AU Game Center is a unique multi-disciplinary academic research center operating through a partnership between the School of Communication and the College of Arts & Sciences with core activities of the center are clustered in three interlocking areas:

1. World-class academic programs exploring games and interactive media in a variety of contexts that are based on experiential education approaches and innovative production experiences;
2. Critical research, artistic exploration, and in-depth analysis of games as a media form;
3. Field-defining service and policy initiatives as they pertain to games and game education.

The common theme that runs through all of this activity is the idea of "games plus." Beyond games as recreation or games as commercial media, the Game Center explores the use of games for diverse purposes and contexts, including education, health, community, policy, and politics — the profound impact on segments of the human condition beyond entertainment. Through this unique lens, as well as its engagement with and activities in the capital region, the AU Game Center offers a wholly unique and timely opportunity to explore and understand games and their profound impact on our world.
 

Academics

The academic programs housed through the Center directly and through partnerships with other academic units represent a broad spectrum of curricular opportunity with regard to the study of games. AU offers both an MA in Arts in Game Design and MFA in Games and Interactive Media directly through the Center’s partnership with SOC and CAS. These programs are nationally recognized in the top 25 annually by the publications including Princeton Review and Animation Review. 

Research & Creative Practice

The research and creative practice activities of the faculty and student body of the Center are broadly multi-disciplinary, as is common (and even required) in game design and development. Work at the Center spans several interlocking fields including game design, game development, game production, game art, game studies, and more. This means that simultaneously faculty might be exploring technical elements of how games are made or new ideas on how to incorporate cutting edge technology such as artificial intelligence or augmented reality, while others are examining the effects of games on local communities and how they can be used for tools of interaction and empowerment for transforming a “smart city” into a “playable city.”

Service & Policy Initiatives

The AU Game Center is also home to a faculty and staff that is engaged in supporting games in higher education in ways that have helped not only the university, but the entire field of games in higher education move forward. As a few examples, consider the following: Professor Benjamin Stokes served as a program officer for the MacArthur foundation’s Games and Learning program, which funded multiple studies across the United States regarding the use of games as a platform for education, and helped establish a position on games and learning at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) during the Obama administration. He is also the co-founder of Games 4 Change, the most widely recognized and successful non-profit engaged in furthering the exploration of games as catalysts for social change and the betterment of society. The annual G4C summit in New York is a cornerstone of work in this academic space around the world.

Center Synergy, Culture, & Practice

The three elements described above – academics, research, and professional service — work together to create a culture of highly impactful, energetic practice. New projects and collaborations are constantly being explored through a variety of synergies. What starts as a class assignment can quickly turn into a research project, research projects produce games and experiences that become case-studies in our curriculum, and students get real-world networking and internship experience through service initiatives and outreach activities. Which is all to say that the culture of the Center is one of making, one of doing, one of exploring.

The general modality of our work is to build things, and through that process to better understand games as a form of media, their capabilities and effects, their players and their interactions, and the world that they are created in and that they reflect. We learn through creation and experimentation, and in that work we draw across a wide number of disciplines, from computing and engineering through communication and the arts. The Center does not focus on disciplinary boundaries, but rather seeks to explicitly act as a place of collaboration, creation and exploration that ignores disciplines-as-barriers and instead acts as a nexus for colleagues across the university and around the world. When referring to "games +" within the Center, this means not only extending the purpose of games into other domains and areas, but also to partnering with a wide array of scholars, practitioners, and experts to better inform our creative activity and produce new knowledge.