IAHGames

Games. Research. Can these two actually exist together? One initiative, like a small handful of others sprouting up around the world, is paving the way. Welcome to the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, where ground-breaking games are designed for the world of tomorrow.

IAHGames.com presents this exclusive two-part interview with no other than the key members of GAMBIT: Mr Philip Tan (US Executive Director; project manager with Media Development Authority of Singapore) and Prof.William Uricchio (Lead Principal Investigator; Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies)...      

GAMBIT addresses important challenges faced by the world’s game researchers and industry players, deploying a multi-disciplinary approach to tackle research problems. In short… they play a LOT of games, are allowed to wax lyrical about them, and are paid for it.

Read on for what games research is all about and what awaits you if you want to pursue a career in it!

What led to the establishment of GAMBIT?

There was a big push by the National Research Foundation to foster a culture of research in Singapore in 2006. The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab was one of the earliest projects under this initiative. We had a growing local game industry and the (Singapore) government was looking for ways to support that. MIT also had interest in games, so it worked together with the NRF and the Media Development Authority of Singapore to create GAMBIT.

The idea was to put together a program that would straddle all the different aspects of game research and development – having students work alongside university faculty to produce games that tackled risky problems, while making the findings accessible to the industry. And of course, there’s no better way to get an idea across to the game industry than to make games.

Why is research in games important?

Wow, this is a pretty big one! I’m not sure if I can come up with a single answer.

After all, why are games important? It’s an activity that the human race has been doing for millennia. It holds important clues about how people learn about complex systems, and how societies interact. It brings out behaviour that reveals both the best and the worst in us. It pushes technology forward, particularly in the last couple of decades. Games make many people happy, and some people extremely angry. Given all that, why should we not research such a fundamental, fascinating aspect of the way we live?

One alternate question would be: Why is academic research in games important? This is perfectly valid… the commercial game industry and hobbyists alike do a great job in inspiring, surprising, and entertaining the population at large without necessarily needing the input or intervention from universities and research labs. There are many unknowns in the massive space of game research, and both the profit motive (making something that sells) and creative curiosity (trying out something different) are great motivators in pushing those frontiers.

Universities have a mandate to ask hard questions… the ones that make seasoned professionals shake their heads and wince, the ones that fly against conventional wisdom. That’s what academic research is about: identifying problems that have no clear answer, sometimes not even clear questions, and slowly chipping away at them through methodical inquiry, theory, and experimentation. There’s a mountain of seemingly insurmountable problems in games, and every time we shed a little light on one, we discover whole new problems, and occasionally we discover new possibilities.

Go...play... Leave your soul at the door...

What can games do for people, besides being an outlet for recreation?

Let’s take one area that’s seen a fair amount of new work in recent years: games for learning. There was a lot of really interesting experimentation in the 80s, but so many people jumped on the bandwagon and made shoddy products that the market basically died. The whole field developed a stigma and even excellent products (e.g. many of Sid Meier’s games) weren’t really acknowledged for their ability to inspire and inform for fear of being lumped together with “educational games.”

Some independent game developers continue to make great, innovative games for learning, but they don’t necessarily have the resources to tackle a lot of topics, or to deal with different school curricula, or to experiment with different ways of learning. I suspect there are many gamers out there who can point to some game that has inspired them or helped them understand something about the real world, but how and what they learned can be very different.

That’s because we’re only just scratching the surface in understanding how people actually learn, and our knowledge about how games work as learning tools is even shallower. However, there are a fairly decent number of researchers in universities right now who have come to new insights on how people ‘learn through play’. Games are really powerful for learning about complex systems, for instance. One reason they work so well is that it isn’t bad to fail in a game – in many cases, it’s really engaging to play through the outcomes of a mistake – and if you’re less afraid of screwing up, then you’re less afraid to experiment!

All this is built on the shoulders of giants from other fields, of course, like Seymour Papert and Jean Piaget. Compared to other academic disciplines, I would say game studies, game technology, and even economic game theory are relatively young fields.

What are the main areas of research you’re looking into, and where do you draw your experts from?

We cast a very wide net. Game development requires a wide range of different skills and one of our goals is to provide a central meeting space for all these experts: visual art and animation, computer science, sound design and music, game design, media studies, interaction design, project management, quality assurance and testing, and comparative literature.

We look at the behaviour and demographics of players, how they make decisions about their play, their time, and their spending. There’s a lot of experimentation with different aesthetic traditions, across art, sound, and writing. Most of that happens during the process of developing games, and we actively try to make games that don’t look or sound like what you can easily find in stores.

In the space of game design, there are a lot of challenges in making games about topics that don’t have a clear precedent in rules and mechanics. Sometimes the interesting research is in the design itself, and sometimes it’s more about the process. Often, by looking a little wider across genres and further in the past, we find solutions for problems that currently perplex game makers today, and we try to highlight those and re-introduce them.

And of course, given that we’re at MIT, there are plenty of interesting technical problems to tackle. For examples: getting a computer to do something that currently only a human can do, or looking at traditional computer game workarounds and coming up with a more detailed, robust, or efficient implementation. This type of work mostly focuses on tools for game developers.

If you're already doing this all day, you'll fit right in!

Is knowledge of a technical field, like programming or video recording, critical to success as a game researcher?

You don't necessarily need to specialize in technical skills, but you should be comfortable working in a technical environment. Put another way, you don't have to be a top-notch programmer to understand how programmers think and solve problems. If you understand that, you can work productively with programmers far above your skill level. The same goes for understanding of cinematic language, or sound design, or storytelling, or game design, or math. If you understand a little bit of all of that, you have a much better chance of successfully collaborating with experts in all those fields.

Are there many universities that are starting departments in games research? How is the field growing now?

Many universities are starting programs to prepare students for careers in the game industry, and a subset of them is specifically interested in research.

We have some universities doing large-scale economic and behavioural studies in MMOs. Many labs are working on expanding the applications of games and game technology in non-entertainment fields, such as public outreach, health, training and education. Programs in media find games to be a pretty natural fit, and there’s a decent amount of discourse between academics and practitioners about how people play games, and how changes in technology and processes affect markets and cultures.

Even traditional departments, such as computer science, are realizing that research topics like graphics and multithreaded programming continue to hold the attention of the game industry, so some have started up labs specifically to facilitate those sorts of collaborations.

Have there been improvements in funding and sponsorship in game research?

Government funding has definitely picked up. You have countries like the Netherlands supporting huge game research initiatives, and the UK commissioning game studies. There's a lot of funding in military and education research in the US, both from the government and independent foundations, and sometimes they are willing to support game projects. However, much of that funding is in the vein of "Making Games Do X", where "X" may not necessarily be research into games themselves.

There's not actually all that much public funding for addressing longstanding challenges in the commercial game industry. Much of that sort of work might be sponsored by the industry itself, but corporate-sponsored research often remains closed and proprietary to the sponsor. So a perfectly good solution to a common problem across the industry may only be used by one company. 

I don't hold anything against companies trying to protect research that they have led and funded. I think there is a strong justification for continued public funding, though, in the same vein of public funding for the arts. Games are a powerful way for people to share experiences and points of view, and we should be supporting creative and experimental work that may fall outside the interests of profit-making.

OK that photo-op was fun... now get back to the lab!

Stay tuned next week for Part Two of this exclusive, cutting-edge reveal of what ‘goes down’ in games research. We shall unveil some of the GAMBIT Lab’s breakthroughs and YOUR career prospects in games research!

Browse through GAMBIT’s entire collection of cutting-edge games here and take them on yourself! To find out more about the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT initiative, click here. For more photographs of the researchers’ activities and hangout joints, click here.