Fostering Communities at the NYU Game Center
By: Anna-Michelle Lavandier
The eSports, Killer Queen and fighting game communities in New York City have one thing in common: the central hub to meet offline called the NYU Game Center. Even with differences in audience, skill requirements and characteristics of their respective genres, these gaming communities can not only coexist harmoniously, but thrive thanks to the culture found at the NYU Game Center.
Located in Brooklyn, the Game Center is the main classroom for students at NYU studying game design both on a graduate and undergraduate level. However, during special events, the space is open to the public, attracting gamers from various gaming subcommunities throughout the city.
These endeavors are often led by Charles Pratt, assistant professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, who has organized the annual Spring Fighter tournament, various eSports events and the No Quarter Exhibition at the NYU Game Center. Seeing the intersection between the various communities at these events is part of the job for Pratt.
“It’s given me insights on how a community revolves around games,” Pratt said. “Seeing that first-hand is really interesting. Killer Queen I do for fun and my research. When you’re a game designer, “research” could be broad. I’m looking into the revitalization of arcade games or more like the Renaissance for arcade games.”
For those who decide to participate in the gaming culture found at the NYU Game Center, even if they are not students, they have a chance to interact with many other people and even cross over into different communities. While the potential for tension and disagreement is always present in these kinds of environments, the Game Center has created a space for these communities to exist harmoniously.
Ramiro Corbetta, Director of the Digital Game Design and Development department at Long Island University, believes that this overlap is not as unusual as it may seem.
“It’s still a games and game development community,” Corbetta said. “I don’t think it’s too strange. It seems so obvious; I’d be surprised if they didn’t all get along. It just makes sense. They still have things in common. People have multiple mini communities.”
While previous generations of gamers have witnessed the fierce competition that different communities and different platform users engaged in, Pratt believes that those factions could be seeing its last legs.
“In some ways, the old divisions for players, those have started to fall away,” he said. “I don’t really know people who only play one kind of game at this point. At this point, people play all kinds of games.”
Chris Wallace, a second year game design graduate student at NYU, is glad that the school offers such a welcoming space for gamers to mingle, but hopes that it bleeds into other spaces.
“Understanding the socio-cultural aspect of games is part of what we study here,” Wallace said. “Culture itself has a lot of work to do to make [gaming] better for everyone.”
Pratt agrees that while the communities based at the NYU Game Center coexist harmoniously, there is much to be done to transfer that spirit to the overall gaming culture.
“We’re still overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white,” Pratt said. “People should feel welcome even if they aren’t the majority. We want to make it look like the future we want to have. In some ways we’re ahead of the game and there are some ways in which we can improve. We’re on the road to building that.”
Damish Shah, a software designer from the East Village neighborhood, hopes that future innovations will allow gaming to move into spaces that spark conversation outside of technology to include more voices in the community.
“Video game are a really cool medium,” Shah said. “Why not introduce social issues through them?”
Pratt attributes this nature of inclusion and experimentation among the community to the overall nature showcases by the students and other local participants at the NYU Game Center.
“We’re a community of people who take games seriously,” Pratt said. “We like to hang out and relax, but we think of it as an important form of culture like dance, film, art and history. We’re also very interdisciplinary. There are a lot of people here.”
The Nerd Castle is an ongoing thesis project that will be used to explore, showcase and expose diversity and the issues surrounding it within the gaming community. Anna-Michelle can be found on Twitter @amlavandier.
