Can NYU do for New York’s game community what it did for film?

On Friday, NYU announced its MFA for game design for its Game Center:

The Game Center MFA is a 2-year Masters of Fine Arts degree that explores the design and development of games as a creative practice. The curriculum is centered on the creation of games and includes game design, criticism, programming, and visual design.

Game development in NYC have been a challenging proposition for a variety of reasons: Wall Street gobbled up tech talent (a problem tackled by Hack NY), there has never been a large game studio company (outside of sales/marketing) to seed new baby startups, the city is awash a dozens of other creative communities, high cost of living and so on.

Nonetheless, developments like this are exciting and NYU has a long history of birthing new talent. The list of successful grads from the film department are lengthy and reputable: Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Joel Coen, Jim Jarmusch, Morgan Spurlock etc.

Let’s hope that laundry list reads as notably for games in ten years.

–Jamin