Design x Technology Series: Eric Zimmerman

Join CoAD for our next important Design x Technology Series featuring game designer & Arts Professor, NYU Game Center Eric Zimmerman.  His talk titled, Playing with Systems will explore important fundamental design questions relevant to most design fields. This conversational discussion with LTU Director of Game Design and Assistant Professor Ahu Yolaç will provide our guests with a thoughtfully guided interview. 

Games have a special relationship to systems thinking. Every game is an opportunity to push and pull at the affordances of a system, exploring how the system works and how it can be played. While every form of culture (every image, every story, every song) is a system, games - as dynamic participatory experiences - are particularly systemic. And they have been engaging our species for thousands of years.

This session builds connections between game design and other forms of systems design through an interactive workshop where we will play with each other. Specifically, we will explore the simple game of Rock-Paper-Scissors to understand how it works as a system of signification and play. Through a series of modifications, we will look at how small design changes in the rules of a game can ramify into large changes on the level of player experience.

Specifically we will look at what it means to be playful - the ways that play are about transgressing, bending, and breaking structures, in creative ways. Please come to the session ready to play and participate.

The focus of the session is designing meaningful experiences for audiences. How does a choice become interesting for a participant? What makes something engaging - on emotional, social, or cognitive levels? How do we balance structured and organized systems with wild and chaotic experiences?

Through the modification and play of a simple game, we will be exploring these important fundamental design questions, which are relevant to just about any field of art or design.

The format of the session itself - a way of teaching design through games and play - itself serves as a model for how to integrate ideas and pedagogy into interactive experiences. And it will be fun too! See you there.

🛂 CoAD Freshman, this event counts towards your Experience Passport. 

As part of CoAD's Design x Technology Series, this event is free and open to the public. Guests may watch online or on campus. Register for the location/viewing details. A pizza lunch will be provided to all on-site registered guests.

Eric is a veteran game designer who makes award-winning games on and off the computer. Along with Peter Lee, he was the co-founder of Gamelab, a New York City-based studio that created original games like Diner Dash and worked with companies like Lego to create dozens of online titles. Other digital games include SiSSYFiGHT (with word.com), an online game about little girls in social conflict on a playground, Leela (with Curious Pictures), an X-Box Kinect launch title about play and meditation, and Dear Reader (with Local No.12), an Apple Arcade launch title that uses public domain literature as the basis for word puzzles. He was a co-founder of the nonprofit The Institute of Play, which designed entire schools where the curriculum was based on play and games as the model for learning. Tabletop titles include Quantum (with FunForge) and The Metagame (with Local No.12). With architect Nathalie Pozzi, he has designed installations that have been shown in the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and other festivals and museums around the world. He is the co-founder of the top-ranked NYU Game Center, where he teaches as an Arts Professor. Eric’s books include Rules of Play (co-authored with Katie Salen) a textbook that helped establish game design as a discipline, and The Rules We Break, a compendium of his game design exercises. He teaches and lectures extensively about game design and is always ready to play.

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