By Elizabeth Durant

“I think that a game can be made about anything,” says Kayode Dada, a rising senior majoring in mechanical engineering. “But to make a good game,” he adds, “it takes a lot of time and effort and thinking about it.”

Now, Dada has created his biggest and most ambitious game yet: a trading-card game for 1,100 incoming first-year students during MIT Orientation in late August.

Last year, Dada’s interest in game design intersected with his role at MIT Orientation. The staff had been brainstorming games to try to keep the new students engaged between events, and Dada offered to create a trading-card game that would also serve as an ice-breaker. His game, “Campus Trade,” capitalized on the fact that the students are divided into 12 groups designated by a different color. Each student would start with 12 trading cards the color of their group, and by the end of the week they had to collect one card from every other group — in other words, 12 different colors.

He decided to redesign “Campus Trade” and connected with Cassandra Lee, a research designer in the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Constructive Communication, whose interests include the connection between games and social interaction. Under her supervision, he spent his junior year doing an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project through the realtalk@MIT program, which supports students who design and organize their own creative community infrastructure. 

Working on “Campus Trade” with Dada was a “sincerely rewarding collaboration,” Lee says. “Community development work really requires a student who understands and is willing to fight for the value of people, stories, and being in community. Consistently throughout this project, it was clear that Kayode is more than capable of balancing his own spirit with the grueling organizing work that makes a project like ‘Campus Trade’ possible.”

Ultimately, Dada hopes to pursue a career in game design after he graduates. He thinks about games a lot, lying awake at night, or even in church.