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About the Archives

This page contains all entries posted to GAMBIT in July 2011. They are listed from oldest to newest.

June 2011 is the previous archive.

August 2011 is the next archive.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

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GAMBIT Presents "Indies Will Shoot You In The Knees: Redux" August 4th, 2011 @ 5PM

During last July's Boston Post Mortem there was a frank and occasionally hysterical panel about the day to day insanity of running an indie game company. We here at GAMBIT loved the panel so much that we begged for a command performance here at MIT. Coming back from that original panel are Ichiro Lambe (Founder and President of Dejobaan Games, LLC), Scott Macmillan (Founder and President of Macguffin Games), Eitan Glinert (Founder and President of Fire Hose Games) and new to the panel and moderating is Alex Schwartz (Co-Founder of Owlchemy Games). The panel will take place in room 6-120 here at MIT beginning at 5PM sharp on Thursday August 4th. Snacks will be provided courtesy of the GAMBIT Game Lab. The event is free and open to the public.

Looking Glass Studios Interview Series - Audio Podcast 7 - Eric Brosius

Part 7 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

This week it's Harmonix Audio Director Eric Brosius. Eric originally hails from Boston's music scene. He was in the band Tribe along with Greg LoPiccolo and came to Looking Glass as a sound designer around the same time, working first on Terra Nova before moving on to bigger projects. He was one of the few members who continued to work on Looking Glass properties even after the company closed, doing sound design both for System Shock 2 at Irrational and Thief: Deadly Shadows at Ion Storm. I talk with Eric mostly about his approach to sound design, how he dealt with things like music vs. ambience, and how such choices became an integral part of Looking Glass's aesthetic and legacy.

If you want to know why there is no "music" slider in Thief or why stealth "works" in System Shock 2, check it out!

Download the podcast here.
Week Seven Update Of The 2011 US GAMBIT Lab Summer Program

Week Seven saw the arrival of three new mentors to assist with the Summer 2011 GAMBIT Summer Program. Douglas Finnigan (Temasek Polytechnic), Jeremy Kang (Republic Polytechnic) and Mark Gossage (Singapore Polytechnic). They will be sharing their views on how the summer has been progressing, including the what happened leading up and during the last focus test for the summer! From June 6th to August 8th, 2011, the US Lab of Singapore-MIT GAMBIT welcomes over 40 interns from various Singaporean Universities as well as interns from Berklee College of Music, Rhode Island School of Design and of course, MIT to participate in a nine week intensive program creating videogames from research begun at MIT and in various Singapore universities. We have also invited mentors from Singapore to assist and observe the interns so during this summer's program we can update you on the intern's progress through their notes and photographs.

Week Six Update Of The 2011 US GAMBIT Lab Summer Program

Week Six of the Summer 2011 GAMBIT Summer Program has the teams working on their games armed with the comments gathered from the first focus test. They now hustle to make the changes needed before week seven's final focus test happening July 21st. Visiting Singaporean Lecturer, Andrew Tan, gives you his view of the fourth week of the 2011 GAMBIT Summer Program. From June 6th to August 8th, 2011, the US Lab of Singapore-MIT GAMBIT welcomes over 40 interns from various Singaporean Universities as well as interns from Berklee College of Music, Rhode Island School of Design and of course, MIT to participate in a nine week intensive program creating videogames from research begun at MIT and in various Singapore universities. We have also invited mentors from Singapore to assist and observe the interns so during this summer's program we can update you on the intern's progress through their notes and photographs.

7/21/11 6pm: GAMBIT Open House Focus Test (Part Deux)

Our last open house of the summer!

PlaytestingCome one, come all! Come to the our open house focus test!

Thursday, July 21st
6 PM - 8 PM

Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
5 Cambridge Center, 3rd Floor
Cambridge, MA 02142
(Next door to the Kendall Square T stop)

The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab has six games in early development, each one seeking to answer a different research question. We invite everyone - young, old, game playing, game developing, or even never touched a video game before in your life - to play our games and give us the early feedback we need to complete our games by the end of the summer.

What is an "Focus Test"? During the open house, our development teams observe your game playing, answer any questions you may have, and record your comments and opinions about the games you are playing. Our games will be in their seventh week of development. By testing them now, we intend to get feedback we can use, with time left to use it. This is your big chance to actively influence our games in development!

Our doors are open from 6pm - 8pm. You are welcome to drop in at any time during those hours and play as many (or as few!) of our games as you wish. Each game takes around ten minutes to complete; some are longer than others. We do recommend that if you want to play all the games, you should arrive earlier rather than later! (There will also be light snacks available, to keep your game playing strength up.)

While we welcome testers of all ages, our games are not intended for the youngest players. Children under seven may have difficulty playing our games alone, but might enjoy sitting on a parent's lap and watching. We are an active research lab, so any minors (age 17 and under) need to have a parent or guardian fill out a consent form before playing any games. Forms will be available at the lab, or you can contact gambit-qa at mit dot edu and request forms that can be printed and filled out to bring to the test.

We are at 5 Cambridge Center, 3rd Floor. Tell the guard at the desk you are here for the GAMBIT Focus test, then take the elevators up to the 3rd Floor. Turn towards the big glass doors as you exit the elevators, and come on in!

Looking Glass Studios Interview Series - Audio Podcast 6 - Greg LoPiccolo
Part 6 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

Next up: Greg LoPiccolo. Greg has risen to impressive heights as the vice president of product development at Harmonix, makers of world famous games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but he got his start at Looking Glass back in the 90s. Coming from the music industry (he was bass guitarist in the Boston-based rock band Tribe) he started out as music/sound designer on System Shock, eventually becoming project lead on Thief 1. I talk with Greg about his roots in the music business, how he adapted to the culture of video games and software design, and how that has affected his approach to game development overall.

If you ever wanted to know how SHODAN's voice came about, be sure to give it a listen!

Download the podcast here.
Week Five Update Of The 2011 US GAMBIT Lab Summer Program

Week Five of the Summer 2011 GAMBIT Summer Program featured two successful events, The GAMBIT Summer Summit and the GAMBIT Open House Focus Test! A huge crowd packed the US GAMBIT Lab this past Thursday to try the games our interns have created and the feedback was so helpful. Visiting Singaporean Lecturer, Andrew Tan, gives you his view of the fourth week of the 2011 GAMBIT Summer Program. From June 6th to August 8th, 2011, the US Lab of Singapore-MIT GAMBIT welcomes over 40 interns from various Singaporean Universities as well as interns from Berklee College of Music, Rhode Island School of Design and of course, MIT to participate in a nine week intensive program creating videogames from research begun at MIT and in various Singapore universities. We have also invited mentors from Singapore to assist and observe the interns so during this summer's program we can update you on the intern's progress through their notes and photographs.

Knowing When to Compromise

So as some of you may know, or have read or heard about, this summer at GAMBIT I am the product owner of a game design team, in order to do some research on why queer/LGBTQ characters and themes aren't making it into games. If you read "Playing It Straight" in Edge back in October, you probably know what sparked me to want to do this. I am in the weird position of being an ethnographer studying the process of my team (who are all great) and being the person who the team is supposed to be appeasing, if that makes any sense. I often have to quell the urge to get too involved.

An issue came up Wednesday that I wanted to discuss because of its broader implications, which is the nature of our in-game protagonist.

A major inspiration for our game has been old SNES-era RPGs like Earthbound, and so the team has been at work developing enemies, the setting, the main character, and the encounters that make up the meat of such a game. They've had a ton of great ideas, most of which I don't want to get too deep into, especially since we're only halfway through the 8 week creative process, and I don't want to open up my team to critique before it's time. I also can't share any of the assets they've made with you until the game is done. But it is enough to know that they've been working hard on concepting out these ideas.

Part of the challenge of this process is that the GAMBIT summer program is only 8 weeks long, and so we are constantly under that Sword of Damocles; a really common thing to hear ourselves say is "That'd be a great feature! If we have time, let's put it in!" and then quietly we accept that the time probably won't materialize and that's okay. We're going to make the best game we can in the circumstances. Well, one of the features that I asked for in the game but which we really had to give a low priority was selectable gender for the player's avatar.

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Sexual identity and gender identity are inextricably linked, and separating them is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. It's also worth noting that, at least in mass media in the US, homosexuality is often conceived of as a white, male, upper middle class phenomenon, though lesbians are increasingly visible. But queer people of color and lower socio-economic status are often pushed aside, and transgendered and bisexual individuals usually get cut as well. There are many reasons for this, and not all of them necessarily appropriate for this post. It is enough to say that we have every reason to want to include a range of experiences in our game, and not contribute to the trend of queer content being mostly about white men with money to burn.

To that end the team decided to design a main character who was purposefully androgynous, so that the player could read whatever gender they wanted into the avatar. This was a decision I was behind; to me it was a compromise that wasn't quite as good as being able to create what you wanted, but which was (unlike that feature) likely to make it into the game in the time we had and which contributed to the ideals of the game. Now, that's the first part of this equation.

The second is that we are also starting to address what is the most critical, and most challenging, part of this process: getting the queer content into the game. Without talking too much about our plans, part of our current thinking is that there will be, at some point in the game, short scenes from the in-game avatar's memories that establish the avatar as a queer character, and that the memories would be resonant with the experiences of queer people... in as much as that's possible, since there is nothing like a "universal queer experience." The best we can offer, I believe, is a series of experiences that many queer people can look at, and feel a degree of empathy and resonance with, but which also involve themes that any player can relate to and understand. It is, as with many decisions about this process, not perfect, but as close as we can get. Creating this game has been, I have found, a series of compromises.

This week we had a very tight deadline, because at the GAMBIT Open House yesterday every team's games were playable by the public for the first time, meaning we were soliciting public feedback. Everyone was under a time crunch to get something that, while perhaps not polished, is enough that we can get good feedback about the game to head into the second half of the program. One of the things my team worked on Wednesday afternoon was creating one of those scenes, describing a time when a queer person's identity might make them feel inadequate somehow.

It's tough to do, especially since for the moment we're trying to use only images, not words, but what we discovered while talking it through is that working within the restriction of an androgynous main character was introducing a particular set of challenges to the process. As I said before, gender identity and sexual identity are very tightly knit. Part of the challenge is that we have to establish the character as queer inside the context of the mini-scene. But how can that be easily done, in a way that is reasonably able to be understood by the average player?

This is a legitimate challenge and I think it's more at the core of these issues not appearing in games than any sort of institutional homophobia among either devs or players. As my game director, the awesome Abe Stein, said during our prototyping work this spring, "Unless they're actually having sex on screen, how do you know? How does it get said?" It's the question that's dogged us. If you want to establish a character as gay or lesbian in a social world, how do you do that without establishing, even in some small way, their gender expression? For bisexuals this is even more complicated, and I would dare say that gender expression and its relation to one's identity is at the core of the issues transpeople face. In short: can we actually accomplish this with an androgynous character?

It's important that the team finds a solution that works for them; the game is as much theirs as it is mine... probably more so, considering they're behind the creative work. I didn't want to say "yes, keep the androgyny" or "no, pick a gender," because I don't want to limit their creativity, nor underestimate their ability to find a creative solution. I want them to go at the problem with all their effort, and find a solution that they're comfortable with. That said, as I left them to think this afternoon, I did say that it might be in order to tell the story they want (and, in some part at least, that I want) to tell, an androgynous main character might be more liability than good. What I asked them to do was weigh the pros and cons of the situation, then decide.

But that conversation haunted me all the way home. I make no claims that my little game is going to change the universe, no matter how incredibly awesome my team is. In fact, I said multiple times during our prototyping phase that if we fail, even that is still "useful" because I am studying the process and not the result, though that is what I call my 'inner ice-cold sociologist persona' coming to the fore. The truth is I want our game to be socially responsible; Abe uses the word 'tasteful' in this instance, and that's not entirely off the mark. If we slip into old tropes just to make a game with some queer content, that's a "part of the problem instead of the solution" scenario.

That said, I wonder where the line of compromise is, because part of this research is to examine how the constraints of the process can affect creating queer content, too. And compromise is at the heart of any text that's produced. My friend, talented writer Karen Healey, had to deal with a very similar sort of scenario regarding the cover of her debut novel Guardian of the Dead. What's the point at which you say "Okay, I am an advocate for [x], but I understand that to make what I want happen, I have to give in and accept compromise position [y]"? It's tough, and any decision you make sort of gives you that pit of the stomach feeling you get when you're forced to give up something you really want, just to make something else work.

Part of me is asking myself, "If our game goes out with a white male protagonist, have I done the community a disservice?" I don't know the answer to that. I want my team to find their own answer to that, too, and as long as it makes sense I will back their play. But I thought that this dilemma really gets at the heart of why I'm doing this research in the first place, and why I think this is a genuinely difficult thing for game designers out there to do right now. If we want to see these characters and themes make it into games, we need strategies to deal with the difficult and often ambiguous issues that come with crafting games where sexual identity is meaningful in some way.

Week Four Update Of The 2011 US GAMBIT Lab Summer Program

Week Four of The GAMBIT Summer Program is over and the interns have created their first playables and are getting ready for their first focus test in week five! Visiting Singaporean Lecturer, Andrew Tan, gives you his view of the fourth week of the 2011 GAMBIT Summer Program. From June 6th to August 8th, 2011, the US Lab of Singapore-MIT GAMBIT welcomes over 40 interns from various Singaporean Universities as well as interns from Berklee College of Music, Rhode Island School of Design and of course, MIT to participate in a nine week intensive program creating videogames from research begun at MIT and in various Singapore universities. We have also invited mentors from Singapore to assist and observe the interns so during this summer's program we can update you on the intern's progress through their notes and photographs.

The Conversation Continues: On Disciplinarity

Following up on our previous "digital conversation" regarding design, we felt it would be nice to continue the dialogue by adding a new voice. This time our friend Doug Wilson from IT University of Copenhagen joins the fray as we dissect the notion of "game studies" as a discipline, and explore the interdisciplinary nature of research on games.

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Abe:I have been thinking about "game studies" as an academic discipline relative to other, older, more traditional educational departments like Political Science, Anthropology, Sociology, or Philosophy. The fact is, many game studies scholars are approaching video games from different perspectives with drastically different theoretical lenses and research methods. The single unifying thread tying various scholars in the game studies domain is the supposed object of their inquiry: games... no wait, players! Crap... never mind.

While this certainly makes for some exciting conversations, one of my concerns is that with so many scholars approaching game studies from so many different directions, it becomes hard to have a coherent conversation. For example, someone might write a text that is approaching games from a philosophical lens, in the most traditional of senses, positioning his/her argument somewhere in a long history of broader philosophical discourse. To fully understand such a text, one would need to read it within a certain philosophical context. Simply reading the text as a "game studies" document, would be limiting. This is fine for someone who wants to put in the time reading and becoming familiar with Philosophy as a course of study, but what about everyone else?

With so many lenses, so many methods, and so many perspectives, how could anyone be accurately categorized as a "game studies" scholar? Nobody would have the time to familiarize themselves with the entirety of thought necessary to be so broad an academic. Would it not be more useful to be aligned with others who are working in the same discipline, that is to say, philosophers studying games with other philosophers, sociologists studying players with other sociologists, and anthropologists studying games played with other anthropologists?

Doug:
Is game studies a legitimate "discipline"? And should we even want it to be one? These questions have been addressed many times before, perhaps most famously by Espen Aarseth in his 2001 editorial for the very first issue of the Game Studies journal. For Aarseth, the question seems to be inextricably intertwined with academic politics. He worries that "the fundamentally unique aspects of the games" will be overlooked if left to the analyses of other, already existing fields.

(If I could give stage directions in a blog post, I would write here: cue 2001 era "ludology vs. narratology" dispute).

For me, however, the question inevitably leads back to a more general one: how should we structure interdisciplinary research? And when and why does an interdisciplinary endeavor become its own stable discipline?

On this question, I can only share my own personal struggles. Currently, as a PhD candidate, I find myself immersed in design theory, political science, and contemporary art - three fields which I only grazed in my previous educations (a self-designed BA in "digital humanities" and an MS in computer science). As a result, I worry constantly that I might be misreading a certain theorist, or that I might be naively rehashing old debates. To compound this problem, I do my work at IT University of Copenhagen's Center For Computer Games Research, an interdisciplinary group that houses researchers from a diversity of fields such as artificial intelligence, sociology, philosophy, and interaction design. This means that I have few colleagues who are able to give me thorough, literature-grounded feedback on my work. For better or worse, I find myself in a situation where I am largely on my own.

I do think this constellation of disciplines works well for project-based research. In our department, for example, several computer science and serious games researchers are teaming up on large international multi-disciplinary projects. Humanities-based research, by contrast, still seems to be a very solitary, individualistic endeavor. Or at least that's the prevailing culture. You write your manuscript, solicit feedback, publish it as a book, then repeat. If I can be frank, I'm not convinced that I have the suitable training for that kind of work. I've always viewed myself as more of a "glue" person, amplifying and connecting the ideas of collaborators.

Thus, Abe, I'm inclined to agree with you. As far as "basic research" goes - especially basic research in the humanities - I do think it might be more useful to frame one's work within more "traditional" disciplines. Speaking from personal experience, I do worry that my academic work has suffered from my lack of grounding in a "home base."

Speaking as a practicing game designer, however, my interdisciplinary background has served me very well indeed! It has been tremendously empowering to be able to pull from disciplines as disparate as computer science, design research, and art theory. Moreover, my ability to "speak the language" of multiple disciplines has made it easy for me to collaborate with different types of people (i.e. programmers, artists, musicians, etc). Game development is, after all, a highly interdisciplinary endeavor.

In summary, I don't think it's a coincidence that my PhD research (e.g. here) has ended up focusing so intently on my ongoing design practice. That wasn't the plan when I originally applied for the PhD, but it makes sense that my deeply interdisciplinary background would be better geared to project-based work. As such, I suspect that the answer to your question, Abe, might be: it depends on what kind of research you hope to do!

Jason:
Interdisciplinarity is certainly a big word around video game development and studies. Comparative Media Studies, the academic department that GAMBIT is affiliated with, puts enormous emphasis on interdisciplinary work. Doug's history is a perfect example of the advantage of this kind of work.

But as Abe has hinted, the multitude of scholars working under the guise "game studies" runs the risk of dilution. Subscribe to the DiGRA mailing list for a weekend (why is it always busy on the weekend?) and you will see many people arguing vehemently from a variety of perspectives, and it's hard to say whether anything is ever accomplished. I think this is at least partially because of the vast differences between subscribers. Hence the importance of indicating where you are coming from and what your perspectives are.

This line of thinking leads me to another point: I sometimes whether now is a good time for the study of "games" generally. The problem is that "games" is an enormous category including, at the bare minimum, both human experience and cultural artifacts, and it is easy for a theory applicable to one game to break down upon application to another. The field desperately needs more genre- and medium-specific studies of games, and those studies need to proclaim their perspective and focus. Interdisciplinarity is certainly valuable, but if I am attempting to describe a board game, and Abe is trying to apply those ideas to baseball, something is going to be lost in that communication. Similar problems occur when comparing games across (or even within) genres. As another example, in response to Abe and I's last conversational blog post, we had an interesting discussion with Doug on Twitter, and it became apparent that we were even operating under different understandings of "rules" - understandings that where shaped by our respective backgrounds, interests, and areas of research.

While this sounds pessimistic, I actually think it represents an enormous potential for widespread investigation, experimentation and research. "Game" is an extremely broad term and there is room for people with all manner of background and interest. I think a simultaneous mix of diversification and specialization - more people studying more games more specifically - would be invaluable in that it would create a stable base for the field.

Abe:
It may be that I am the biggest pessimist of we three, for I am very afraid of the dilution of a scholastic field like game studies. I am often found asking for some higher standard, some greater sense of rigor in the realm of game studies, one I would be greatly challenged to live up to myself. Indeed, I often find myself slipping into the comforts of lazy analysis or reporting - the comforts of working over ideas without taking the time to dig deep enough into the history of the topic. Shame on me. Perhaps this is why I find myself trying to focus my work on the realm of sports and sports video games from the perspective of cultural anthropology, to have a stronger sense of home.

It comes back to this concern I have that without a well structured, historical and contextual lens, we may not even know in what direction we are looking. I try hard to imagine what a standardized "game studies" curriculum could be: what exacting standards, what theoretical frameworks, and what history would define expertise in the field. Regrettably my thoughts darken and I inevitably envision top ten lists of important video games, that regurgitate the same narrow, fan informed perspective. Can we agree that it is no longer enough to simply like games, or even to eloquently critique them, rather we need to ground analysis in a history of thought? But what history then?

I agree with you both about interdisciplinary emphasis. Starting my work in video games as a sound designer surely taught me the importance of all the constituent parts of game design. That said, I still feel that theory necessarily depends on the works of predecessors. This is the nature of philosophy. I think some of the conflict comes from the conflation of the study, and the creation of games. That, however, is another huge discussion.

Doug:
Abe, I suspect that some of us game studies people could benefit from examining the history of other academic disciplines. For example, how and why did "computer science" become a stable academic discipline? Why didn't it just evolve as a sub-field of existing university departments like mathematics and electrical engineering? Despite my graduate comp sci degree, I don't actually know enough history to offer a coherent answer.

(More wishful stage directions: cue historians of science!)

But before I defer to the experts, I'd like to ask a leading question: is the professed object of study - the computer game - too narrow in scope? A discipline like biology is quite broad, spanning diverse interests such as molecular genetics, ecology, developmental biology, etc. The discipline of art history studies not only painting, but also a wide variety of different forms and traditions.

Yes, I do think "game studies" has (unfortunately) positioned itself as the study of digital games specifically. But even if we accept that game studies scholars are branching out into non-digital areas like board games, we might still ask why games studies is so socially and professionally isolated from other academic traditions like sports studies, folklore studies, play theory, etc. Can we ever hope to call ourselves a proper discipline as long as we remain so isolated from (and irrelevant to) those other communities that also study play and games?

Gosh, it would be so nice to build some stronger ties to the sports studies community in particular! (Abe, I bet you'd agree here).

Jason:
I think that in this post we have accidentally managed to identify an interesting tension: dilution and amorphousness versus collaboration and inclusion. Clearly there are benefits to be had from incorporating other fields of inquiry into game studies, but there are also benefits to establishing "game studies" as a concrete discipline.

From whichever perspective one takes, however, it should be immediately clear that citing one's object of study as "games" or even "computer games" is not a very accurate or useful label. Doug, you asked, "is the professed object of study - the computer game - too narrow in scope?" I would be inclined to answer that present studies of computer games does not suffer from narrow scope, but rather lack of focus. The necessary questions of someone who studies "the computer game" should be "which aspects of which games in what context?"

For me, anyway, the take-away from this collaboration is that I now find it hard to have strong opinions either way. Games are a fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of the human condition, and we have barely scratched the surface of understanding precisely what they are, how they work, what roles they serve, and why they even exist. At this point "game studies" simply needs more of everything.

7/7/11 6pm: GAMBIT Open House Focus Test

Paper PrototypingCome one, come all! Come to the our open house focus test!

Thursday, July 7th
6 PM - 8 PM

Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
5 Cambridge Center, 3rd Floor
Cambridge, MA 02142
(Next door to the Kendall Square T stop)

The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab has six games in early development, each one seeking to answer a different research question. We invite everyone - young, old, game playing, game developing, or even never touched a video game before in your life - to play our games and give us the early feedback we need to complete our games by the end of the summer.

What is an "Focus Test"? During the open house, our development teams observe your game playing, answer any questions you may have, and record your comments and opinions about the games you are playing. Our games will be in their fifth week of development, with placeholder artwork and user interfaces still in development. By testing them now, we intend to get feedback we can use, with time left to use it. This is your big chance to actively influence our games in development!

Our doors are open from 6pm - 8pm. You are welcome to drop in at any time during those hours and play as many (or as few!) of our games as you wish. Each game takes around ten minutes to complete; some are longer than others. We do recommend that if you want to play all the games, you should arrive earlier rather than later! (There will also be light snacks available, to keep your game playing strength up.)

While we welcome testers of all ages, our games are not intended for the youngest players. Children under seven may have difficulty playing our games alone, but might enjoy sitting on a parent's lap and watching. We are an active research lab, so any minors (age 17 and under) need to have a parent or guardian fill out a consent form before playing any games. Forms will be available at the lab, or you can contact gambit-qa at mit dot edu and request forms that can be printed and filled out to bring to the test.

We are at 5 Cambridge Center, 3rd Floor. Tell the guard at the desk you are here for the GAMBIT Focus test, then take the elevators up to the 3rd Floor. Turn towards the big glass doors as you exit the elevators, and come on in!

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