GAMBIT

Matt Weise gave a great presentation to a packed room at MIT last week, peppered with war stories and so-horrible-it's-funny anecdotes from his experiences in the game industry. For those of you who missed it, here's his list of awful things about professional game development, and each point was greeted with doleful grins and nods of agreement from the other industry members in the audience. Forewarned is forearmed, so here's my recommendation: everybody preparing to enter a game industry career should stop believing that anyone can avoid these pitfalls, but start anticipating and preparing for them instead.

10. Working with people who don't play games
9. Dealing with people who think "fun" is objective
8. Working on games and/or genres you don't like
7. Dealing with people who do not understand the design process
6. Being told you must kiss a publisher's ass
5. Having a design dictated to you over the phone
4. People who cannot communicate to save their life
3. Overtime (Matt actually skipped this one in the presentation because it's pretty obvious)
2. Dealing with people who can't work on a team
1. Realizing that no one has ever unknowingly made a bad game (That'll be you one day)

Thanks Matt!

The GAMBIT undergraduate team had a visitor today! Doug Church, Executive Producer from Electronic Arts Los Angeles (to us Bostonians, he'll always be "of Looking Glass fame") dropped by the team's second sprint review session to lend his analytical skills to their current project.

The UROP team is currently two months into the development of their puzzle game, which we hope to put up on the GAMBIT web site soon. Doug reminded the team to always keep in mind what they wanted the player to feel, examining each game mechanic to see how it contributed or detracted from the desired user experience. He highlighted some fundamentals of good casual games: the rhythm of learning new tricks and strategies, the peaks and troughs of the difficulty curve, and the "potential extra achievements" that will keep players coming back.

Doug was extremely generous with his time, spending an extra half-hour after the sprint review to chat with the students about the realities of working in game development. A great day for the team with a great gamesmith! Thanks Doug!

Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab Speaker Series presents Comparative Media Studies alumnus Matt Weise, who has been working in the mobile games industry since his 2004 graduation. There will be a question and answer session with Matt after the lecture.

IBM-MIT/ESD Innovation Lecture Series:
Engineering Systems Solutions to Real World Challenges in Media and Entertainment:
Threshold Animation Studios

Larry Kasanoff, CEO, Threshold Animation Studios and Producer/Director/Co-creator/Writer, Foodfight!

Moderated by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Visiting Professor of Engineering Systems and VP, Technical Strategy and Innovation, IBM

Event Details
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Time: 4:00 pm (Reception to follow)
Location: MIT, Building E51-345 Cambridge, MA
Map and directions
Contact: Lois Slavin
Sponsored by: MIT's Engineering System Division and IBM

March 13, 2007 | 5:00 PM | Location: 14E-304

Women's culture has existed for centuries in Japan. Today, it extensively shapes Japan's popular culture - even its game industry. Gender-blending, androgyny and the challenging of gender roles lie at the core of specific game genres produced by and for females in Japan. Whereas in the West most professional attempts to adress a larger number of female gamers and to engage a greater female workforce in the game industry have failed, Avaloop - an independent game development studio in Austria - is about to change this profoundly. By taking the global de-disneyfication into account and employing female creative leads, its game Papermint has not only already gained a large fanbase of non-traditional gamers but even manages to blend games with the notion of bourgeois 'high culture'. Papermint's success is based on its practical realisation of Barbara's research on Japanese gaming and girl culture, as well as the game's wholly original artistic concept created by a diverse team.