nyu game center Archives

NYU Game Center’s new scholarship targets women game designers

Famously, the videogame space can be an unpleasant place for women. From professional game designers to the most casual game players, women have repeatedly encountered a two-fold problem when exploring the world of videogames: our experiences are continuously ignored (often accused of being “fakes”) and suffering a slew of personal attacks. Last week, the NYU Game Center, the Game Design program within the Tisch School of the Arts, announced the Barlovento Scholarship for Women in Games. It’s aimed at women who wish to pursue a graduate degree in game design. The scholarship is funded by the Barlovento Foundation, whose founder, Vanessa Briceño,…

News

Upcoming game uses genetic science to create alien gardens

NYU Game Center alumni Owen Bell is the first game designer to be awarded the Public Understanding prize from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Sloan’s Public Understanding prize, in particular, is intended to support projects that blend science and the humanities; it’s for creators and researchers that recognize science and humanities as operating under a single culture. Books, film, and theater have been supported in the past, but never a videogame. With $10,000 in prize money, Bell will commit serious time to Mendel—his “science creativity sandbox” game that allows players to breed different combinations of plants to create unique, lush gardens. Though…

News

Run the world’s fastest tattoo parlor in Ten Second Tattoo

For a little while now, I’ve been contemplating whether or not I want to get a tattoo. It’s not that I have a particular idea for one in mind, so much as it is that I like the thought of using ink to assert my own bodily autonomy. I just have two issues stopping me from pulling the trigger. The first is that I can’t think of a design I want at the moment, let alone one I’ll like decades down the line. The second is that I worry about where I should go for such a permanent change. After playing…

News

✨Beglitched’s journey to make debugging cute n’ fun✨

You’re a kid in a dust-ridden bookstore. The bookshelves rise high, nearly touching the ceiling, with ladders that slide the perimeter. Buried in the back of the store is the oldest of bookshelves. The color’s faded from the bindings of the books that sit within it, the text made hard to read by the wear and tear of decades’ toll. You reach in, and to your surprise, find a magical instruction book. It’s a How-To for becoming a wizard. Now flash forward to our reality, where something like that could maybe, possibly, actually happen—that is, except you manage to discover a…

News

Dig into the brilliant, quiet death of DYG

A faceless figure stands in a field. The shovel tight in grip, its body rises up and down in exhaustion. It lifts the shovel, attempting to dig a hole beneath its feet. The figure is successful and sinks slowly into the earth. But then it fails: the loud ding of the shovel hitting the hard ground rings out. The shovel didn’t cut the soil quite right, not this time, at least. The sun quickly sets behind them, promising only to bury this figure in darkness… and then what? Such is the brief, bite-sized browser-based project DYG; an aesthetically pleasing game…