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, he has taught game design for over 12 years at NYU, SVA, and Parsons and his writings on games, technology and culture have appeared in a variety of publications.

Frank is a game designer who has worked in the field of game development for the past 20 years. In 2005 he co-founded Area/Code, which created cross-media, location-based, and social network games as well as the popular abstract puzzle game Drop7. 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 10 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; Sharkrunners, which allowed players to interact with living sharks in a persistent virtual world, 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.

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 - Instructor

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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Kevin Spain – Department Administrator

Kevin came to the Game Center from the Film & Television program at Tisch in September 2012. Before that he went to Cornell University for Film Studies, got an MA in Cinema Studies from NYU and even spent a year in law school. Games have literally had an impact on his life since the early age of three when he broke his collar bone playing Pac-Man at the arcade. Now at the Game Center he works to support the administrative needs of the department and can help with questions about registration, faculty, admissions and more.

Kevin can be reached at kevin.spain@nyu.edu.

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.

Dylan can be reached at dylan.mckenzie@nyu.edu.

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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.

Andy Nealen – Assistant Professor

Andy is a faculty member in the department of computer science at NYU Poly, where he teaches and researches game design, computer graphics,and human perception. Some time ago he studied architecture and structural engineering, and worked in those fields before turning his attention to the study and design of games and computer graphics. He has since obtained a PhD in computer science, helped out with the award-winning game Osmos, published work at SIGGRAPH, and spoken at international game and graphics conferences. Some of his current obsessions include minimalist game design, tabletop game design, the semiology of graphics, perceptual science, procedural modeling, digital shape creation, animation, and analysis, and simple graphical user interfaces. When not thinking about design and/or traveling, he indulges in training sessions of StarCraft, Street Fighter, Chess, and too many other digital and tabletop games.

Andy can be reached at anealen@poly.edu.

Joost van Dreunen – Adjunct Professor

Joost is fascinated by games and human behavior. His research explores video games as an entryway to contemporary media culture. After completing a Master’s degree in Media studies in Amsterdam, he continued his research in New York. There he was project manager on a landmark investigation of three decades of ownership trends in the American media landscape, the results of which were part of a congressional testimony, a series of articles and a book. In 2010 he received his doctorate from Columbia University for his dissertation titled “Social Gaming and Communicative Exchange.” Joost is an adjunct professor at NYU Game Center.

In addition to his academic pursuits, Joost is also founder and CEO of an online games research firm called SuperData. In early 2010 the company secured multi-year seed funding, and today employs five people. Clients include publishers such as Electronic Arts, SEGA, Wargaming.net and Pokémon as well as many of the major Wall street firms.

Joost lives in the East Village with his wife Janelle and son Maximus.

Joost can be reached at jvd228@nyu.edu.

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Matt Parker – Adjunct Professor

Matt Parker is a game designer, teacher, and new media artist. His work has been displayed at the American Museum of Natural History, SIGGRAPH Asia, the NY Hall of Science, Museum of the Moving Image, FILE Games Rio, Sony Wonder Technology Lab, and many other venues. His game Lucid was a finalist in Android’s Developer Challenge 2 and his project Lumarca won the “Create the Future” prize at New York Maker Faire 2010. He created the game Recurse for the inaugural No Quarter exhibition at the NYU Game Center. Recurse was a finalist for Indiecade 2010 and won the “Play This Now!” award at Come Out and Play 2012.

Matt can be found on his website. You can reach Matt at madparker@nyu.edu.

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Kaho Abe – Artist in Residence & Adjunct Professor

Kaho Abe is currently the Artist in Residence at the Game Innovation Lab at NYU-Poly and a Computational Fashion Fellow at Eyebeam Atrt & Technology Center. She designs and builds digital games that are played in the physical world, often face to face, using custom controllers. She teaches game design as well as how to build custom controllers for games to youth, undergraduate and graduate students. Her projects include Hit Me!, Mary Mack 5000 and Ninja Shadow Warrior. She is currently working on a game that explores costumes as game controllers.