With twin courses running in New York and Los Angeles, New York Film Academy (NYFA) places its students in two of the world’s major development and cultural hotspots. But it goes much further than that, inviting professional coders to work with teams of aspiring developers. NYFA’s courses are brand new and guided by a strong focus on game design that champions a ‘playcentric’ approach. Here, course architect and veteran developer Chris Swain, who set up EA’s Game Innovation Lab, explains NYFA’s offer.
You do things a little differently at NYFA. How does it all work?
The core course is Game Studio. Students take it each semester and must work as a team to deliver a working digital game both times. This class is exciting because each semester the student is running his own studio with classmates. The student gets mentorship and instruction from faculty members who are top-tier professional game developers. We provide each studio of three or four students with a professional programmer as a teaching assistant and technical team member.
Tell us about the ‘playcentric’ approach that informs the courses.
This is a method developed over the past 15 years and is expressed in the book I co-authored, Game Design Workshop. Playcentric design is taught across the curriculum and involves three aspects. Firstly, the student will understand fundamental theory so they can deconstruct any game experience into formal, dramatic and dynamic systems and learn how to interrelate the three. Secondly, they learn the core development process, picking up skills of game prototyping, playtesting, iteration, presentation and collaboration. The third principle is ‘practise, practise, practise’. All students will prototype multiple games hands-on, regardless of technical skills.
How do you go about preparing industry-ready graduates?
It is imperative that a graduate have solid exposure to both the technical and creative. Students should be aware that the industry is schizophrenic when it comes to entry-level hiring. By that I mean studios say they want to hire tomorrow’s creative leaders but the skills most likely to land a student their first job are technical. So our curriculum provides enough hard skill technical exposure to programming, art and Agile tools so they can get in the door. And the curriculum also provides the deeper, soft skills of creative leadership and playcentric design.
You mention creative leadership. Are you looking to create fast-track development stars?
Inside triple-A game studios the age at which a person is first able to successfully lead a big project – such as Bioshock Infinite – is 32 to 37. That’s because it takes a long time to get exposed to all of the things you need – technical, creative and business – to be competent at the top. Students who get a complete education in games and lots of real exposure while in school – like the curriculum I described above – have an advantage from the start. A goal is for developers to be able to get to that top position earlier in their career – say in their mid to late 20s.
How do you prepare students for next-generation technology?
Our student studios will be able to make awesome play experiences that run on a platform of their choosing – including next-generation consoles such as PS4 and devices such as Google Glass. That said, those projects are probably not going to push the technical boundaries of a given platform. Doing so would require a full engineering infrastructure and curriculum and detract from our mission.
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