November 11-13, 2016

New York City

PRACTICE brings together the smartest minds in game design for one weekend of discussion, debate, and play.

PRACTICE gives your mobile game the the race track designer’s idea you didn’t know you needed.

PRACTICE dives deep into game design.

PRACTICE is an annual event that takes a close look at the concrete challenges of game design, bridging dialog across industries. Where else can a console developer discuss level design with a tabletop RPG writer? Or an iPhone puzzle creator debate economy balancing with a collectible card game designer? Or a professional sports official share secrets with an experimental indie game artist? No other conference brings together such a diverse group of game designers for high-level dialog.

We explore the day-to-day, nuts and bolts of game design – where the rubber of design ideas and methods meets the road of meaningful, playable games. Join us for three days of lectures and panels, debates and discussions, mixed with plenty of game-playing and socializing.

Speakers

PRACTICE brings together video game designers, board and card game designers, designers of sports, and just about any other kind of game designer you can imagine.

PRACTICE 2016 line-up includes:

Sam Barlow, Designer of Her Story
Jennifer Shahade, Champion chess and poker player
Tarn Adams, Designer behind Dwarf Fortress
Celia Hodent, Director of User Experience at Epic Games
Dain Saint, Game Designer, Musician, and Co-Founder of Cypher Prime Studios

You can watch all the talks from PRACTICE 2016 on our Vimeo page.

If you’d like to read more from past PRACTICE speakers, check out our Three Questions series, where Game Center MFAs asked speakers three questions to dive deeper into their design philosophies and methods.

Talks, Panels, and Discussions

Each year PRACTICE features presentations from a variety of expert and accomplished game designers representing all corners of game design. Speakers focus on design challenges and solutions in a wide range of games, from AAA videogames to collectible card games, to indie experiments to military simulations.

All past PRACTICE talks are archived on our vimeo page. You can check out all of PRACTICE 2015, starting with the opening talk from Meg Jayanth below:

PRACTICE also features a variety of sessions that invite everyone in the room to present and participate in the overall conversation of PRACTICE. Those include:

Open Problems

Open Problems is a high-energy “open mic” session in which any conference attendee can present a work or idea in progress for discussion and feedback.

Attendees get five minutes to present a game design problem from a current prototype, idea, or just in general, and get ideas, answers, and debate from the entire room.

If you’re interested in presenting an Open Problem, we’ll send out a call for submissions about a month out from the conference.

Feedback Loops

Feedback loops are brief sessions between talks where we invite conference attendees to come up and discuss and debate topics from the conference. The feedback loops can be a reaction to a talk, a conversation happening on twitter, or stem from a question at the end of a talks.

Venue

PRACTICE: Game Design in Detail will take place on either NYU’s Manhattan or Brooklyn campus and the official venue for 2016 be announced in early fall. In either location, PRACTICE is surrounded by great places to stay and eat, as well as tons of exciting things going on for games in New York City!

Experience PRACTICE

Every year we ask conference attendees to share tweets, talk slides, photos, and more via twitter, tumblr, and instagram, and we combine all of it on the NYU Game Center tumblr. See all of the conversations, debates, and talk re-caps from past PRACTICE conferences here.

Below are photos and artwork from the past four years of PRACTICE conferences.