You'll learn how to apply, what we look for in our grad students, and about opportunities to bring your passion to fields like civic media, games, computational expression, education, digital humanities, and more.
On-Campus Thursday, September 22, 2011 9:30 AM - 7:00 PM Thursday, November 10, 2011 9:30 AM - 7:00 PM
If you would like to attend an on-campus info session, please RSVP to cms-admissions@mit.edu.
Video: GAMBIT Presents: Indies Will Shoot You In The Knees: Redux
If you missed the August 4th, 2011 panel: "Indies Will Shoot You In The Knees: Redux" that GAMBIT hosted at MIT, you now have a chance to look at it in glorious technicolor (not really technicolor, more like Garrett-O-Scope). Here, presented to you in three savory thought-provoking parts. And in case you have no idea about what I am talking about... 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). Produced by Generoso Fierro, Edited by Garrett Beazley
The Final Update Of The 2011 US GAMBIT Lab Summer Program
All of the team's games went "gold" and the students presented their games at the GAMBIT Summer Program Post Mortem on August 5th. Thanks to everyone for a sensational and successful summer program! Read about how it all wrapped up from the view of our GAMBIT mentors, , Jeremy Kang (Republic Polytechnic), Douglas Finnigan (Temasek Polytechnic) and Mark Gossage (Singapore Polytechnic). 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 Eight Update Of The 2011 US GAMBIT Lab Summer Program
During Week Eight our teams are working hard to finish their games and "Go Gold". Find our how they have done by reading the observations of GAMBIT mentors, Douglas Finnigan (Temasek Polytechnic), Jeremy Kang (Republic Polytechnic) and Mark Gossage (Singapore Polytechnic). 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.
Symon, the Best Browser Game from the 2010 Indie Game Challenge, has been updated with new features and is now free to play at Kongregate. The thought-provoking video game invites players to walk through the dreams of a paralyzed patient. Developed by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, Symon will receive 1 million free ad impressions, courtesy of Kongregate (part of the GameStop network).
Symon is an unusual game in its theme as well as how it plays. The player is in the head of the eponymous Symon, dealing with his regrets and yearnings. The goal is to help Symon sort out his problems in his dreams. As described by Dr. Clara Fernández-Vara, who led the project, "It's a game about thwarted hopes, but it tries to remain optimistic."
Traditionally, puzzles in point-and-click adventure games never change; once a player has figured them out, the same solutions will always work. Symon is unusual because it can be replayed many times with new puzzles. Each time the game is started, the player experiences a unique fragment of all the possible combinations that the game can generate.
Dr. Fernández-Vara explains, "The system that produces the game is based on Symon's personality. For instance, he'll never give children something that would hurt them. By figuring out the puzzles, the player learns more about the system, which is actually the character's mind. It takes a few playthroughs to figure out the system. There are also some characters and items that only appear on rare occasions."
Under the direction of Dr. Fernández-Vara at MIT, a team of nine students from USA and Singapore worked together to develop Symon during an intense 8-week 2010 GAMBIT Summer Program. Their challenge was to design a game that modeled how dreams work, presenting players with puzzles that were "logical, but not quite," in the same way that a dream makes sense while asleep but becomes nonsensical upon awakening.
As the elements of the puzzles could not be entirely random and required consistency for the game to be playable, this posed a significant design and technical hurdle. The Symon team rose to the challenge by developing computer algorithms that could generate puzzles with different solutions.
The design research of Dr. Fernández-Vara looks for new mechanics for adventure games. She is currently working on a new game that extends the same design and technological solutions to create even more complex puzzles and locations. At the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, her team has created a set of tools to facilitate the design of procedurally generated narrative puzzles. She hopes that "this work could be the foundation for a new paradigm to design and play adventure games."
The Kongregate Award for Best Browser Game at IGC will allow Symon will reach a much wider audience beyond university researchers and students. For Dr. Fernández-Vara, winning the award was a surprise and a testament to the talent of the whole team. "Seeing that our experimentation was significant enough not only for research papers but also for game competitions was very rewarding. Hopefully, Symon will also show that there are many themes one can make games about, starting with what makes us human."
For more information, please contact Patti Richards at the MIT News Office at +1 617-253-8923.
