The Third Annual No Quarter Exhibition
Announcing the 3rd annual No Quarter Exhibition! This year’s show will premiere at 7pm on May 18th at the NYU Game Center and feature four brand new games!
The mission of the Game Center has always been to foster new perspectives and groundbreaking game design. To that end, each year we choose innovative and artistic game developers, support their new projects, and display their games during the exhibition. Past commissions include Mark Essen’s Nidhogg, Robin Arnott’s Deep Sea, Terry Cavanaugh’s At a Distance, and Ramiro Corbetta’s Hokra. This year’s No Quarter continues that tradition with games that experiment with and celebrate the art form, featuring new work from:
- Zach Gage, creator of SpellTower and Bit Pilot
- Jan Willem Nijman, co-creator of Super Crate Box
- Margaret Robertson, game designer at Hide & Seek
- Noah Sasso, creator of Miracle Adventures in 2113
Please RSVP here and join us on opening night, at 721 Broadway, 9th floor, for the world premiere of the amazing new games that have been created by these artists.
Game Center Alumni on Kickstarter!
Recent graduate of the Game Center, Zeke Abuhoff, launched his self-published game, Tide of Battle, on Kickstarter! The game is a customizable card game for 2 or 4 players where players take on the roles of martial artists, trying to defeat each other in hand-to-hand combat.
The primary goal of this Kickstarter campaign is to pay the team’s artist for their hard-work in creating the card images, but the team is also interested in taking this opportunity to launch their game in a big way! With the hopes of creating a community of players, developing expansion sets that build on the current system, and producing a iOS application in the future, we can safely say that the team is dedicated to the project and excited about where this game could go!
Help support the independent game development community by heading over to Tide of Battle’s Kickstarter campaign and making a donation today!
Come Out and Play 2012 Call for Games!
Announcing Come Out & Play 2012! This year Come Out & Play is once again partnering with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to bring two days of fun and games to Lower Manhattan.
This year Come Out & Play will feature two main events, each with their own distintive games and flavor. On Friday July 13 Come Out & Play After Dark turns @Seaport and the surrounding streets into a twilight playground. Then on July 14 Come Out & Play Field Day returns to Governors Island for another day of wild new field games.
This year the Field Day will also feature a family-friendly track of games led by ESI Design.
Come out and Play is now accepting submissions for this year’s festival. Submissions will close June 1. They will be accepting submissions on a rolling basis, so apply early.
Submit to Come Out & Play 2012 in New York City.
This post is cross-posted from http://www.comeoutandplay.org/
Games For Change Festival 2012
The Games for Change Festival will be taking place this summer, June 18 – 20th in New York! The aim of the festival is to highlight models of collaboration on game development and distribution, bridging the gap between commercial and issue driven games. The festival will feature a series of highly celebrated designers including Jane McGonigal (author of Reality is Broken), Dr. James Paul Gee (leading researcher at Valve), Navid Khonsari (Grand Theft Auto, Alan Wake) and Chris Bell (WAY, Journey).
There will also be several other workshops and features including Agitprop Game Design, a panel organized by the NYU Game Center. Agitprop Game Design will bring together Paolo Pedercini of Molleindustira and renown artist Wafaa Bilal to discuss with Frank Lantz if games can contribute to social change as active particupants in social issues.
The festival is one of NYC’s largest game events, and we encourage you to check it out this year!
Members of the Game Center community may order discounted tickets along with entering discount code “nyu” to receive an additional 10% off their order.
Those wishing to volunteer at the festival will be given the opportunity to network with various members of the industry. Volunteers who work half of the festival will also be allowed to attend the other half for free. To volunteer, please fill out the form here: http://bit.ly/Iys4QT
Indie Tech Talk.02 – Kaho Abe
Indie Tech Talks.02 – Kaho Abe
Wednesday, May 9th
The Game Innovation Lab at NYU-Poly
5 Metro Tech Center, Brooklyn
Babycastles & The Game Innovation Lab at NYU-Poly present a lecture series spotlighting developers and game designers with insights on games and technology. The series is hosted by Andy Nealen.
Kaho Abe will talk about how simple technology can represent powerful things if given the right context. Complicated input systems and technological feats pale in comparison to the social contexts and resulting personal experiences that games create. Speaking as a designer who hacks every day technologies or makes custom interfaces to make playful experiences, Kaho will demonstrate just how accessible hardware creation can be when you have a good idea for how to deploy it.
Come ready to play with Kaho’s highly physical games!
This event is free and open to the public.
NYU Game Center Student Show
We welcome you to join us for an informal exhibition of playable games from the game design and development classes at the NYU Game Center. Works range from a physical sport to a tabletop RPG to 3D games developed in Unity.
Tuesday May 8, 6-8pm
721 Broadway, 9th floor
This event is free and open to the public.
NYU-Poly Game Innovation Lab Presents: Kickstarter Stories
NYU-POLY GAME INNOVATION LAB PRESENTS: KICKSTARTER STORIES
Using A New Funding Model for Game Development
Wednesday May 2, 7-8:30 p.m. – Pfizer Auditorium, Dibner Building
Need funding for a game project? Seeking funding from the masses through Kickstarter is one way to go. Recently, a well-known game developer raised over 3 million dollars for a project using the website. Our panel discussion includes three recently funded developers working at small and larger scale, as well as Cindy Au, Kickstarter’s Community Director, and Wade Tinney, IGDA-NYC Chapter Coordinator and CEO of Large Animal Games. Panelists will discuss the pros and cons and process of raising funding through Kickstarter for their projects, and how it compares with using the traditional publisher model. And there will be a fun after-party in the Game Innovation Lab next door!
Panelists:
Cindy Au, Community Director, Kickstarter
Wade Tinney, IGDA-NYC Chapter Coordinator and CEO of Large Animal Games
Michael Astolfi,http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/600219258/blindside-the-audio-adventure-video-game
Michael Consoli, ‘Against the Wall’ http://www.againstthewallgame.com
Alex Thomas, Stoic, ‘The Banner Saga’ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stoic/the-banner-saga
http://gil.cite.poly.edu/2012/04/19/kickstarter-stories/
Gender Play: A Game Center Library Exhibition
The Tomb Raider rants, the busty Bayonetta babe, the angry geek girls, and the Call of Duty F.A.G.S ad. These are problematic and poor examples of gender representation in video games to highlight.
That’s the point.
Because this is undeniably the state of gender in video games. Women in games are busty, the women playing games are very justifiably angry, and queer games ostensibly don’t exist in the mainstream. To address this, “Gender Play” exists to look beyond the media surrounding gender and games– what’s written about it, talked about it, drawn about it– and look directly to games themselves. This exhibit is about seeing how play engages with gender and experiencing the choices players have to explore gender in gameplay.
Games give us a beautiful and unique ways to explore the conversation about gender because they allow us to interact with the piece of art in front of us. When we play a game, we become the player, regardless of our gender. So when we press start, can we play with gender?
“Gender Play” will explore how the signals we send to games translate our ideas of man, woman, and everything in between. Through a curated collection of games, the exhibit offers video games as a space to explore and express our gender. Featured games include: Dance Central and Madden, Portal and Gears of War, Persona 3 and Saints Row 2, Dys4ia, The Sims, Metroid, Playboy: the Mansion, and more.
Each day throughout the week in the Open Library, games will be paired to create a unique conversation about a specific aspect of gender in games. Then, on Friday 5/4 from 5-8PM, join us on the 9th Floor Lobby the full exhibit!
Please RSVP for Friday’s exhibit here.
Curated by: Gwynna Forgham-Thrift
New Training: Introduction to HTML5 Game Development
We’re happy to announce that we are teaming up with Bocoup, an open web technology company, to put on a day long workshop for HTML5 Game Development training. Below is the information about the event – as posted on Bocoup’s blog.
“[W]e’re pleased to offer our Introduction to HTML5 Game Development training to the general public for the first time on Saturday, May 5 in New York City at the NYU Game Center!
The class will be taught by Bocoup’s in-house game developers: Greg Smith, whose work on boxbox makes Box2D a joy to use, and Darius Kazemi, who worked on Fieldrunners HTML5.
Topics covered include Canvas, animation, audio, and physics – at the end of the day, attendees will have a simple 2D physics game built in JavaScript and Canvas. See the class description for more info, or go straight to our signup page to get one of the 35 spots available!”
Bad is Beautiful in the news
“Bad is Beautiful,” Owen McLean’s recent exhibit of bad games at the Game Center attracted a lot of press. Some people seemed to be most interested in the bold inclusion of GoldenEye as one of the terrible titles. The entire exhibit turned out fantastically, attracting both those that already loved the games and people who would never look in their direction. Visitors all paid a little more attention to the games, seeing them for what is to be enjoyed about them and it ended up being a lot of fun for everyone there.
The exhibit got quite a few mentions in the press; Kotaku and Forbes considered GoldenEye and the way time effects games while PixelPerfect Magazine and Explosion.com both gave their response to the show as a whole and how it had changed them (or not) as players.
