Play the games of tomorrow at GDIAC Showcase, May 19
By Bill Steele
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If you want to know what sort of video games you’ll be playing next year, stop by at the annual Game Design Initiative at Cornell (GDIAC) Showcase from 4 to 7 p.m. Friday, May 19, in the ACCEL Labs in Carpenter Hall. The event is open to the public. Visitors are invited to play games created by students in several undergraduate game design classes.
The whimsical minds of student programmers often take game players into fantasy words. You can be a bedridden criminal trying to escape from a hospital by having people move your bed around. In “Moving Mansion,” you must protect a little girl by making sure she doesn’t go into a dangerous room. You also move around to play “Fridgeraiders,” stealing other people’s food. In a game both literally and figuratively “dark,” you navigate the ruins of a nuclear reactor meltdown entirely by sound.
Mobile games for phones and tablets include “Laser Penguins,” which lets a group of players compete, using the accelerometers in their devices to shoot at each other. There are also card games to be played on mobile screens.
Several of this year’s gams have been submitted to the 2017 Boston Festival of Indie Games, to be held in September. Games exhibited in the GDIAC Showcase in previous years have gone on to win national awards, and many of the students who created them have jobs in the multibillion-dollar industry. Those people you see hovering around then edge of the room are quite likely recruiters.
The event is the final exam for the teams of programmers, artists and musicians who created the games, and their grades will depend in part on public reaction to their wofk. Visitors are invited to vote for their favorites, which will be recognized at an awards ceremony at 6:45 p.m.
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