, Grog, and GAMBIT: Singapore's Video Game Industry Looks to MIT for Innovation
Wade Roush   |   Xconomy   |   Dec. 13, 2007

"All fall I've been trying to free up time to attend Boston PostMortem, a gathering of Boston-area video game developers held once each month at The Skellig, an Irish pub in Waltham. When it turned out that a team from MIT's GAMBIT video game program would be presenting at PostMortem this Tuesday, I persuaded Bob and Rebecca to unchain me from my Mac for a few hours, and braved the freezing drizzle for the drive to the western 'burbs...

"I arrived half an hour late, but it was okay--the drinking hadn't yet given way to the speechmaking. The Skellig, it turned out, is about as authentic as Irish pubs get on this side of the pond, with real red-headed Irish bartenders and a real flute-and-fiddle ensemble belting out Celtic dances in the front room. I ordered a Harpoon and settled back to listen to Philip Tan, Matthew Weise, Clara Fernández-Vara, and Eitan Glinert talk about GAMBIT's first year in operation."

National University of Singapore
CNM Gamers Excel in MIT
Koh Eng Beng   |   National University of Singapore   |   Nov/Dec 2007

"Two gaming projects led by Communications and New Media (CNM) students are due for commercial showcase. They were completed during an eight-week internship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the first Singapore-MIT GAMBIT (Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation and Technology) Game Lab programme.

"A mathematic literacy game project, The Illogical Journey of Orez, led by CNM graduate Donny Kristianto, has been selected to be published in USA. While another gaming project, Wiip, led by CNM final-year undergraduate, Joshua Wong, will be pitched by the Media Development Authority to potential commercial publishers."

Gametap
School of Thought: MIT
Jonathan Miller   |   Game Tap   |   Nov. 30, 2007

"In case you haven't noticed, videogames are sort of popular these days. As the game industry continues its meteoric rise, the days of 'winging it' are long gone for publishers and developers. As budgets for triple-A franchises such as Halo and Grand Theft Auto have skyrocketed, it's clear that gaming business is now big business. With million-dollar budgets and hundreds of employees, game makers have left their garage games roots in the past and have embraced a more professional, corporate culture. They can't afford not to.

"And a more professional culture demands more quality trained game makers. College students dreaming of working on their favorite games are increasingly interested in game design programs, and academia has responded. Large public universities and small private colleges around the country are embracing degree programs in 'interactive entertainment' and 'digital media.' Whatever moniker you choose to use, being educated in both the art and science of videogames is very attractive to prospective employers like Electronic Arts and Microsoft.

"In GameTap's new series, called School of Thought, we'll examine educational institutions around the country that are pioneering this new field of learning. Our goal is to you a glimpse into the life of students hoping to embark on a career in making games."

For our first stop, we head to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the leading technical schools in the entire world: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

MediaCorp Radio
The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Gamelab
Jason Tan   |   Mediacorp Radio   |   Oct. 31, 2007

"Videogames are big business. By 2011, the worldwide gaming market is projected to be worth 48.9 billion US-dollars. Growth in the Asia-Pacific is generally outperforming other regional markets.

"The GAMBIT Game Lab is a collaboration between Singapore's Media Development Authority and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

"In June 2007 thirty-one students from various local institutions participated in an 8 week-program at Boston's MIT, creating playable videogame-projects from the ground up."

Today online
$20M to Up the Fun Factor
Ashley Ng   |   TODAYonline   |   Sept. 7, 2007

"The Government will pump in $20 million to fund 14 research and development projects in areas such as gaming, computer graphics and image processing.

"These projects, undertaken by institutes of higher learning, will involve about 400 researchers and were selected from 50 proposals submitted since the call went out early this year by the Integrated Digital Media (IDM) programme office.

"Giving this update yesterday, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Second Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, said that half a billion dollars would be committed to fund research and development in IDM over the next five years.

"'With this programme, we hope to achieve a value-added contribution of $10 billion to our economy and to create 10,000 new jobs,' said Dr Balakrishnan at the official opening of the Games Convention Asia 2007.

"One of the initiatives under this programme, called GAMBIT - or Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation and Technology - is a joint drive between Singapore and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States."

ZDNet Asia
Singapore to Grow Games Talent
Lynn Tan   |   ZDNet Asia   |   Sept. 6, 2007

"The Singapore government plans to develop the island-state into a knowledge hub for games and digital media business, and the first step is to ensure that a pool of local and foreign talent is readily available.

"Speaking to reporters at the Games Convention Asia 2007 show held here Thursday, Singapore's Second Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA) Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, said the first priority is to develop local expertise, as well as attract foreign talent, "to create productive teams from day one".

"Building Singapore's talent pool is important, because 'venture capitalists (VCs) basically go to where talent is,' the minister explained. 'Once they (VCs) see that you've got good people [with] good ideas which are commercially viable, smart money will come.'"

Wired
Rhythm Game Developed for Visually Impaired Players
Susan Arendt   |   Wired Magazine   |   Sept. 4, 2007

"An experimental PC game developed by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT game lab hopes to introduce the visually impaired to the world of rhythm games. In AudiOdyssey, players use the keyboard to lay down the tracks of a song (similar to Frequency or Amplitude), but the game is also compatible with the Wii Remote.

"Since it was developed with the visually impaired in mind, AudiOdyssey relies more on audio than video, but GAMBIT wanted it to be enjoyable for a mainstream audience, too. Eitan Glinert, the lead researcher on AudiOdyssey, believes that sighted players won't even realize that they're playing a game designed for the blind."

Video Games' New Frontier: The Visually Impaired
Steve Mollman   |   CNN   |   Sept. 4, 2007

"Forget shoot-em-up addicts -- video games are reaching out to the rest of us.

"The greatest symbol of this is the Wii console from Nintendo. Its innovative wireless control -- the Wiimote -- has even non-gamers excited as they swing it through the air to control, say, a tennis racket on the screen.

"Wii's Wiimote may play a pivotal role in bringing the visually impaired into the electronic gaming fold.

"But not quite everyone has been reached. One group is still largely ignored by video game makers: the blind.

"With that in mind, a team of researchers at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in Massachusetts set out this summer to make a music-based video game that's designed for mainstream players and also accessible to the blind.

"Appropriately, perhaps, they incorporated the Wiimote into the game-play, though it's optional.

"The resulting DJ game, designed for the PC, is called AudiOdyssey. In it, players try to lay down different tracks in a song by swinging and waving the Wiimote in time with the beats. Or they can just use keyboard controls."

MediaCorp Radio
The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
Jason Tan   |   Mediacorp Radio   |   August 30, 2007

"This week in Blogwatch with Jason Tan, find out about the GAMBIT (Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation and Technology) Game Lab, a joint collaboration between Singapore's Media Development Authority (MDA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

"Formed in October 2006, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab conducts research and development of next generation digital games.

"The five-year initiative will focus on identifying and solving research problems using a multi-disciplinary approach that can be applied by Singapore's digital game industry.

"In June this year, 31 students from Singapore's various institutes were sent to Boston on an 8-week internship. This pioneer batch recently returned and was given the opportunity to showcase their playable game projects.

"Jason Tan speaks with Ms. Teo Chor Guan (TCG), Programme Director of the GAMBIT Game Lab."

National University of Singapore
CNM Interns at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts
Donny Kristianto and Yeo Jing Ying   |   National University of Singapore   |   August 28, 2007

"During the summer term break, 31 students from Singapore, including 6 NUS students, spent 9 weeks, from 9 June to 11 August 2007, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working together with MIT students and faculty as part of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. During this exchange programme, the students had the opportunity to work on research-based games projects, attend seminars provided by MIT professors, engage in cross-cultural interaction, and were exposed to the overall games production cycle."

que pasa
When Will It Be Chile's Turn?
Cristóbal García   |   Que Pasa   |   July 20, 2007

(Translated.) "Singapore is having a celebration these days. The GAMBIT Game Lab (Games, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, Technology) started off on Monday 18th of June. It is a five-year collaboration for innnovation between MIT and diverse public and private institutions from that country. The idea is to predict, research and develop the videogames of the future.

"Videogames stopped being child's play long ago. They're extremely interesting to fans and millions of adult consumers play, as well as educational institutions, big corporations and start-up companies. By the way, videogames involve large capital investments.

"Now whole countries are interested in videogames too. Singapore decided to invest $500 million in digital interactive media. Its national research center – akin to CONICYT in Chile – is following an aggressive research and development agenda on digital media. One of the privileged areas in this is the growing field of videogames."

gamesindustry.biz
GCA: Singapore Serious About Games
Phil Elliott   |   gamesindustry.biz   |   June 9, 2007

"In the opening ceremony for Games Convention Asia, guest of honour Vivian Balakrishnan, minister for community development, youth and sports, and second minister for information, communication and the arts, detailed the extent that Singapore is prepared to go to in order to become a games industry centre of excellence.

"'Singapore intends to be part of the action,' he said, after pointing out that the Asia-Pacific region is estimated to contribute 40 per cent to the industry's global revenues of USD 39.8 billion by the end of 2008.

"Balakrishnan revealed that the Singapore government is spending SD 500 million to stimulate research and development in the digital interactive sector, and went on to outline the GAMBIT initiative, a student exchange between Singapore and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

MIT Technology Review
Games and Their MIT Makers: Participatory Games Advance Education
Nancy Duvergne Smith   |   Technology Review   |   May/June 2007

"The best modern video and online games do more than entertain. They also teach – and give players a say in how they learn. MIT is a pioneer in this participatory, games-to-­educate approach, with a growing number of faculty and alumni leading the field. And students interested in this kind of gaming can tap MIT's academic strengths, such as artificial intelligence, as well as industry savvy right on campus."

Wired
Today's Homework: Make Good Games
Chris Kohler   |   Wired Magazine   |   Feb. 13, 2007

"The recently announced Singapore-MIT International Game Lab is a collaboration between MIT and the Singapore government's Media Development Authority. Singapore hopes to create 10,000 new jobs in the digital media sector by 2015, and to that end will send its best and brightest to study at MIT -- about 30 to 40 undergraduate students each year, says Philip Tan, executive director of the lab's U.S. operations.

"Faculty, postdoctoral students and graduate researchers will all work together under the auspices of the lab to study game design and produce "a lot of games, somewhere between five and 10 each year," says Tan.

"'The game industry isn't particularly fond of reading research papers from academia,' but its leaders do pay attention to games, says Tan.

"Jenkins says the university connection will foster greater innovation: 'We see the lab as a space where we can move swiftly from pure research into compelling applications, and then partner with the games industry to bring the best ideas to market.'"

Read Full Interview Transcript »

Gamasutra
Singapore-MIT International Game Lab Formed
Jason Dobson   |   Gamasutra   |   Oct. 11, 2006

"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Singapore Media Development Authority have announced an agreement to establish the Singapore-MIT International Game Lab (SMIGL). The SMIGL initiative will allow students and researchers from Singapore to collaborate with MIT researchers and game industry professionals in international research projects.

"Outcomes planned for SMIGL's initial period include development of both an academic and a high-impact research program, publication of peer-reviewed research papers and production of publicly distributable digital games. However, the long term goal of the new initiative, according to SMIGL representatives, will be to 'further digital game research globally, develop world-class academic programs in game technology, and establish Singapore as a vital node in the international game industry.'

"Beyond technology development, representatives also note that SMIGL will engage in research concerning the "artistic, creative, business and social aspects of games." The organization will also provide Singapore game researchers and professionals with access to new technologies, as well as the latest conceptual developments and links to international game development and research communities.

"The collaboration, which will include offices both in Singapore and at MIT, will be co-directed by the directors of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program (CMS), Henry Jenkins, DeFlorez Professor of Humanities, and William Uricchio, professor of comparative media studies. Both Jenkins and Uricchio will also serve as the leading investigators in the collaboration."

Design Singapore
Game Creators to Go for Stint at MIT Lab
  |   DesignSingapore   |   Oct. 11, 2006

"ST, ZB, TODAY and BT reported that about 300 of Singapore's top talent in computer games will be headed for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to soak up the latest ideas and technologies. A five-year tie-up between Media Development Authority and MIT has produced the Singapore-MIT Game Lab, which will enroll its pioneer batch of game designers and media researchers by the middle of next year. Also announced by PM yesterday, this initiative will bring together Singapore game designers, MIT academics and game-industry professionals for research into the creative, business and social aspects of computer gaming."

C-Net News.com
MIT, Singapore Set Up Game Lab
Stefanie Olsen   |   CNET News.com   |   Oct. 10, 2006

"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said Tuesday it teamed up with a Singapore-based group known as the Media Development Authority to establish an international game lab. The focus of the lab, called the Singapore-MIT International Game Lab (SMIGL), will be to research and develop game technology--including new genres, multicultural vocabularies and gaming's societal effects--and create academic programs in the field, among other goals.

"The lab, which will have offices at MIT's Cambridge, Mass., campus and in Singapore, will be lead by the directors of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program, Henry Jenkins and William Uricchio. Financial terms were not disclosed.

"'We are excited by ... the opportunity to push game research and the industry in new directions, and we very much look forward to initiating an international dialogue among leading scholars, designers, students and gamers,' Uricchio, a specialist in trans-national media distribution, said in a statement."

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