I will not play Uncharted 2.

I will not play Uncharted 2.

I will not play Uncharted 2.

Crap, I’m playing Uncharted 2.

So, the trouble with being in a program so heavily geared towards a career in the gaming industry is that it’s pretty tough to not take notice when its best products hit the shelves. I mean, we’re passionate about this, right? Right.

As someone who’s been anxiously waiting for Naughty Dog’s sequel to 2007’s best game, Uncharted 2 couldn’t have been released at a worse time – looking down the barrel of two massive school projects, both due one after the other.

The first one is for George Johnson’s The Visual Story course, and the other for Harold Caput and Snjezana Cvoro-Begovic’s Building Virtual Worlds. And because we’re all excited to push the skills of our new groups to their respective limits, both of them have occupied the better part of our waking hours for the past couple of weeks (on top of a few smaller projects we’re scrambling to deliver). I’ll be sure to post the link to some of these projects in a future blog because some of the work that went into them really has to be seen.

Students have been coming in all day on weekends, staying up late with little to no sleep to try and meet project milestones, and been working hard to help each other where they need it. The spirit of co-operation has really been quite brilliant, and even in our sleepwalking haze, we’ve come to realize that our best resource is one other – whether it’s within our own class or the ever-helpful C2’s.

And how do we break up these long sessions of work? With everything from World of Warcraft to Wii Sports to Rock Band 2 to Little Big Planet to. . . um, have I mentioned Uncharted 2 yet?

We spent last weekend hosting an excellent potluck Thanksgiving Dinner organized by the ever-sociable Gabe van Bergen – we rearranged Classroom 1 into a giant table, around which all 34 of us sat and ate (and ate, and ate some more). The great thing about such an international program is the variety of food at potluck events, and I for one now know whose lunch to steal from the fridge (I’m looking at you, Khadija!)

Afterwards, we split into two very distinct factions – those who wanted to play Wii Sports, and those who wanted to play Rock Band 2 – and then spent the next five hours just batting the stress out.

I guess project groups are a lot like Rock Band – you can’t succeed if one of you fails, you can always save someone when they’re in trouble, and your best result comes when you play to everyone’s strengths.

I could go into a similar comparison with Wii Sports, but I’ve got to get back to, um, my project with the thing and the other thing and the Uncharted 2… 

Nick Lewis is a 1st year MDM student. His hobbies include long walks on the beach and giving free publicity to products he loves.