You might have heard of the rapidly growing trend of escape room games. In escape rooms groups of 3-8 players voluntarily get locked into a physical room. These live-action team-based games offer a variety of fascinating insights into game and level design, player cultures, business models, and technologies. We would like to enrich the discussion by asking how these games could be played in a competitive tournament style – as a (e)sport.

A new feature for the MIT Overseer Observer mod project: The “Workers Killed” notification is a little pop-up tab that appears on the left side of an SC2 observer screen that shows how many workers have been killed recently. Our goals for this feature are to make it easier for StarCraft 2 observers, casters, and spectators to identify and assess the amount of economic damage during attacks on the mineral line.

We’ve been experimenting with the StarCraft 2 Galaxy Editor at the MIT Game Lab over the summer and we’d like to share our current prototype casting tool. The MIT Overseer project aims to provide casters with real-time graphics to help them tell the story of a game while it is in progress. We are trying out several different ways of displaying what happened in the past of a single game and anticipating what might happen in the near future.