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The NYU Game Center is dedicated to the exploration of games as a cultural form and game design as creative practice. Our approach to the study of games is based on a simple idea: games matter. Just like other cultural forms – music, film, literature, painting, dance, theater – games are valuable for their own sake. Games are worth studying, not merely as artifacts of advanced digital technology, or for their potential to educate, or as products within a thriving global industry, but in and of themselves, as experiences that entertain us, move us, explore complex topics, communicate profound ideas, and illuminate elusive truths about ourselves, the world around us, and each other.

The Game Center was established in 2008, and is housed at the Tisch School of the Arts in the Skirball Center for New Media. We work in close collaboration with other NYU schools and departments including the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, and NYU Poly. Our goal is to incubate new ideas, create partnerships, and establish a multi-school curriculum to explore new directions for the creative development and critical understanding of games. We are also active supporters of the New York City game development scene and seek to help establish New York as a place of innovation and creativity within this important field.

The mission of the Center is to graduate the next generation of game designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and critics, and to advance the art, science and culture of gaming by creating a context for advanced study and innovative work. The Center’s students, both undergraduates and graduates, will be drawn from diverse disciplines including computer programming, visual art, sound and audio, animation, writing, and joined together by the central discipline of game design.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, interactive systems surround us not just as the material reality of our lives but also as our primary method for understanding the world and our place in it. The study of games is the study of the aesthetics of interactive systems—their capacity to move us, to fascinate us, and to connect us in entirely new ways.

-Frank Lantz, Department Chair