Courses taught:
- Introduction to Narrative Design
- Introduction to Game Studies
- Narrative Game Studio
- Game Studies I
- Games 101
Clara Fernández-Vara is a media scholar, game designer and writer. Her work focuses on narrative design, both as her professional practice and in her academic work, as well as the study of videogame history. Her current research and creative interests tackle the narrative design of detective and mystery games, following a comparative media approach. Clara’s work is grounded in the humanities, informed by her background in literature, film and theatre, which she brings together with digital technologies.
Before joining the NYU Game Center, Clara was a researcher and game developer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as part of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Clara has presented her work and been a keynote speaker at various international academic and industry conferences, such as the International Conference on Games and Narrative, the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference, Foundations of Digital Games (FDG), Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) conference, Replaying Japan, Central and Eastern European Game Studies Conference (CEEG), and Game Developer’s Conference (GDC). She has worked on commercial games for Warner Bros., Die Gute Fabrik, the Spanish National Ballet, and Big Fish Games among others. Her book Introduction to Game Analysis is one of the most popular textbook in the field of game studies and is now on its third edition.