Education Feature: 'The mtvU Journals - Part I'

Author: by Beth A.

Today's Gamasutra educational feature, part of the expanded Gamasutra Education section of the site, journals the mtvU Digital Incubator grant application process of the New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program team as the first entry in a three part series. In the Fall of 2005, mtvU and Cisco Systems set out to find, fund, and incubate college students pioneering the future of broadband programming. Of the numerous programs submitted by student groups from across the nation, ten were given $250,000 in grants and named to mtvU's inaugural "Digital Incubator" development team. The winning works will roll out on mtvU, mtvU Über, and mtvU wireless in the months ahead. Team member Oren Ross describes the beginning of the game idea for the mtvU Digital Incubator in the following extract: "Jaki Levy sent out an email to the program’s listserv requesting help. He initially got tons of responses, so he set a meeting time for everyone who was interested in joining the group to discuss ideas. But finals took over everyone’s life, so only three showed up: Jaki, Pollie Barden, and me. The contest seemed like a perfect fit for our program, and looked open to anything we thought of. Jaki had three ideas in his sketchbook: two were video based projects and the third was an idea for a camera phone scavenger hunt. Pollie and I immediately loved the idea of using the pictures on camera phones. We took close to an hour to refine our idea of a camera phone-based scavenger hunt so it captured what we found existing games were missing, and spent about three hours to come up with the name of the game: Tag. Now came the hard part: filling out the forms, writing up the idea, and sending it off. Pollie put everything together just in the nick of time. We realized in the flurry of finals and applications that some information was missing, but there was no way to update it; our fate rested in the hands of the contest gods." You can read the full Gamasutra educational feature on the topic to learn about the results of the grant application (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).