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MIT’s GAMBIT Game Lab highlights strange, thematic indie flash games

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.