Processing Foundation Adds Gaming Track, Opens Nominations

The Processing Foundation is taking nominations for its 2027 fellowship, the first edition to carry a track dedicated to games. Gaming the System, funded by the Riot Games Social Impact Fund, gives a Los Angeles-based fellow a $10,000 stipend and eight months to build an open-source toolkit for videogame design, co-designed with underserved communities in the city. The foundation announced the Riot backing in an Oct. 1 blog post and on Instagram, and opened nominations, self-nominations included, on Oct. 7.

The fellow will work with the foundation’s team and gaming professionals, publish open-access tutorials and templates, and support students through online workshops and an in-person summer intensive in Los Angeles. Every 2027 project must build on one of the foundation’s own open-source tools, p5.js, the p5.js Editor and Processing 4 among them. The track is open to game makers, creative coders and educators based in Los Angeles.

It is one of three tracks in the 2027 program, beside Collective Intelligence, an AI-education track run with the Mark Cuban Foundation’s youth community, and DIY Computing, a cyberdeck-building track rooted in New York. The program runs Jan. 25 to Sept. 26, 2027.

Since 2013 the fellowship has backed artists and technologists building open creative-coding infrastructure, and it incubated p5.js and the p5.js Editor. The foundation says the Riot grant, from the studio’s nonprofit fund created in 2019, extends that record into videogames for the first time.

For more reading, see KoLab bringing Processing Community Day to YU Festival and p5.js, the fellowship’s best-known alum.