Game Design MFA

New York University

The NYU Game Center MFA is a 2-year Master of Fine Arts degree in Game Design. Located within NYU’s famous Tisch School of the Arts, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other forms of art, media, and culture. Our students study the design and development of games in a context of advanced critical literacy, with the goal of becoming game designers and developers, artists and curators, critics and scholars.Our curriculum includes classes in the following areas:Game Design – the fundamentals of how games work and how to create meaningful interactive experiences on and off the computerGame Production – oriented towards the creation of digital games, such as our Code Lab series of game programming coursesGame Studies – critical theory and scholarship around the idea of games as a form of designed human cultureGame History – including our foundational Games 101 class, which traces the history of games from ancient board games to today’s videogamesStudio Courses – where the emphasis is on the collaborative group creation of digital gamesThesis – focus of the program’s second year, where you work alone or in groups on a project of your choosingPlay Labs – classes that take a deeper dive into the play of a particular game genre or designer’s work – such as indie tabletop RPGs or tournament Star craft playElectives – a wide range of classes that explore everything from Game Journalism to Games and Players (a class on the psychology and emotions of game play).

Tisch School of the Arts