NYU Game Center 2-year Master Program Fall 2012

Phew. Lots of work has lead up to this, but here at the New York University Game Center, we can finally announce that we are launching a 2-year MFA Degree in Game Design starting the Fall of 2012.

http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate

Full announcement below.

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NYU Game Center to Offer  MFA Degree in Game Design

Beginning Fall 2012

New York University has announced that the NYU Game Center, one of the world’s leading academic game programs, will offer a new Masters of Fine Arts degree beginning in Fall 2012.  MFA students will explore games as a creative art form as they design and develop games within a context of rigorous scholarly study in the two-year program at the NYU Game Center.

The curriculum includes game design, game programming, visual design for games, and game criticism. The program is distinctive in looking at games across a wide variety of media, from consoles and PCs to smartphones and social networks. Over the course of two years, students will find their voices as creative practitioners working on individual and group projects, as they study the theoretical and cultural aspects of games, all within the thriving community that is the NYU Game Center. For more detailed information, visit: http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate.

“Games are the defining cultural form of this century and the NYU Game Center MFA is dedicated to exploring their potential,” says Director Frank Lantz, “There are places to study the technical and business aspects of games, but the Game Center MFA has a unique creative focus on games for today’s platforms.”

The NYU Game Center features a roster of world-class faculty, including:

  • Director Frank Lantz, well-known game designer and successful entrepreneur, an instructor at NYU for nearly two decades
  • Katherine Isbister, acclaimed researcher whose work on players was cited in Forbes, Wired, Scientific American, and NPR’s Science Friday this year
  • Jesper Juul, leading game scholar and theorist whose most recent book was selected by New Yorker magazine as one of the 5 essential books on games
  • Eric Zimmerman, veteran game designer who recently exhibited work at MoMA and co-authored the most widely-used textbook on game design

The NYU Game Center houses one of the world’s largest collections of videogames, and offers a busy schedule of exhibitions, tournaments, and lectures, including the annual PRACTICE: Game Design in Detail conference.

The Game Center MFA was created by Tisch in close affiliation with NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, and NYU Poly. Together with efforts like the Games for Learning Institute and the NYU Poly Game Innovation Lab, the Game Center MFA makes NYU a global leader in games.

Apply now: http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate. Deadline March 1.

The Casual Revolution in RIFT

Over at Joystiq, Karen Bryan is using some of the concepts from A Casual Revolution to discuss what is happening in RIFT: Enter at Your Own Rift: The casual revolution in RIFT.

It’s spot on in terms of picking up what I was thinking when I wrote the book, but then she is using it to discuss MMOs (and the development in a particular MMO),  something that I had not really thought the book to be about.

But that’s what’s so interesting (and a little scary) about writing theory: someone picks up on what you were thinking and applies it to something you hadn’t thought about … and what I wrote no longer belongs to me, but acquires all the meanings that is being put into it by other people. As it should be.

Where Good Citations come From

Call me old-fashioned, but I never thought that truth was simply generated by whoever is in power. (This would require that those in power had a perfect ability to not only control everybody, but also to predict what fabricated truths would be in their interest for all eternity – well, no, nobody really knows that.)

Here is another way in which things can become considered to be true: the always observant XKCD shows how the citation policies of Wikipedia (always refer to external source) quickly go wrong when Wikipedia is used for writing those external sources in the first place:

The Well Played Journal, volume 1, issue 1

ETC Press has posted the first issue of the new Well Played Journal.

Here is issue 1, volume 1.

Minecraft, Beyond Construction and Survival
Sean C. Duncan

Architecture as teambuilding in Left 4 Dead 2
Matt Haselton

Afterland – From well theorized to well learned?
Konstantin Mitgutsch, Matthew Weise

Little Big Planet and Metal Gear Solid 4: Being Old Sack Snake
Caroline C. Williams