"Robotany" Puts Artificial Intelligence in the Mind of the Beholder
When it comes to directing a video game's characters ("If x happens, do y"), there is only so much current artificial intelligence (A.I.) can do.
And while their skills are specialized and prized, A.I. programmers can devote years to a single game. They have to consider all the events that might occur and map out characters' possible reactions. In a first-person shooter, for example, the A.I.-controlled character needs to know how to collect ammunition, seek his target, get within range to fire, and then escape.
What if making certain kinds of A.I. didn't have to be that laborious? What would happen if an algorithm, extrapolating from a few decisions made by players, could figure things out for itself--and even reuse those lessons from one game to the next?
And what if all this could be done by someone with no A.I. training at all?
Those are questions that our game prototype "Robotany" wants to answer.
Set in a garden, the game features small robot-like creatures that sustain the lives of plants. The player manipulates graphs of the robots' three sensory inputs--three overlapping A.I.'s--and these manipulations teach the A.I.'s how to direct characters in new situations.
"The scheme behind Robotany requires that we ask the user to describe what the A.I. should do in just a few example situations, and our algorithm deduces the rest," said the game's product owner, Andrew Grant. "In essence, when faced with something the user hasn't described, the algorithm finds a similar situation that the user did specify, and goes with that."
The game was developed as part of GAMBIT's eight-week summer program, which brings together young artists, programmers, and project managers from U.S. and Singaporean institutes.
Robotany's team of eleven pushed game research in a unique direction by taking advantage of the human brain's ability to identify patterns.
"If we ask the user about a bunch of random example situations and draw conclusions from that," said Grant, "it turns out that you still need a really long list of example situations. With our approach, we can drastically reduce the number of examples we need to make an interesting A.I., well before you'd traditionally get anything good."
Added game director Jason Begy, "The player can effectively give the characters some instructions and then walk away indefinitely while the game runs."
Other A.I. developers have been enthusiastic about this new approach.
"Robotany represents a great new direction for game A.I.," said Damian Isla, who was the artificial intelligence lead at Bungie Studios, makers of the Halo franchise. "It's one in which the A.I.'s brains are grown organically (with help from the player), rather than painstakingly rebuilt from scratch each time by an expert programmer."
MIT Media Lab researcher and GAMBIT summer program alum Jeff Orkin suggested solving this kind of challenge would be "one of the holy grails of A.I. research." He said the video game industry spends an incredible amount of time and money micromanaging the decisions that characters make. "It would be a boon to the game industry, as long as the system still provided designers with an acceptable degree of control."
Rethinking the visual interface to the AI was a key component for addressing these technological questions. Begy described the need for more effective visual design as "absolutely necessary if the project is to succeed," because A.I.'s can handle countless variables while human players training the A.I. cannot. For similar projects, he would recommend having a skilled user interface staffer on hand and testing interfaces with players as much as possible. "In the final design, we went for many robots, each of which was only paying attention to two variables," said Begy. "This is reflected in the training system in Robotany, which is made up of simple two-dimensional graphs."
The Robotany team, honored as a finalist in the student competition at the upcoming Independent Games Festival, China, was also comprised of producer Shawn Conrad (MIT); artists Hannah Lawler (Rhode Island School of Design), Benjamin Khan (Nanyang Technological University), and Hing Chui (Rhode Island School of Design); quality assurance lead Michelle Teo (Ngee Ann Polytechnic); designer Patrick Rodriguez (MIT), programmers Biju Joseph Jacob (Nanyang Technological University) and Daniel Ho (National University Singapore), and audio designer Ashwin Ashley Menon (Republic Polytechnic).
Additional Information
Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab (gambit.mit.edu)
The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab is a research collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Interactive Digital Media R&D Programme Office hosted by the Media Development Authority of Singapore. The lab experiments with the theory, aesthetics, culture, craft, legacy, technology and play of games, developing, sharing, and deploying prototypes, findings and best practices to challenge and shape global game research and industry. GAMBIT builds collaborations between Singapore institutions of higher learning and MIT departments to identify and solve research problems using a multi-disciplinary approach that can be applied by Singapore's digital game industry.
Media Development Authority (www.mda.gov.sg)
The Media Development Authority of Singapore promotes the growth of globally competitive film, television, radio, publishing, music, games, animation and interactive digital media industries. It also regulates the media sector to safeguard the interests of consumers, and promotes a connected society.
Part Six of the GAMBIT Summer Summit Videos: Fredo Durand, CSAIL
Part six of the GAMBIT Summer Summit videos features a lecture by Fredo Durand from MIT CSAIL who presents his talk on "Computer Graphics Research" Each Monday throughout the fall of 2011, we will feature a new video from the inaugural GAMBIT Summer Summit which took place on July 6th, 2011. Video Produced by Generoso Fierro, Edited by Garrett Beazley.
Sizzle Reel for the GAMBIT Summer 2011 Games Is Out!
This summer the interns at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab created six amazing prototypes! Here is a little teaser trailer to give you a quick look at what our summer of 2011 was all about. .
Part Five of the GAMBIT Summer Summit Videos is Up!
Part Five of the GAMBIT Summer Summit Videos features a talk by Bai Haoyu, from The National University of Singapore in which he discusses: "Planning and Decision Making under Uncertainty in Complex Worlds". Each Monday throughout the fall of 2011, we will feature a new video from the inaugural GAMBIT Summer Summit which took place on July 6th, 2011. Video Produced by Generoso Fierro, Edited by Garrett Beazley
Digital Archaeology: Investigating the Spacewar! Source
Here at GAMBIT we've been working on a project that aims to replicate the first computer game written at MIT, Spacewar! In the process we've been learning a lot about the way that games were written for the machines in the pioneering days of computing.
Spacewar! is game of space combat created for the DEC PDP-1 by hackers at MIT, including Steve "Slug" Russell, Martin "Shag" Graetz, Wayne Witaenem, Alan Kotok, Dan Edwards, Peter Samson and Graetz. You can play the game running on a Java emulator here. You can also run the game on the Multiple Emulator Super System (MESS) implementation of a PDP-1 by following the instructions here. The Spacewar! source code we've taken as the base version of the game is also available through that site. Our goal, however, is to make a version of the game that runs on an Arduino that we can demonstrate in the foyer of the lab.
As part of this project we're trying to understand what's going on in the PDP-1 source code that the emulators use. This has meant teaching ourselves the PDP-1 assembly language MACRO from old manuals written in 1962. It's been slow going, because a lot of information is either buried in the technical documentation or was just assumed knowledge that has been lost over time. It's also been very rewarding though and creates a feeling of connection to the minds of those hackers back in the 60s.
Looking around on Google it seems there's not that much information on the Spacewar! source code, and in trying to understand it we've come up with a few tips that might help someone else out:
Get the manuals for the PDP-1 and also for MACRO. They're available from the Bitsaver's archive and are very helpful. We have noticed that there seem to be errors in some of the example code in the MACRO manual, which were very confusing for me at first. The later examples, however, seem to be correct and are helpful in introducing some of the key concepts in the Spacewar! source.
Look at the compiled version of source code. There are two listings of the Spacewar! source code. The spacewar.mac file is handy for reading clean code, but the spacewar.lst file contains translations of every instruction into machine code, which is very useful for understanding exactly what's going on with the layout of everything in memory, which in turn is critical for understanding a lot of the low level memory manipulation that the code does.
MACRO inlines all macro definitions. The MACRO equivalent of functions are (somewhat confusingly) called macros. When you look through the .lst file you'll notice that wherever a macro was used in the .mac file MACRO has gone through and expanded it out inline by introducing temporary variables for each of the macro's arguments. This is what all the strange labels starting with "ZZ" are. Once you know this, reading the source code becomes a lot less confusing.
All numbers are in octal by default. This took us a long time to work out, although we should have realized it sooner. Unless the MACRO directive "decimal" has been issued in a macro definition the assembler interprets all numbers as octal. All the machine code and addresses that are in the .lst file are expressed in octal.
There is no stack. For programmers used to working at a C level of abstraction or higher, this was very confusing for us at first. As mentioned above, macros look like function when you write them, but when they are processed by the MACRO compiler they all get inlined. There is no stack pointer. There are no stack frames. Everything is just one big blob of data and instructions mushed together.
Labels are used both for naming variables and controlling flow. This was very hard for us to wrap our heads around at first. As mentioned before, there is no separation in memory between data and instructions. A coder would just have to make sure that they never let the program counter point to a place in memory that contains data rather than an instruction. The Spacewar! coders will commonly use a label to name an address in memory that they want to jump the flow control to and they'll also use a label to refer to a memory location that they are only going to store data in. As far as we can tell there is no naming convention which distinguishes them. Sometimes data can be stored immediately next to instructions in memory. Thankfully, however, the majority of the game object data is stored in a big contiguous block of memory after the instructions, rather than being completely interleaved.
Including the symbol "i" after an instruction makes it indirect. We never found an explicit statement of this, but I inferred it from looking at the opcodes in the .lst file. Indirect instructions take a memory address as an argument which tells them where to find the real argument. This idiom is very commonly used in Spacewar!
Space delimiters mean addition. So for instance "law 1 3 5" is equivalent to "law 9". Plus symbols also mean addition!
Parentheses define constants. MACRO automatically allocates some memory to hold the constant, stores its value there, and then replaces the constant symbols with the memory address of the constant. For instance when MACRO reads the instruction "lac (2000" in the preprocessing phase, it causes some memory to be allocated, say address 027703, and then stores 2000 in that address, replacing the original instruction with "lac 027703". This is all done prior to execution. We found this very confusing at first.
Get used to seeing a lot of "dap". The instruction "dap x" deposits the accumulator contents into the argument portion of the memory address x. This lets you change the argument of the instruction stored at that memory address. One of the most common idioms that the Spacewar! programmers use is to manipulate the flow of the program by writing "jmp .", which is a command that says "jump to this address" (which would result in a tight infinite loop if it were actually execute) and then to use the dap instruction to overwrite the target of the jump from "." to some other address that they load into the accumulator. This makes it hard to look at the code and immediately tell what the flow control is going to look like without tracing the execution, since you need to know what the "." is going to be replaced by when the program is actually running. They use a similar idiom for loading data, for example writing "lac ." which if executed straight up would load the contents of the current address (i.e. the "lac ." instruction itself) into the accumulator, but they then use dap to conditionally change the target from "." to some other location that contains data that they want to operate on.
Think in bits. Spacewar! is written very close to the machine. The programmers have used a frightening array of bitwise manipulation tricks that you don't often see in modern programming. They rotate bits in memory using bit-shifting so that they can store two short numbers in space normally used for one long number. They shift number representations around so that they're in the left or right side of a memory address depending on where a particular instruction call requires that it needs to be, which crops up quite frequently with the display instruction "dpy". They use clever number representations, such as 2's complement, to do fancy arithmetic tricks. They use MACRO to repeatedly double numbers in the preprocessing stage so that they get bit-shifted to the location in memory that they want before execution. They add together the bit codes of instructions to create combined instructions. These tricks are very rarely commented and working out exactly what this "clever" code is doing and why often requires a lot of poking around and reverse engineering.
Use MESS as a debugger to understand what's going on. The MESS PDP-1 emulator maps ctrl + most of your keyboard buttons to the switches on the PDP-1. You can turn on the "single step" and "single inst." switches and then hit ctrl-p, which will cause the PDP-1 to go into debugging mode and let your step through the code line by line by repeatedly pressing ctrl-p. By reading off the "memory address" lights and converting from binary to octal you can look up where the program is up to in the .lst file and follow the program as it's being executed.
Working on Spacewar! is fascinating. The programming style is unlike anything we've ever worked on before and has certainly made us think about low level programming in a whole new way. For anyone who is interested in computing history and low-level programming we strongly recommend checking it out.
At 4pm this Friday, we'll be playing games from the 2012 IGF Pirate Kart! As Mike Meyer explains from the website:
A Pirate Kart is a very very inclusive game compilation made in a hurry. Jeremy Penner came up with the idea for the first Pirate Kart as a way for the Glorious Trainwrecks community to collaborate on something for TIGSource's "B-Game" competition. To galvanize the community, he set an absurd goal: make 100 games in 48 hours and package them as a single entry in the competition.
The IGF Pirate Kart continues the spirit of the Pirate Kart but with a new twist: instead of making brand new games for it, mostly people are entering the games that they are proud of, but not "big" or "polished" or "real" enough to be worth the entry fee.
The 2012 IGF Pirate Kart has been entered into the 2012 Indie Games Festival, but the games are already available via BitTorrent and mirror sites. You can check out the full list of games here.
We're on the third floor of 5 Cambridge Center! (Cambridge, MA 02142) If you can't join us, you can watch our live stream.
The past month there has been much discussion and press about A Closed World, the summer project for which I served as game director this summer last. The response is overwhelming, by which I mean we are humbled by the attention we have received, and that it is difficult to maintain consistent correspondence with all who wish to discuss the game or have their specific questions answered. Truth be told, this latter burden has fallen harder on Todd than me, as I have been content to remain largely silent regarding my thoughts on the game. I felt that my role as game director afforded me the opportunity to have a voice on a compelling project, but the spirit and heart of the game belongs first with Todd as the caretaker of the goals, and with the talented team of developers we had working on the team during the eight week cycle.
This is in no way an attempt to minimize my involvement with the project. I'm proud of the game, and especially proud of the fingerprint traces I have left all over it. I think, especially when held up against other games I have been involved with at GAMBIT, a pattern emerges that marks my presence in the projects - specifically, the trace of a design approach that tries to emphasize and interrogate player subjectivity.
It is this design approach, and recent specific criticism of the game, that has compelled me to write this post voicing my opinion.
Much has been made of the game's opening monologue and the initial question: "are you male or female?" The most common criticism of this specific part of the game is that the question reinforces notions of a gender binary that excludes many for whom the male/female gender dichotomy excludes. Many suggest that they stopped playing the game upon being asked the question, and others couldn't or refused to see much beyond the question and the binary choice presented the player.
The language of the question is important. The game asks, quite simply "Are you male, or female?" The "you" in the question is intentionally obscure. Most players will immediately assume that the question functions as a basic character creation choice, that you are simply choosing a gender for your character. They assume that the gender choice at the start of the game will effect narrative aspects of the game, and specifically that it will shape the romantic relationships in the story of the game.
The question is more profound, and the criticism that transgendered communities are excluded by the binary mechanic speaks to the profundity of the opening statement. The question is asked in an attempt to frame the entire experience of gender in the game. It is meant to ask not only what is your classification, rather, and more importantly, how do you classify? The great challenge for me during the entirety of the project, as a person for whom questions of gender have never personally been at the fore, is how do we, as a society and as individuals, concieve of gender, and how do we present gender in games. The question is masked as a standard game mechanic of character creation, while trying to do much more. In asking the question we were trying to emphasize the players' subjectivity, and specifically, the players' personal notions of gender and identity.
The question works best when paired with the procedurally random assigment of gender to characters in the game. The frivolity with which the program assigns gender held against the boldness of the opening question creates a tension in the game that problematizes socially accepted notions of gender, gender roles, and more specifically how we conceive of and represent gender in games.
Allow me an anecdote. I often reminisce about the surprise with which everyone discovered that Samus from Metroid was a woman. There is so much complexity wrapped up in the revelation that it is hard to untangle. We discover Samus is a woman because she either A) removes her helmet and has long hair, or B) removes her armor revealing her swimsuit. This early depiction of gender raises many questions. Is Samus' long hair and/or swimsuit an adequate signifier of her gender? Why would a community be surprised to discover that the protagonist is a female? To what extent does Samus' gender have anything at all to do with the experience of Metroid? For me, the instance of Samus speaks to the culturally situated notions of gender that we were trying to problematize with A Closed World.
As I mentioned before, a pattern has emerged with games that I work on at GAMBIT. With Seer, and more obviously with Yet One Word, a goal of the project was to cave in the screen and invite players to reflect on their playerness. I am particularly fond of games that do this. Dance Central and B.U.T.T.O.N. remind players of their subjectivity by emphasizing their very corporeality. Sports and many board games do something similar. As the steep incline of technology has driven digital gaming toward an emphasis on photorealism and surround sound, designers have pushed for a specific kind of immersion pinned to the virtually real; forever chasing the Holodec. For me, I am interested more in games that are immersive not because they transport, rather because they reflect and force the players' gaze back on themselves as subjects. Indeed, it seems to me that this is a strength of interactivity, creating meaning by reminding players of how they are interacting.
For many, this has worked. Players have remarked at their surprise when they found themselves making assumptions about gender in A Closed World. The game invited these players to reflect on their own conceptions of gender, and how they were applying their notions to their experience of the game.
We have said, and it bears repeating, to the extent that we could, we wanted A Closed World to raise questions, not to provide answers. For me, the strength of the project is not in the narrative at all. Indeed, many of the accusations levied against the game's story, that it's overly reductive, simplistic, and possibly trite, have some merit. Hey, stories are very hard. For those looking for a game about gender and sexuality power dynamics, about the oppressive cultural hegemony of our heteronormative society, or about the deep personal challenges constantly faced by marginalized individuals, I fear this game may leave you wanting. Some of the expectations for what the game meant to accomplish may have been confused by our paratextual rhetoric surrounding the game, which we are continuing to iterate on and improve. Also, if you are looking for a robust and detailed procedurally profound combat system, you won't find it here.
Where A Closed World shines for me is in how it invites players to reflect on their conceptions of gender. We start the game by emphasizing gender only to deemphasize it procedurally, attempting to turn the tables on the player that they might consider what their expectations were going into the game, and how those expectations may be challenged. The turn may seem simple, but I believe it is elegant in its reflective capability. That people, through playing the game, have been asking these questions, of us and of themselves, suggests to me that we may have accomplished that goal.
New MIT Game Research Explores Singapore Culture from the Inside Out
With student and faculty exchange programs, research alliances and the development of a brand new university, MIT has a long history of collaboration with the country of Singapore.
One such partnership, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, considers how that strong relationship has created a unique need: how does someone reflect Singaporean culture to those on this side of the Pacific without resorting to rough, if well-intentioned, stereotypes?
A team in the GAMBIT Game Lab's demanding summer program takes on the challenge with its new title, "Stranded in Singapore", a point-and-click adventure game featuring a player "forced by circumstances to complete tasks for the eccentric Auntie MeeMaggi."
"We wanted to see how a game player's values can be mirrored in another culture," says Dr. Clara Fernández-Vara (SM '04), the game's product owner, who along with game director Richard Eberhardt oversaw the work of ten interns over the eight-week summer program. "Singaporean culture was pretty much ideal in that sense. It's distinctive and it offers the parameters needed to design a game in such a short time. It also facilitated the creation of a story: we could present Singapore almost as a character in itself."
In fact, much of the gameplay features Singapore's famously heterogeneous cuisine.
"Food in Singapore is very modular," says Eberhardt. Culinary components of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and other dishes find themselves mixed and matched in creative ways. Similarly, the quests in "Stranded in Singapore" are modular, obliging players to create new combinations of found objects to make their way through the game.
Such permutating puzzles are central to Fernández-Vara's research. The game is procedurally generated, which means it's dependent on algorithms to create and re-create the story. "You can play it multiple times, solving new puzzles with each play-through," describes Eberhardt, illustrating why such games are appealing for players.
Procedural generation can make a game uniquely hard to design. Where traditional adventure games are mapped out in detail, the puzzles in procedurally-generated games change every time you play, even during development. "Our designers and programmers would make a change to an object in the game, and that change would ripple out," remembers Fernández-Vara. "Adventure games are already challenging to make, but when they can be played in many different ways, dependencies get complicated."
When featuring Singaporean culture, those dependencies can get especially complicated.
"We're dealing with dialects, for example," says Fernández-Vara. "We're dealing with mixed vocabularies -- like 'Singlish'. How do you get a game to work well when the same word can have different meanings for different people, when an ambiguous phrase can change the game's whole direction?"
As an example, Fernández-Vara cites "can can".
"In the game, we have a can as an object. But in Singlish, can can is like saying no problem or can do. These language problems are tough."
"It's curious, though," adds Eberhardt, "our Singaporean students learned new Singlish phrases they never heard before -- from each other and from resources we used for the game, such as local guidebooks."
The game development team, which included several Singaporean tertiary students, found technical and design solutions for designers in the game industry. The researchers caution developers working with permutating content to allocate additional planning time. Misconceptions in the team can cause weeks of development delays for a procedurally-generated game. Fernández-Vara describes the dilemma, "everyone on a team envisions the game a little differently, but you can't have changing content if you don't already have content."
Eberhardt backs up that sentiment with a practical solution. "Working in the same room is really important," whether the team member is a programmer, artist, or audio designer. The team's producer, Nicholas Garza '11, echoes the need for open communication from a cultural standpoint. "Every summer we're suddenly grouped with nine strangers and asked to create something unique and amazing together. Working with familiar mentors lent me some solid footing, but when half your team represents the culture featured in your game, communication is especially important. They are not only your subject matter experts, they also reflect your potential audience."
Fernández-Vara describes her satisfaction from building upon her research from GAMBIT's 2010 award-winning adventure game "Symon". "'Stranded in Singapore' features more complex puzzles and locations. To do that, we had to create a set of tools to facilitate the design of procedurally-generated narrative puzzles." The long-term impact of this research will extend beyond point-and-click adventures. GAMBIT plans to to release a version of these tools for general use to programmers and designers of all sorts of games.
Additional Information
Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab (gambit.mit.edu)
The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab is a research collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Interactive Digital Media R&D Programme Office hosted by the Media Development Authority of Singapore. The lab experiments with the theory, aesthetics, culture, craft, legacy, technology and play of games, developing, sharing, and deploying prototypes, findings and best practices to challenge and shape global game research and industry. GAMBIT builds collaborations between Singapore institutions of higher learning and MIT departments to identify and solve research problems using a multi-disciplinary approach that can be applied by Singapore's digital game industry.
Media Development Authority (www.mda.gov.sg)
The Media Development Authority of Singapore promotes the growth of globally competitive film, television, radio, publishing, music, games, animation and interactive digital media industries. It also regulates the media sector to safeguard the interests of consumers, and promotes a connected society.
Contact
Andrew Whitacre
Communications Manager
Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(617) 324-0490
awhit@mit.edu
Part Four of our GAMBIT Summer Summit Series Videos is a lecture by Li Zhuoru from The National University of Singapore on "Context-sensitive Markov Decision Processes". Each Monday for the next twelve weeks we will release a video of a speaker or panel from the July 6th, 2011 GAMBIT Summer Summit. An event that featured talks on some of our current game development and research activities.
Improviso goes to IndieCade 2011 and draws some attention from the good folks at ShackNews who go on to talk about other new indie titles, Hohokum and BasketBelle.
What's in a name? Making an #Occupy board game at the Cardboard Jam.
I was happy to host the second Cardboard Jam at the GAMBIT Game Lab with Darren Torpey of Boston Game Jams (and Boston Indies and countless other Boston game development groups). Sixteen local developers, researchers, and students joined us for two days of rapid iteration of board, dice, and card games. After a few hours of brainstorming and pitching ideas to the group, we coalesced into five teams and spent the remaining 20 hours creating games. By day one's dinner time, we were trading people around to test all of the games. All five games were finished and playtested by the end of the game jam, with rules and pieces that could be picked up and played by others.
OCCUPY
The theme of our game jam was Occupy. I emailed Darren the week before the game jam started and pitched the theme to him - I've been keeping up with the Occupy events around the nation, especially OccupyWallStreet and OccupyBoston. He liked it and so it was then presented to the jammers at the start of the brainstorming session. They came up with dozens of ideas; some pitched mechanics for which 'occupy' was a good fit and others pitched fictions and themes based on the word. Having a verb as our theme was useful in that all of our pitches seemed to gel well with the theme.
We grouped the pitches by shared aspects and from there the jammers formed into teams. My team of four chose to explore a two mechanics: Conway's game of life and RoboRally-style programmed moves with cards. We placed these two pitches next a few other cards that were similar and got to work. One of these related cards was a pitch I came up with, where the players could be groundskeepers at a park during OccupyWallStreet and the NPC actors as police and protesters. I never mentioned this theme again to the team, but I think it was in the back of my mind throughout the event.
For Part Three of the GAMBIT Summer Summit which occurred back on July 6th, 2011features Owen Macindoe from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and his lecture on "Cooperative planning for AI in games". Every summer at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, students from Singapore and the US work with GAMBIT researchers and development teams on novel game concepts, and visiting researchers spend that time research gaming related topics across a variety of fields. Back on July 6th, 2011, we drew back the curtains in the middle of the summer to provide insights into our current game development and research activities during the inaugural GAMBIT Summer Summit.
It has been quite the news week for our Summer 2011 Game, "A Closed World". Let's look at what's been created, both pro and con.
Strong reviews by the games press from such notable publications as Kotaku, indiegames.com, jayisgames.com and pcgamer.com who picked "A Closed World" as one of the week's best PC games.
Many LGBTQ web publications such as AfterEllen, The Advocate and GPhilly have positively endorsed the game with AfterEllen going as far as to "applaud the team for crafting something sensitive, compelling and important"
And a few not so flattering reviews of the game have arisen as well, including something unique for our game lab: a Stencyl created parody of "A Closed World" from the folks at auntiepixelante.com called, "A Closed Mind".
At Friday Games @ GAMBIT this week you will die. All those who want to die should show up at the GAMBIT Lounge at 4:00, and even if you don't want to die please pay us a visit anyway. There will be cookies.
Dark Souls, released this week, is the spiritual successor to Demon's Souls, 2009's sleeper hit famous for its innovative online features and crushing difficulty. This Friday we will be showcasing the series, its legacy as an outgrowth of the King's Field series (one of the rare examples of Japanese 1st-person gaming), and discuss just what makes it different from almost any other AAA game on the market right now.
Contrary to the ads you may have seen (like this one), it's about a lot more than just getting killed.
For Part Two of the GAMBIT Summer Summit which occurred back on July 6th, 2011 a Project Panel representing five of our summer games was assembled to discuss their individual status' in mid program. The panel featured· Mia Consalvo on "The Social Social Game", Todd Harper's "Gender and sexual identity game project" , Clara Fernández-Vara's "Aunt MeeMaggi's Cleaning School", Mark Sullivan "Softbody Physics" and Andrew Haydn Grant "Human Trainer AI". What is The GAMBIT Summer Summit? Every summer at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, students from Singapore and the US work with GAMBIT researchers and development teams on novel game concepts, and visiting researchers spend that time research gaming related topics across a variety of fields. Back on July 6th, 2011, we drew back the curtains in the middle of the summer to provide insights into our current game development and research activities during the inaugural GAMBIT Summer Summit.
Friday Games 10/14/11 - What can the demoscene do for you?
Tammo "kb" Hinrichs is a game industry professional and organizing
team member for several demoparties with attendance as high as twelve
hundred people. He will give an overview of what the demoscene is and
present on what the demoscene community has done in the past to
contribute to his and others' professional development and encourage
the formation of new companies, such as game studios.
The demoscene is a computer art subculture active most in Europe which
has encouraged students, mid-career IT and computer creative
professionals to build and continue to develop their coding, graphic
arts, and compositional skills. It has also facilitated networking and
mentorship connections. Many members of the scene have also found
opportunities within it to cultivate their teamwork and leadership
skills. Software development houses, particularly game studios, have
also benefited from techniques refined in the scene, such as
procedural content generation, and many demosceners work in the games
industry.
This talk is
sponsored by @party, a Boston area demoparty. Please visit their website
at atparty-demoscene.net.
Spacewar! is game of space combat created for the DEC PDP-1 by hackers at MIT, including Steve "Slug" Russell, Martin "Shag" Graetz, Wayne Witaenem, Alan Kotok, Dan Edwards, Peter Samson and Graetz. You can play the game running on a Java emulator 
At 4pm this Friday, we'll be playing games from the 2012 IGF Pirate Kart! As Mike Meyer explains from 
