NYU Game Center

People

Please direct your general questions to gamecenter@nyu.edu.

Frank Lantz – Director

Frank Lantz is the Director of the NYU Game Center. For over 12 years, Frank has taught game design at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. He has also taught at the School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design. His writings on games, technology and culture have appeared in a variety of publications.

Frank is the Creative Director and co-Founder of Zynga New York, a New York based developer that creates cross-media, location-based, and social network games. He has worked in the field of game development for the past 20 years. Before starting Area/Code, Frank worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at Pop & Co, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive.

Over the past 8 years, Frank helped pioneer the genre of large-scale realworld games, working on projects such as the Big Urban Game, which turned the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul into the world’s largest boardgame; ConQwest, which featured the first major application of semacodes in the United States, PacManhattan, a life-size version of the arcade classic created by the students in his Big Games class at NYU, and many other experiments in pervasive and urban gaming.

Frank can be reached at frank.lantz@nyu.edu.

Jesper Juul – Visiting Professor

Jesper Juul has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990′s. He is a visiting arts professor at the Game Center, but has previously worked at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab at MIT and at the IT University of Copenhagen where he also got his PhD.

His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT press in 2005. His recently published book, A Casual Revolution, examines how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii are bringing video games to a new audience. His current research focuses on the history of video game aesthetics and the role of failure in video games. Jesper is a co-editor of the new Playful Thinking book series on MIT Press and maintains the blog The Ludologist on “game research and other important things”.

To contact Jesper, please use jesper.juul@nyu.edu.

Katherine Isbister – Associate Professor

Katherine Isbister has a joint appointment between the Game Center and the Computer Science Department at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn. She also maintains an affiliation with the IT University in Copenhagen’s Center for Computer Games Research. Isbister is Research Director of the Game Innovation Lab at NYU-Poly, and is an investigator in the NYU Games for Learning Institute. Her research focuses on designing games that heighten social and emotional connections for players, toward innovating design theory and practice.
Isbister’s book on game character design—Better Game Characters by Design: A Psychological Approach—was nominated for a Game Developer Magazine Frontline award. Her edited volume, Game Usability, brings together best practices in game playtesting and user research.

Katherine is available at katherine.isbister@nyu.edu.

Rosanne Limoncelli – Director of Production

Rosanne Limoncelli is the Director of Production for Film and New Media at the Kanbar Institute, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She received her BFA from the Department of Film & TV at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and her PhD in Teaching Reading, Writing, and Media from NYU’s Steinhardt School. Dr. Limoncelli has been teaching filmmaking and creative writing to students and teachers since 1989, and has served as a consultant in the area of teacher education to high schools, colleges and universities. Presently she teaches filmmaking in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Rosanne’s first memories of games are of story/imagination based games she played with her brothers and sisters growing up in Connecticut. In high school she got the high scores on the Ms Pac-Man and Millipede consoles that replaced the pinball machines in the local hang outs. As an undergrad at NYU, solving story puzzles became her favorite game as she wrote scripts, made movies and completed the dissertation for her PhD, which resulted in her first published book, Teaching Filmmaking: Empowering Students Through Visual Storytelling.

Since getting involved in the Game Center in 2008, Rosanne has once again taken up digital games, and although she refuses to list any favorites, enjoys spending time on any digital games that she can play with her pre-teen daughter, who will usually get the higher score.

Rosanne can be reached at rosanne.limoncelli@nyu.edu.

Eric Zimmerman – Instructor

Eric Zimmerman is a game designer, entrepreneur, author, and academic who has been working in the game industry for 15 years.

Eric’s diverse activities have made him one of the New York Observer’s “Power Punks,” one of Interview Magazine’s “30 To Watch,” one of International Design Magazine’s “ID 40” influential designers and one of The Hollywood Reporter’s “Digital 50” along with Stephen Spielberg and Will Wright. Eric recently was honored with a “VIP Award” by the International Game Developers Association for his years of work in the game creation community.

For nine years, Eric was the Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer of Gamelab, a game development company based in New York City that was named one of 5 “Rising Star” design firms by HOW Magazine.

Eric lectures and publishes extensively on games, including keynotes at major industry events. He is the co-author with Katie Salen of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, the definitive textbook on game design. He is also the co-editor with Katie Salen of The Game Design Reader and co-editor with Amy Scholder of RE:PLAY – Game Design and Game Culture.

Eric can be found on his blog as well as his website. You can reach Eric at e@ericzimmerman.com.

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Charles J Pratt - Researcher

Charles J Pratt has been a freelance game designer since he graduated from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in 2007. He’s worked on projects for companies as varied as Adult Swim, Footlocker, and the British government. He’s also been involved with a number of independent games such as the early web-based social game Casablanca, the street game Search Brigade, and most recently a tower defense game for the iPhone called Critter Defense.

In his spare time he teaches Game Studies, he blogs at GameDesignAdvance, and he hosts the podcast Another Castle, a series of long form interviews with people working and thinking about games in the New York metropolitan area.

To speak with Charles, contact him at cjp281@nyu.edu.

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Dylan McKenzie – Program Coordinator

Dylan McKenzie is dedicated to the pursuit of exploring the expressive, educational, and aesthetic properties of games. He cultivated this passion during his time at the NYU Steinhardt Media, Culture, and Communication program, where he completed his thesis, “Fantasies of Labor: Work and Play in World of Warcraft.” In 2008, Dylan began working at the NYU Game Center’s then burgeoning Open Library, where he helped expand its presence at NYU, and has since worked enthusiastically to move the Game Center to the forefront of game studies in New York City.