Tuesday, September 27, 2011

MassDiGI unlocks $500K achievement from Commerce Dept.

By Rodney Brown

The new promotional arm for the Massachusetts videogame industry, the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute, has landed a $500,000 from the U.S. Department of Commerce to help its effort to boost the development of a videogame cluster in the Bay State.

At an event planned for this morning at the home of MassDiGI, Becker College in Worcester, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) is to announce the funding, which came from the Dept. of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration University Center, according to a release from McGovern’s office.

MassDiGI held its official opening earlier this month, at which time it announced a further $30,000 investment from the state through the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s John Adams Innovation Institute. The new funding is supporting two initiatives. The first is a virtual “Rapid Integration Lab,” which will allow industry and academia to tap into each others’ resources to test and demonstrate “next generation game technologies.” The second initiative is called a “Reverse Sabbatical” program in which game industry professionals would come to Massachusetts schools to help in the development of new game technologies.

In April, MassDiGI became official, after a short development cycle of just a few months starting in October 2010, when Becker College hosted a videogame forum titled MASSImpact, at which college President Robert Johnson got the state officials in attendance – including Lt. Gov. Murray, state Rep. Brian Dempsey of Haverhill and event co-host state Rep. Vincent Pedone of Worcester – to agree to convene a working group to see what the state could do to help the sector grow.

Becker, for its part, has invested $1.5 million up front for renovation of a building the college acquired next to its campus. Part of that building, once finished, will be used for MassDiGI offices.