No longer mere pastimes for dining room tables or living room tv’s, games have become a playground for future-minded artists and designers working in the 21st century’s most popular and impactful medium of art, entertainment, and personal expression. This course is a hybrid workshop and seminar designed for first-time game designers who want to not just play the games of today but make the game art of tomorrow.

Through exploring theories of play and the structure of games, learning game design methodologies and practicing the games development pipeline, students will create and playtest original works of digital game art and design.

Students will be immersed in many facets of game design, including game mechanics, game animation and asset creation, worldbuilding and interactive storytelling, as well as explore gaming’s relationship to traditional artistic practices and to a global culture beyond the board and screen.

Over four weeks, within our communally-focused classroom, students will work both collaboratively and individually on game projects, attend class sessions, as well as work with guest artists and attend field trips. Class sessions will include immersive and experiential play; analysis, study, and discussion of the game medium and canonical games; and experimentation with and design of original digital games.

To develop their technical game design skills, students will be introduced to Unity, a free-to-use, industry- standard game engine, and undertake basic coding of the C# programming language— though this is not a “coding class,” and is rather intended for beginning game artists, designers, and makers.

This is an immersive studio experience with students earning 3 college credits. Participants are expected to continue working on projects in the evenings and over the weekends.

Game Arts is a full-day studio.

Pre-College 2025 application opens in September 2024.