When the playroom is the computer
For all the work that’s gone into developing educational media, even the most stimulating TV shows and video games leave kids stationary. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab are hoping to change that with...
View ArticleGame of the Week returns to Gambit Game Lab
When dozens of young visual designers, programmers and project managers descended on the MIT campus last summer to create full-fledged video games in just nine weeks, the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab...
View ArticleImprov game puts the role-playing back in RPG
While most role-playing games (RPGs) ask players to step into the shoes of an orc, level up and collect stats, RPGs haven’t asked players to take on actual roles — to act, to improvise, to explore...
View ArticleBlood, sex and politics in video games: how censorship is done (or not)
MIT researcher Konstantin Mitgutsch, brilliant as he is, can't figure out how video games are rated. And that's saying something, given that Mitgutsch is a scientific board member of Europe's...
View ArticleFirst Person Victim
“This is going to be a little bit untraditional,” said Henrik Schønau Fog, a PhD fellow at Denmark’s Aalborg University who studies how video games portray war, as he introduced his team’s provocative...
View ArticleLearning science through gaming
This month, thousands of middle-school students are going online to play an interactive video game. That might not sound surprising, by itself. But in this case, the game is a special science-mystery...
View ArticleComparative Media Studies on display at MIT150 and Cambridge Science Festival
This weekend is the chance of a lifetime to learn about media at MIT ... or, really, the chance that only comes around every 150 years.Come celebrate media at MIT as part of MIT's 150th anniversary...
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Faster computer graphics
Photographs of moving objects are almost always a little blurry — or a lot blurry, if the objects are moving rapidly enough. To make their work look as much like conventional film as possible, game and...
View ArticleComputer learns language by playing games
Computers are great at treating words as data: Word-processing programs let you rearrange and format text however you like, and search engines can quickly find a word anywhere on the Web. But what...
View ArticleAward-winning game explores puzzling dreams
Developed by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, 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...
View ArticleLGBT content and video games: MIT lab tackles the issue
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) content has found acceptance in every medium of American popular entertainment ... that is, all but one: video games.New research efforts at MIT takes that...
View ArticleNew 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...
View ArticleGame puts artificial intelligence in the mind of the beholder
When it comes to programming video-game characters to act realistically in response to ever-changing environments, there is only so much current artificial intelligence (AI) can do. Even skilled AI...
View ArticleSaid and Done for January 2012
Said and Done is the monthly, photo-rich publication from MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, integrating feature articles with news, research and events to give you a distilled...
View ArticleExperimental World War I video game combats 'over-engineered' storytelling
A new video game from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab takes interactive storytelling trends to task. Developed by student interns over the summer, "The Snowfield" has just been announced as a...
View ArticleVisiting Artist Ben Houge leads lively 'Sound and Real-Time Systems' panel
MIT Visiting Artist Ben Houge led a panel on "Sound and Real-Time Systems," held in Bartos Theater on Feb. 15 at 7 p.m., where he was joined by members of the MIT community to discuss the convergence...
View ArticlePrinceton Review names MIT a top school for video game design
The Princeton Review has ranked MIT second for undergraduate game design programs and third for graduate programs on its list of "Top Schools to Study Video Game Design for 2012," which honors 50 of...
View Article3 Questions: Hanna Rose Shell on the hidden history of camouflage
Soldiers have been trying to disguise themselves since at least the Trojan War. But as MIT historian of technology Hanna Rose Shell has detailed in her research, no concerted effort to develop...
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MIT Game Lab explores the potential of games and play
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...
View ArticleWireless researchers host ‘Game-Jam’
It is difficult to provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of wireless network data performance in the real world. Although providers like AT&T and Verizon offer coverage maps on their web...
View ArticlePlaying with Einstein
Students and researchers of the MIT Game Lab have released an open-source toolkit to simulate the visual effects of special relativity in games and graphics applications. Intended for game developers,...
View ArticleLearn game development at MIT this summer
The MIT Game Lab is for the first time providing a one-week course to expose professionals to their research and development methods for game development. This course will be held August 5-9 in...
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Big game hunter
The crowd stands and cheers. The exhausted, triumphant winning team is handed its trophy, which the captain lifts while the rest of the players raise their arms in victory. This sounds like the scene...
View ArticleTaking games seriously at the Lincoln Laboratory
Researchers in Lincoln Laboratory's Informatics and Decision Support Group are developing serious games, an oxymoronic term coined for a wide variety of games whose primary goal is not entertainment....
View ArticleBuilding culture in digital media
The video game “Grand Theft Auto V,” which recently grossed $1 billion in its first three days on sale, is set in the fictional city of Los Santos. But if you’ve played the game, you probably don’t...
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