The NYU Game Center offers a wide range of open-to-the-public events throughout the year. Our goal is to bring brilliant thinkers and storied designers into our community of students, developers, and the curious public. We firmly believe that everyone involved benefits from the exchange of ideas that comes from shared experiences. The following events are a selection of our annual events. To see what’s happening now, visit our Events page. Our events are made possible in part by the generous contributions of our Event Sponsors.
Student Showcases & Curated Exhibitions
Each year, the NYU Game Center’s graduating students produce the NYU Game Center Showcase. The showcase features MFA Thesis work, BFA Capstone work, and high exceptional projects from all of our graduate and undergraduate classes. The show regularly features about 100 digital and non-digital games, highlighting the diverse work produced at the NYU Game Center to hundreds of attendees. The NYU Game Center Showcase brings upwards of 1000 guests to our department, including representatives from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, IndieFund, Kickstarter, EA, Apple, and dozens of other companies.
The No Quarter Exhibition of Games commissions innovative work from four high-profile independent game designers. The games are debuted to the public for the first time at each year’s exhibition, which has grown from a small opening reception to a huge, must-attend event for hundreds of people coming from all over the country. Games like Nidhogg, Killer Queen, and Sportsfriends began at No Quarter, and we’ve commissioned work from artists like Terry Cavanagh, Zach Gage, and Auriea Harvey, among many others. See photos from the 2015 No Quarter here.
Every September, we celebrate the completion of the NYU Game Center Incubator with a large public showcase. Hundreds of people join us to hear presentations from the Incubator developers and play the games from that year’s cohort. Learn more about the Incubator and the Incubator Showcase here.
The NYU Game Center also showcases promising student work outside of the department including at local events like BQEs & Betas, a pop-up exhibition of student work in the brewery’s tasting room. We also bring students on the road with us to festivals, showing their games at events like IndieCade, GDC, Evo, and more.
Playtest Thursday
One of the NYU Game Center’s signature events is Playtest Thursday, a weekly playtesting event where our students and local professionals work on games together. In a casual atmosphere, designers show work in progress, play each other’s games, give feedback, and work to make everyone’s games better. This event regularly draws upwards of 50 people per week, including a mix of our students, faculty, and staff, indie designers from NYC, local studios, and future game designers from local high schools. Visit the Playtest Thursday site here.
The NYU Game Center Lecture Series
Established in 2009, the Game Center Lecture Series brings leading game design and game scholarship figures to the New York game development community. These lectures are open to the public and have been the occasion for many extraordinary standing-room-only events. The series has become a catalyst for the New York game scene, serving as a gathering point for local game developers and journalists as well as students and faculty from NYU and other NYC schools. You can watch recordings of the Lecture Series going back to 2009 on our YouTube channel. To find out when the next upcoming Lecture Series talk is scheduled, visit our Events page.
Game Jams
Since 2008, we’ve hosted one of the largest sites in the world for the global game jam, including the largest in North America. Each year between 200-300 jammers from all over the northeast convene at the NYU Game Center to make games alongside our students, faculty, and staff. Games made at our site have gone on to major festivals and release, including indie hits Mushroom 11 and How do you Do It?. Watch a video of the Global Game Jam at NYU here.
Each year we run a Thesis Jam, where students spend a weekend prototyping ideas and collaborating with potential teammates in anticipation of their upcoming year-long thesis game. We also host a number of smaller annual and one-off jams, usually based around much more specialized themes, topical issues, and charitable causes.
Conferences
PRACTICE: Game Design in Detail, our annual conference for professional game designers, features industry leaders and innovators like Jonathan Blow, Richard Garfield, and Mare Sheppard. At PRACTICE, about two hundred professional game designers come to the NYU Game Center for a weekend of talks and conversation on the subject of game design. The conference is designed to bring together designers of every discipline, and has included talks from AAA designers, indie developers, board game designers, rock climbing route setters, War game designers, NCAA football rule makers, and more. Visit the PRACTICE site here.
We have been home to the NEA grant-funded, Different Games Conference, which addresses diversity and inclusivity in games, striving to amplify the creative and critical voices of marginalized participants in games culture. Different Games combines an arcade along with a multitrack weekend of talks and workshops for a couple hundred attendees who range from designers new to games to veteran industry professionals.
Tournaments
We feel competitive games are under-theorized aspect of games, so we host a range of events that highlight the artistry of competitive games. For example, at our annual Spring Fighter Tournament, we gather some of the best fighting game players in the world for a day-long celebration fighting games. in 2018, we hosted fighting game legend Justin Wong and Seth Killian in conversation about his journey to the top of the sport. Experience the talk here.
Tournaments are also an active part of our library offerings. The Open Library’s Tournament Organizer runs tournaments on a bi-weekly basis in partnerships with NYU’s Super Smash Bros community, Fighting Games club, and for indie games like Rocket League and Towerfall, as well as multiplayer student games, like Sumer and Badblood. You can watch many of our tournaments live on our twitch.tv channel.