SINGAPORE--A joint internship program by Singapore and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for students from tertiary institutes here has seen two computer games go commercial.
The Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab (Gambit) initiative--a collaboration between the country's Media Development Authority (MDA) and MIT--focuses on identifying and solving research problems that can be applied by the island-state's digital game industry. It involves a summer internship where students are attached to MIT to create innovative games based on research topics.
Teo Chor Guan, Singapore program director of Gambit, said that since the program began in 2007, two prototype games--CarneyVale: Showtime and Backflow--have gone on to be commercialized.
CarneyVale was the first Singapore game to be published on Microsoft's Xbox Live XNA Community Games Channel. Backflow is a cross between a casual-style action game and a multiplayer strategy game for mobile phones.
Teo said: "We are currently negotiating with a games publisher to have Backflow on Apple's iPhone."
She was speaking to journalists at an event today where 40 students from the 2009 Gambit batch showcased six new game prototypes to the media.
"Not all six games will be commercialized. We will evaluate them and at least one from the batch will be made commercial," Teo said.
However, one of the games has already made some headway. Chuang Xuejin of the National University of Singapore, and the producer of Waker, said the game will be tried out as a teaching aid in classrooms in the United States and Singapore.
The U.S. trials will begin this fall in some high schools, while in Singapore, the game will be pitched to secondary schools with the aim of having it tested out next year.
Waker is designed to expose its players to the concepts of physics such as displacement and velocity. To successfully complete the game, a player has to manipulate the avatar's physical displacement or velocity to create a graph that can be navigated to reach the end point.
To date, Gambit has trained 77 students in games research and development. Of these, 41 have since found employment in the local games and media industries as artists, programmers and game designers with companies such as Ubisoft, Boomzap, Double Negative and NexGen Studio. The rest are still serving national service, according to the MDA.
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