The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a long (long) history of student “hacks” — harmless but clever pranks. Several tend to show up in any given year. Previous reasonably recent favourites (of mine) include turning a building into The One Ring, flying Nyan Cat through a lobby, and an upside-down lounge.
Four months ago, EA Sports opened up applications for a four-month fellowship meant to invite former college athletes into video game design careers. Today, the label awarded its first two, to graduates who played football at Colorado State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
GAMBIT, the video games research centre at MIT, is investigating racism and hate speech in online multiplayer gaming. The results are not particularly surprising, but I’ll confess to a morbid curiosity as to what a gamer would hear playing Halo: Reach under the gamertag PROUD_2B_MUSLIM, GayPride90 or Black_N_Proud90. It, and the language in this video, is decisively NSFW.
I’m still on a semi-enforced vacation from academia, but I couldn’t resist reading some of the essays found on electronic book review. The essays are a selection from two MIT Press books, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. There are a bunch of interesting essays (and some not-so-interesting ones, I’m sure), on topics ranging from IF to WoW to more general ruminations on narrative, stories, gaming in general:
