MAGNET_panorama

MAGNET
Our new space, the Media and Games Network or MAGNET, is officially open! Read about our new space on the 8th floor of 2 MetroTech Center and see some pictures of the floor and our new branch of the Open Library in this Wall Street Journal article.

Polygon also covered our new space and new faculty in this piece on Bennett Foddy’s journey from philosophy student to musician to game designer and faculty Assistant Arts Professor at the Game Center.

The MAGNET Open Library Branch debuted at Pressing Restart: Community Discussion on Video Game Preservation, a conference organized by Tisch’s MIAP program and hosted at the Game Center on games archiving. Pressing Restart welcomed video game preservationists and librarians from all over the country to the Open Library. As a response to the conference, Game Center MFA Ilya Zarembsky wrote this piece, which ran in The Atlantic.

indiecadepic

IndieCade Scholarship

We are excited to announce a new scholarship program which we are offering in partnership with IndieCade the international game festival and conference. The NYU Game Center IndieCade Scholarship will offer $25,000 towards our Game Design MFA program to an individual whose game has been selected for inclusion in the IndieCade festival.
Who’s Eligible?
Anyone who worked on a game that has been chosen as an Official Nominee or an Official Selection in an IndieCade festival past or present is automatically eligible to apply for the scholarship.

How to Apply
Simply begin the normal process of applying to the MFA program. In that application form you will be able to indicate if you are interested in, and eligible for, the scholarship.

IndieCade Recap

We’d like to send a huge congratulations to:

  • Slash Dash for taking home the Audience Choice Award! This team (pictured above) of undergraduate Game Center students, Adnan Agha, Reynaldo Vargas, Vivian Allum, Alexandre Gresh, and Armand Silvani, initially created the game for Kevin Cancienne’s Introduction to Modding class to fullfill an assignment to mod Bomberman into a multiplayer game, and they have continued to polish the design, art, and sound of the game leading them to the Audience Choice Award.
  • Killer Queen Arcade for winning the Developers Choice Award! Nik Mikros and Josh DeBonis debuted their the Killer Queen Arcade cabinet for our 2013 No Quarter exhibition, and have been continuously developing their massive ten person arcade game.
  • Nidhogg for winning Best Game Design! Mark Essen created Nidhogg for our first ever 2010 No Quarter exhibition, and has worked on the game over the years to develop new mechanics and finely tune the game.

Read more about the Game Center at Indiecade: “When Indie Game Producers Come Out to Play” – New York Times feature on the 2013 IndieCade festival, featuring the NYU Game Center IndieCade Scholarship.

Code Liberation Game Jam
Code Liberation, a program to empower women to code, held their first game jam last month, and some of the ladies of our MFA program developed games with women students and developers from all over NYC.

To see some of the games made, check out “Beacon” by first year MFAs Winnie Song, Maria Saint Martin, and Elyse Lemoine and “Therapy Sesh” by second year MFA Toni Pizza.

NYC Comic Con Panel

NYU Game Center Director Frank Lantz moderated a panel where NYC Indie game devs Doug Wilson, Phoenix Perry, Naomi Clark, Zach Gage, and Syed Salahuddin showed off their work and talked about coming up in the NYC indie scene.

To hear more about the panel, check out this great Polygon piece, “Want to make a game?” Find an indie scene?”, and learn more about each of the panelists and their role in the NYC scene in this IndieStatik article, “NYCC 2013: The Game Design Underground Panel”.

Bernie DeKoven’s Lecture & New Games Workshop
Game designer, theorist of play, and author Bernie DeKoven took part in the first installment of our 2013-2014 Lecture Series last Thursday. Bernie discussed his theories on play and invited the audience to play along with him. The evening lead to some elaborate versions of patty-cake.

The talk is now up in multiple parts on our Vimeo page.

Then on Saturday, Bernie lead an exciting afternoon of play in Fort Greene Park. See photos of the afternoon here.

The Ludic Century: A Debate
The November installment of the NYU Game Center Lecture Series brought in Abe Stein, Ben Johnson, and Heather Chaplin with Game Center Professor Eric Zimmerman to discuss his Ludic Century Manifesto. If you missed the debate live, check out the video.

PRACTICE: Game Design in Detail
Two of the PRACTICE 2013 lectures are now online! We’ll post the entirety of the conference on our Vimeo page. Click to view our first lecture of the weekend from Warren Spector, and the last of the conference, Robert Yang.

esports
The New York eSports Summit
The Game Center, in partnership with Red Bull, brought representatives from major competitive games to the same table for one night only. Sean “Day[9]” Plott, Travis “SotLTravis” Gafford, Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez, and Rod “Slasher” Breslau, sat down with NYU Game Center Professor Charles Pratt to discuss the past, present, and future of eSports.

You can watch the archive of the stream here.

 

Indie Essentials: 25 Must-Play Video Games
From now until March, the Museum of the Moving Image is exhibiting twenty-five indie games chosen to represent the breath and depth of the indie game scene. The exhibition includes 2013 IndieCade Festival award winners, including the No Quarter commissioned game “Killer Queen” by Nik Mikros and Josh DeBonis, “Slash Dash” by a group of NYU Game Center undergraduate students, “QWOP” by Game Center faculty member Bennett Foddy, and “Diner Dash” from the Game Lab team lead in part by Game Center faculty Eric Zimmerman! Learn more about the exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image site.

To read up on the exhibit, check out “Multiplayer Games With a Local Touch” from the New York Times!

deathmatch
Deathmatch by Audio
Now featured at Death By Audio, a music venue and bar in the heart of Williamsburg: two cabinets hand built by teams that included NYU Game Center MFAs and local indie devs! The Crystal Brawl and Field-1 cabinets debuted at an opening party with two fierce tournaments of over seventy competitors ready to battle to death. Read about the opening in this IndieStatik article, “Deathmatch by Audio: The Underground Crystal Brawl and Field-1 Tournament”.