Looking to the Future: The MIT GAMBIT Lab
Boston is no doubt a true metropolitan city; the historic architecture and contemporary skyscrapers provide the backdrop for some of the most influential and high caliber video game development studios in the nation. Boston’s Irrational Games has been a city staple since 1997 with the now defunct Looking Glass Studios coming 7 years prior in 1990. Harmonix, the studio that started the industry’s 5-year obsession with plastic instruments, also calls Boston home. I hate to use the phrase ‘game-changer’ to describe a game’s effect on the industry and it’s contemporaries, but there is no doubt of the far reaching influences that both Harmonix and Irrational have had on the industry. Unfortunately these studios, no matter how influential, have to rely on the sales of a product to further development, leaving a space for unhindered exploration vacant – or so one would think.
Situated in Cambridge, above the oh so tasty Legal Sea Food (Which I had my way with a lobster…a very tasty lobster), is the MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Created as joint-venture between MIT (The Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the government of Singapore, the GAMBIT lab represents the first step in filling the largely ignored academic space of the games industry by specifically focusing on the creation of new gameplay experiences and research as it directly pertains to video games. Over my Spring Break holiday I was given the opportunity to talk and get a tour of the studio from the director of US Operations (The GAMBIT lab is split between facilities in Boston and Singapore), Phillip Tan.
Tan started my visit with a quick tour of the lab itself, which I would describe as an office made up of equal parts work space and game room, with a definite focus on keeping the floor plan open and accessible. While walking through the corridors of the studio, I was informed that the floor layout was specifically designed like a first person shooter level, and is utilized in routine battles throughout the year. Not to miss out on a teaching opportunity, Tan explained an instance of showing how easily a game can become broken through a simple rule change, illustrated by making deaths only count if a player was shot in the back. The rule change predictably resulted in a stalemate as the students shuffled through the ‘level’ with their backs turned square against the walls.
After seeing the design rooms, which were littered with concept art and whiteboards crammed with seemingly incomprehensible development schedules, we headed back to Tan’s office where we discussed the design philosophies and goals that the GAMBIT lab commits itself to. The GAMBIT lab grew out of the Education Arcade program (A part of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT) when Tan, and the other founding members of the lab, realized that summer was an ideal time for student game design projects; It gave enough time to see a project come to fruition without having to compete with a student’s already loaded academic schedule during the school year.
Although MIT is probably best known for being one of the top technical colleges in the world, and thus it stands to reason that the GAMBIT lab would be filled with genius coders, the first requirement for working at the lab has nothing to do with a student’s ability to work with Python or Flash, and everything to do with “Not Being a Jerk” as Tan eloquently stated. Teamwork seems to be the key at the GAMBIT lab which allows everyone to fulfill certain roles during the development cycle of a game while trying to co-opt everyone’s ideas into the final product. With a diverse array of jobs encompassing the development of a game, there is no prerequisite for coding experience at GAMBIT, although Tan stated that many who work at the lab have some baseline knowledge to start from. As well as pulling from the expansive pool of talent that MIT represents, students from other academic establishments including RISD (The Rhode Island School of Design), Berklee, and countless others help handle art design as well as musical composition (which are fields not specifically catered to at MIT).
Despite the lack of any official degrees pertaining directly to games or their design, and to the confusion of it’s members, the GAMBIT lab was recently named the ninth best undergraduate video game design program by the Princeton Review, and one only needs to play their games to understand why. Representing a diverse range of genres, GAMBIT’s games, although not always the most polished, all manage to feel unique in their efforts to create new and different mechanics and gameplay experiences. To check out the games for yourself you just need to head to the GAMBIT lab’s official website which hosts the extent of their history with playable builds of almost all of their past development projects. In talking with Tan I learned of quite a few interesting aspects about both the ideas behind certain games and some of the difficulties that were accompanied their developments.
Probably the most interesting tidbit of information I gleaned from my visit was Tan’s explanation of a first person shooter that was developed by the GAMBIT lab and the problems associated with creating the experience it’s team envisioned. Instead of being a traditional first person shooter, GAMBIT’s version took a more juvenile approach by removing guns and replacing them with a players hand in a gun position (Think to your days on the playground playing Cops and Robbers) and replacing ammo and health with a breathe and self esteem meter respectively. The breath meter is pretty self-explanatory, as players would fire their ‘hand guns’ through the use of literal shooting noises, but the true genius came at the implementation of the self-esteem meter which gave the player, much like in the aforementioned games of our youth, the ability to contest another players killing blow with the equivalent of a ‘Nu-uh, you didn’t hit me.’
Despite the genius premise, Tan stated that development was anything but smooth as the team had to adapt Valve’s Source engine for their unique set of circumstances. The Source engine has long been a staple of the mod community for it’s vast toolset and adaptability, but because their uses included modifying the 3D character models to swap guns for a players hands, the Source engine itself became a major development hurdle to overcome. As the engine handles a player’s gun as a part of their body, instead of a separate piece of geometry, the void left by the removal of the gun had to be accounted for. The unexpected amount of time associated with fixing this problem significantly delayed the development schedule leading to a final product that ultimately could have benefited from more time.
The goal of GAMBIT has always been focused on exploring new ideas and how they can best be implemented into a functional gamer experience. Tan remarked that the lab wants to have a developer look at the games that they create and think to themselves ‘I could do that better.’ Unlike the vast majority of the industry’s development studios, which are often incredibly proactive in the protection of their intellectual property, GAMBIT actually hopes that developers take notice and steal their ideas, because that’s the point.
The space that the GAMBIT lab occupies is a rather new one, and something that acts as an important bridge between academia and industry. The lab takes the constraints, which both inherently possess, and uses them in an advantageous way by focusing on something that neither a purely academic or business focused studio could achieve. There is no doubt in my mind of the significant progress that the GAMBIT lab represents for the industry – Both in it’s exploration of new territories of game design, as well as educating a new breed of designer that isn’t afraid of bucking established genre trends. Will the next big idea come out of the lab? Only time will tell, but if two graduates from the MIT Media Lab have taught us anything, the students at MIT have some great ideas just waiting to be shared with the world.
Sharing: It’s Win/Win
