The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab started in 2007 with the mission of throwing together teams of MIT and Singaporean students to develop video games over nine weeks. Each team’s game must answer a specific research question, and delve into some very strange territory. Consider your favorite games right now. While I’m sure they’re great games – do they ask any questions, let alone provide any answers? The assignment sounds like a pretty tall order for mere students of game design.

Each year’s games are uploaded onto the website, so you could go all the way back to the first batch to see how the program has developed. The 2010 games are the most recent, and deal in some pretty weighty thematic material. They are all very short, and far less involved than some of the games you’ll to find at Kongregate or Newgrounds. Taken together, the seven entries of the 2010 class are the videogame equivalent of a collection of short stories. They’re all narrow in scope but powerfully focused, and each could probably be finished during your lunch break.

I have to tip my hat to this program. While these games are simple, some of them are exemplary of what videogames scholar Ian Bogost has termed “procedural rhetoric.” It means that the theme, message, or narrative of the game is delivered by the mechanics themselves, rather than just cutscenes and text explanations. For example, “Elude” is about depression, and the mechanics demonstrate what sufferers of depression experience more than the visuals. The game is a 2D platformer in which the player must work to locate and activate birds that provide a boost to movement and jumping so as to escape through the treetops to happiness. Tarry too long and tentacles rise up from the ground, rendering the player helpless as they drag him into a crushing and inescapable underground cave meant to symbolize depression itself. The procedural rhetoric here argues that it’s a constant struggle for those with depression to work at specific goals (the birds) that lead them away from a severe downturn in mood. Even with that effort, your time in happiness is limited for seemingly no reason, and you can still end up in the doldrums. And the end of the game provides the most potent procedural rhetoric, which I won’t spoil here.

Other subject matter includes Greek tragedy, the peculiar role of memory in dreams, and our subconscious tendency to be trained to recognize and process certain conventions in video game design. Not bad for a two-month development cycle.