Minor in Game Design
The Game Design Minor is a 16-credit minor that provides students with a well-rounded education in the design, production, and study of games. The minor covers introductory courses in all aspects of game design and development, including non-digital game design, game scholarship, programming for games, and digital game production. Our minors have gone on to work in the game industry, become game scholars or critics, and to enrich their future careers with a deep literacy in this vital form of cultural expression.
Requirements
Students must complete a minimum of sixteen units to complete the minor.
Students should contact the NYU Game Center to declare a Minor in Game Design.
Please Note: Not all courses are offered during all academic sessions. Check Albert for course schedule and work with your academic advisor to plan accordingly.
Some courses required for the minor are open to all NYU students when registration opens and others have seats reserved for non-majors. Other courses that can be used to satisfy requirements for the minor open after a period of time in which Game Design majors have registration priority. Students may consult the registration timetable for registration dates each semester. (Students should be logged into NYU Home to access the registration timetable.) Students should also refer to the Notes sections in Albert for additional requirements and non-major procedures. Courses offered at the School of Professional Studies are not eligible to count toward the minor.
Beginning in Fall 2022, students who declare the Minor in Game Design must take:
GAMES-UT 150 Intro to Game Design OR OART-UT 1625 Think Like a Game Designer.
(Students who declared the Minor prior to Fall 2022 are subject to the original requirements for the minor per their Albert degree audit, which included GAMES-UT 101 or OART-UT 1600 Games 101 as the core required course.)
Students must also take at least one of the following four courses:
GAMES-UT 101 Games 101 | Lecture | 4 units | Instructor: Check Albert
Games 101 is the foundational course for the NYU Game Center. The focus of Games 101 is game literacy – a shared understanding of games as complex cultural and aesthetic objects. The class will incorporate lectures, discussion, readings, and writing assignments, but the primary activity of the class is critical play – playing games in order to better understand and appreciate them. The class will cover games on and off the computer, including classic and contemporary board and card games, sports, and games on the PC, internet, and consoles.
GAMES-UT 120 Intro to Game Development | Studio | 4 units | Instructor: Check Albert
Introduction to Game Development is a practical course that introduces students to the methods, tools and principles used in developing digital games. Over the course of the semester, students will work alone to create a two digital prototypes or ‘sketches’, before building on them to produce a final polished game, using the lessons learned in the earlier prototypes. This is a hands-on, primarily lab-based course, and so the focus is on learning by doing rather than on reading and discussion.
GAMES-UT 201 Intro to Visual Communication | Lecture | 4 units | Instructor: Check Albert
This course allows students to harness the power of visual language in order to convey messages and meaning. The elements of visual foundation that will be covered include components (color, texture, image and typography), composition, and concept. Although the class takes place in the Game Design department, we will be less concerned with visuals as they are applied to games and instead will look at visual communication across a wide range of disciplines, from visual art to graphic design to web and interface design. Although non-digital mediums will be addressed, the understanding and use of industry-standard software is also a primary goal. The class is about the importance of visual design, how it shapes our culture. The students will learn about and discuss widely-practiced methods of visual communication, and then find their own voice through developing their own works, driven by a clearer understanding of their own tastes and interested fields.
GAMES-UT 180 Intro to Programming for Games | Studio | 4 units | Instructor: Check Albert
Introduction to Programming for Games is a course that introduces students to the concepts, problems, and methods of computer programming, and how these apply to the creation of video games. The course assumes no prior programming knowledge, and is designed to touch on the basic principles of digital design in the form of computer code. There will be an emphasis on programming fundamentals; they will be motivated through the lens of designing and producing video games.
The final eight credits needed to achieve the total of sixteen credits required for the minor can come from any Game Center courses (GAMES-UT) for which a student has the needed prerequisites.
CLICK HERE FOR A LIST OF ALL GAMES-UT COURSES FOR SPRING 2025
Grades
A student must earn a grade of C or above for a course to count toward the minor.
Course Allocations
There are no course substitutions allowed for the minor. All courses must be GAMES-UT courses.
Apply
Everything you need to know in order to declare the Game Design Minor is available on the Tisch website.
Register
Minor courses are offered through Tisch Open Arts, you can find them under OART-UT in Albert. Open Arts courses are open to all undergrad students, you do not need to be a part of the minor to register.
