CMS News Archives

Dear Friends of GAMBIT,

Like the rest of the world, we here at the GAMBIT Game Lab are shocked by the recent devastation in Haiti. One cannot help but wonder what it will take to rebuild the community leveled by this disaster. The people of Haiti need our help now, and we at GAMBIT have a plan!

February 26-28th, GAMBIT will be hosting the 2010 Complete Game-Completion Marathon to raise money for relief efforts in Haiti. Teams of players will gather at our MIT lab to attempt to complete a game in one sitting. Participants will independently seek sponsorship on a dollar/hour basis with all proceeds going directly to relief efforts in Haiti through Partners in Health, and with support from the MIT Public Service Center. The labs will be open 24 hours a day through the weekend to accommodate the teams, with snacks and refreshments available for the players.

More at gambit.mit.edu.

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 2:25 PM in Announcements, Events | Permalink

Via friends of CMS at a local television archive, "Yet another Downfall detournement with Bruno Ganz holding the line against digital scholarship and fair use":

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 8:51 AM in | Permalink

CMS's sister group, the Center for Future Civic Media, was uniquely positioned to respond to communication needs in Haiti following last week's devastating earthquake.

Center researchers, led by director Chris Csikszentmihalyi, have been aiding this first majorly tech-heavy humanitarian response, helping ensure developers open their tools to one another. It sounds minor at first, but nearly every news outlet and NGO has ramped up its technological capability in recent years--but without consideration for standards for sharing information in the middle of a crisis.

Csikszentmihalyi's open letter to developers this past weekend was picked up everywhere, most prominently by the New York Times' technology writer David Pogue:

In the response to the earthquake in Haiti, many organizations have created sites where people could find one another, or least information about their loved ones. This excellent idea has been undermined by its success: within 24 hours, it became clear that there were too many places where people were putting information; each site became a silo.

People within the IT community recognized the danger of too many unconnected sites, and Google became interested in helping. Google is now running an embeddable application at: http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/

We recognize that many newspapers have put precious resources into developing a people-finder system. We nonetheless urge them to make their data available to the Google project, and standardize on the Google widget. Doing so will greatly increase the number of successful reunions.

I am not affiliated with Google -- indeed, this is a volunteer initiative by some of their engineers -- but this is one case where their reach and capacity can help the most people.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the reasoning behind this request. Any questions about the widget or its functionality or features are best directed to Google.

Meanwhile, the Center is maintaining an open thread on its website to track the Haiti-tech response. If you have ideas to share, please contribute and it will get re-shared to important mailing lists.

On a personal note, Google's people-finder at http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/ has already helped me (Andrew) find a former Tufts colleague based in Haiti during the quake and report back to her coworkers that she indeed returned safely to the Boston area on Saturday.

So the crisis is ongoing, but the fast-response civic technology the Center is studying and implementing--it works, even at this scale.

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 8:43 AM in Announcements, CMS In The Press | Permalink

Mick Foley, one of the top wrestling performers of the past decade, talked about his experiences as an entertainer and bestselling author who has written three memoirs (including Foley Is Good: And the Real World is Faker Than Wrestling) two novels, and a variety of children's books. Foley has been a professional wrestler since the mid-1980s and was a headlining star for World Wrestling Entertainment (www.wwe.com) under the personas of Mankind, Cactus Jack and Dude Love. Foley will discuss telling stories in a variety of written and performative genres and how he has managed to bridge the gap across multiple genres and entertainment forms.

This is the 2nd part of our multi-part American Pro Wrestling series.

Download Here!

Continue reading "From the CMS archive: "The Real World's Faker than Wrestling: Former WWE Champion and Best-Selling Author Mick Foley"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 9:00 AM in | Permalink

From http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/gambit-game-jam.html

The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab will play host to Boston's developer community for the 2010 Global Game Jam, as participants worldwide try to design ground-breaking games in just 48 hours.

The Jan. 29-31 weekend event, organized by the International Game Developers Association, features volunteer teams of video game designers across six continents, working together for two days and nights as they create games from scratch. In the process, they uncover new possibilities for game styles, execution, and collaboration that future designers can utilize.

Philip Tan, U.S. Executive Director of GAMBIT, said that the Global Game Jam creates an opportunity to prototype new kinds of games, ones that by necessity are more experimental. "Game jams don't give you enough time to mope. It's hard enough to come up with an idea and prototype it without worrying about whether it's good enough."

"Community and creativity are what it's all about," said William Uricchio, Director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program and Lead Principal Investigator at GAMBIT. "With the Global Game Jam, GAMBIT continues its efforts to promote fresh thinking about games -- and to draw on global talents to do so. GAMBIT has been playing an increasingly important role as a place where the local gaming community meets, and the Game Jam will give the lab a chance to redouble its efforts, fueled by caffeine and a brilliant mix of people."

"The Global Game Jam is not really a competition," Tan added. "It's all done for the heady thrill of getting together with fellow game-makers and creating something playful." He urges the participants to get some rest on the first and second nights. "The intensity is what makes it fun, but I'm sending folks home in between days," he said. "Being around developers in the lab every day, we know the final result can be better with some pacing, clear thinking, and, seriously, a bit of sleep."

MIT's jam site at 5 Cambridge Center won't be limited to those with MIT ties. "GAMBIT's goal is to share insights, experiences, and findings with the rest of the game development community," Tan said. "The Global Game Jam is a great opportunity for local developers and enthusiasts to make games together with the students and staff of the lab."

Participants of the Global Game Jam will find out this year's mystery theme at 5 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 29. After brainstorming ideas for games, teams form and start creating the code, art, music, and gameplay needed for a game. The new games are uploaded to the Global Game Jam web site (http://www.globalgamejam.org) on Sunday, Jan. 31.

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 9:24 AM in Events | Permalink

Nick Montfort, CMS affiliate and Associate Professor of Digital Media in MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, spoke last week with Michael Tresca of Examiner.com about interactive fiction and his 2005 book Twisty Little Passages:

MT: With the notion of fantasy rooted in cooperative play (starting with Lord of the Rings and extending through MUDs and MMORPGs), where does IF fit? Or is it the personal isolation, trapped in one's imagination so to speak, that makes it more suitable for horror and conspiracy-style settings?

NM: In standard interactive fiction, you don't have a group of people, each of whom control a character. But that doesn't mean that people play IF by themselves. They can play together online, sharing the same session; they can play together in person, sitting in front of the same screen; they can play "by themselves" but consult comments on forums and newsgroups and look at walkthroughs that other people have written; and they can play in their own session but communicate with others by email, by phone, in person, or by other means.

Examiner.com -- Interview with Nick Montfort, author of Twisty Little Passages
Examiner.com -- Book Review of Twisty Little Passages

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 12:16 PM in CMS In The Press | Permalink

As Comparative Media Studies faculty, students, and staff return from two weeks of Christmas and New Year's celebrations, we also return to celebrate our program's entering, with not-quite-believable-speed, its 10th year.

2010, as an anniversary year, will not only be a time for lauding the program's accomplishments but also for exploring--as an academic community and with our fans--where Comparative Media Studies as a program and discipline wants to go from here.

CMS at MIT has grown from an idea, nurtured by Henry Jenkins and Dean Philip Khoury, into one of the world's top media studies programs. So we will have a formal anniversary celebration in April, bringing together alumni and scholars, with the public portion being a Communications Forum on April 22 to welcome back Henry Jenkins to discuss the history and future of CMS--to talk about what co-Director William Uricchio described in early planning as, "What worked, what didn't, and why. And Henry being Henry, his talk will have a strong dose of the visionary."

A strong dose of the visionary marked these first ten years and--with our move to the Media Lab building this month, more inspired directorship coming this spring, and continued groundbreaking research from our various projects--doses of the visionary will be the prescription for the next ten.

Come be a part of it.

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 9:03 AM in Accomplishments, Announcements | Permalink