The NYU Game Center is dedicated to the exploration of games as a cultural form and game design as creative practice. Our approach to the study of games is based on a simple idea: games matter. Just like other cultural forms – music, film, literature, painting, dance, theater – games are valuable for their own sake. Games are worth studying, not merely as artifacts of advanced digital technology, or for their potential to educate, or as products within a thriving global industry, but in and of themselves, as experiences that entertain us, move us, explore complex topics, communicate profound ideas, and illuminate elusive truths about ourselves, the world around us, and each other.

The Game Center is the Department of Game Design at the Tisch School of the Arts. Our mission is to graduate the next generation of game designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and critics, and to advance the field of games by creating a context for advanced scholarship and groundbreaking work. The Game Center’s students, both undergraduates and graduates, are drawn from diverse disciplines including computer programming, visual art, sound and audio, animation, writing, architecture, english, law, history, all joined together by the central discipline of game design.

We live in a time in which games are evolving in radical and important ways. Our students and faculty are defining the cultural landscape for the next hundred years.