Parsons The New School for Design
Location: 66 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011
phone: 212.229.8900
A pioneer in art and design education since its founding in 1896,
Parsons has cultivated outstanding artists, designers, scholars,
businesspeople, and community leaders for more than a century.
Our bachelor's degree program in Design and Technology at Parsons
encourages you to become skilled in many platforms-from game design for
traditional console and video, to game design for online interactive and
mobile media, to game design for social networks like Facebook and
YouTube. We also offer degree programs in motion graphics and animation!
Learn More here:
http://www.newschool.edu/parsons/game-design-degree/
Note From Will: I took a look through the curriculum and if you want to get a sense for what a game design degree is all about you might want to check it out.
Here are two of their classes in Game Design:
PGTE 5500
This class is for students who are interested in game design and the creation of interactive experiences. The class focuses on game development - computer games and other types of games - through structured game design problems, exercises, lectures, and reading. The emphasis will be on an iterative design methodology, playtesting, user experience, and clear concept development. The goal of the class is to explore how design systems (in this case, games) support interactivity through meaningful play. This class focuses on the design of games and playful experiences, and will not focus on specific game programming techniques.
PGTE 5501
This course builds on the foundation of Game Design I to introduce students to post-prototyping game design and digital game design. Student projects are exclusively digital in this course. Students continue the game analysis, reading, and project-based assignments of the previous course, but focus now on level tuning, mechanic refinement, and alpha builds. Topics include: deeper study of strategic choice and core mechanics; prototyping in a digital environment; introduction to level design; feedback systems and other emergent patterns; using testing in a design process; game interface design; and digital game production process and documentation. All assignments are small-team-based (2 to 3 students, depending on class size), digital and include: designing a digital prototype of a game that is a variant on a traditional mechanic; building a suite of levels for a pre-existing game that explore a specific theme; and writing a design document that expands a prototype mechanic into a full game. The final assignment is to build out a digital prototype into a simple alpha, concentrating on fleshing out the game design features.
