New Multi-School Center to Train Future Video Game Programmers and Designers

By Katie Druesedow Graham

      When Atari released the first version of Pong over 30 years ago, few would have imagined that video games would spawn a multi-billion dollar industry and become staples in so many people’s lives. Now, careers in the field of interactive entertainment are both lucrative and rewarding, and NYU is preparing to educate the next generation of video game programmers, designers, producers, and artists at the newly established NYU Game Center.
      Funded by an anonymous gift of $1 million and a $200,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation’s NYC Cultural Innovation Fund, as well as a generous grant from alumna Sharon Chang and the TTSL Charitable Foundation, the NYU Game Center is a cross-disciplinary initiative uniting professors from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and Tisch School of the Arts. These experts have been working in partnership to develop and establish a multi-school curriculum to explore new directions for the creative growth and critical understanding of games.
      NYU joins at least a dozen other schools in the United States that currently offer video game-related degrees or programs.
      “More and more students are developing an interest in games as a field of study and a potential career,” says the center’s Interim Director Frank Lantz. “At the same time, the theoretical framework and developmental techniques of game production are becoming more mature, more amenable to classroom teaching.”
      Program development has been moving quickly. Beginning in fall 2009, the center will offer two classes open to undergraduates and will continue to develop the graduate program throughout the year. The center’s advisory council, which came together in February, has begun developing the interdepartmental course guide, an important resource for future students, as well as a digital and non-digital game library, which will develop student’s literacy in video games of all types. Beginning in summer 2009, an intensive, hands-on Game Design Workshop will be offered in which students will collaborate to explore creative and technical challenges of game production.
      “Entertainment value aside, video games do also have real-world applications,” says Roseanne C. Limoncelli, director of production for film and new media at Tisch. “They have been used in the fields of rehabilitation, education, military training, and job training,” she adds.