This week on the Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin show, Jeff talks to Eric Zimmerman, who is an NYU professor at the NYU Gamecenter teaching game design.
Eric tells the story of how he got the job, how you teach game design, and how much of the homework that the students get is just playing video games. They also talk about the state of gaming, which of the recently released games that have really good game design and if Microsoft Flight Simulator can be categorized as a game or only as a simulation.
“There really weren’t books about designing video games, altough there were interesting books anthropology, folklore and philosophy, where people had looked at games as something interesting to investigate culturally. There was no field of game design, no discipline of game design that you could be for or against or find your way around.” — Eric Zimmerman on the lack of theories that had been published about game design when he first started teaching it 20 years ago
“Sometimes I don’t really feel like I am at a university. When I came in this weekend and the Global Game Jam was going on, hallways and classrooms were filled with like sweaty, unwashed game geeks finishing their 48 hour stretch making a game, it didn’t feel like what you think about a university.” — Eric Zimmerman on what the atmosphere at the NYU Gamecenter is like.
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