Competing against game development teams from around the world, Edward McNeill '11 won the second-place prize for game development at the 2009 Microsoft Imagine Cup competition, held earlier this month in Cairo, Egypt. The competition, held annually by the Microsoft Corporation, encourages students to utilize Microsoft technology in order to solve global problems.
Roughly 59,000 students from 142 countries submitted a project to the first round of judging, according to the competition's web site. Nearly 150 teams were selected in nine categories ranging from software design to photography to short film for the final competition.
McNeill was one of six finalists in the game development category flown to Cairo to present their projects to the competition judges, he said.
The United States was represented by 18 student competitors and won four awards, according to McNeill, who received a $10,000 cash prize for his second-place finish.
This year's competitors were challenged to "imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today," according to the competition's web site.
Students had to base their submissions on one of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals, McNeill said. McNeill's game, entitled "Alternex," focused on the goal of ensuring environmental sustainability, he said.
McNeill said he learned about the competition in an online forum only three weeks before the submission deadline, he said. At the time, he was working as a game testing intern at Bethesda Softworks, an entertainment software company, and had to develop the project primarily on his nights and weekends, he said.
The time constraint, along with the fact that he was off campus, forced him to create the game without partners, which was rare for the competition, he said.
Aden Evens, assistant professor of English, called McNeill's second-place finish "deeply inspiring." Evens, whose research focuses on new media studies and digital technologies, has taught McNeill in several classes and reviewed his presentation prior to the Cairo competition, Evens said.
"I think the competition is important for the gaming industry," he said. "It shows that you don't need to have a giant corporation and a huge team of people working on it to make a really great game when [McNeill,] as a one-man team, got second place in the world for making a game in three weeks."
Alternex, a "hard core educational game about alternative energy strategies," focused on educating the player about the complexities of energy creation and natural resource management, according to the Imagine Cup web site.
"It shows that energy is complicated," Evens said. "It's not as simple as the idealists would like to think."
In the game, the player is assigned a fictional nation with seven cities and must satisfy the energy needs of the constantly growing population at a "fairly frantic pace," according to McNeill. The goal is to minimize waste while remaining within the nation's limited budget all within the span of 300 seconds, he said.
The first prize went to a four-person Brazilian team, Levv IT, for a complex game called "Choice," which combines techniques used in strategy and arcade games. Players are assigned a random territory and development goal and must work with other countries to fulfill their assignments, according to the Imagine Cup web site.
Evens said McNeill's award could revive interest in computing and digital media at the College, which has a long history that includes the creation of the computer language BASIC by Dartmouth professors.
"It's nice to be back in the fray," Evens said.
Evens added that while he has yet to see a game that has "significant positive social value" reach the market, he noted that multi-player games like World of Warcraft can "cut across all demographic boundaries and cross national boundaries."
"I think that games now play a huge role in our leisure lives and whole economic system," Evens said. "Understanding games is the key to understanding our culture."
McNeill, a major in computer science modified with digital arts, also said he believes that games can potentially have a larger social impact.
"Insofar as they can educate, I think that games can have a role in bettering the world somehow," he said.
