Game Center Director Lantz on NYU’s Practical Career Prep
“We’re very ambitious, like a good Tisch department.”
Recently, we wrote a story about the roundtable that brought Labor Rights to the forefront of the Game Developers Conference.
This week, Game Center Director Frank Lantz and Assistant Arts Professor Naomi Clark sat down to discuss NYU’s role in career prep for game devs.
Clark was at the GDC panel that has energized those pushing for unions in games development. When we spoke to an organizer with Game Workers Unite—a group pushing for unionization—they said that it was a responsibility of NYU to take these issues into the classroom.
When asked, Lantz said that there was no department-wide policy about unionization, nor any plans to establish one.
“We just started this conversation internally about how should we be participating in this conversation [and] how should we be using the structure of our institution and our authority to be ‘think-fluencers’ in this space,” he said. “So yes I don’t think we know yet exactly how to best go about that.”
The way Game Center professors talk about unions in the classroom raises questions regarding career prep.
“It’s not ever talked about and like really like detail like ‘this is what it’s like to work in a company,” said Flan Falacci, a senior in Game Design. “As much as I feel like we get a pretty in-depth coverage of how to ask someone who works at a company to lunch and how to squeeze your way into getting a job, they don’t talk a lot about like—what are the overall working conditions of the industry?”
Lantz defended NYU’s approach to training, which focuses on the capital-A Artist more-so than the capital-P Professional. “If you are building the skills necessary to be an independent developer then by definition you are also a really desirable candidate as an employee in a studio,” he said. “The opposite is not always the case.”
Falacci is a proponent of the artist-focused vision of the Game Center, but said that some of their fellow students don’t feel the same way.
“Most game design programs are very much focused on jobs, they’ll kind of train you into a role,” Falacci said. “But NYU tried to do something different, they became more focused on like being these video game auteurs, which is really artistically interesting, but there’s definitely been like a lot of contention among the students, because a lot of them feel like they weren’t prepared.”
Lantz, and NYU as a whole, make the argument that preparing better artists also prepares better professionals. And while that might be true, the students of the Game Center are not seeing that equivalence.
“They’re between a rock and a hard place right now,” Falacci said. “They have a student population that wants this specific kind of training and that wants this job preparation…[and] the students at the game center all want different things.”
Both Clark and Lantz spoke about ways to straddle the line between equipping industry professionals and creative artists, while not overloading students with work.
“We have had, in the past, the idea of a class that tries to simulate working in a large team,” Clark said. “[Where] everyone’s working on a big project and there’s a sort of top down coordination…But I think we concluded that that kind of experience is not necessarily that valuable.”
But that assessment hasn’t stopped the Game Center from talking about projects that do give students a larger mainstream company experience. One idea was a program similar to Drama’s Artist in Residence productions (like last fall’s “Safety Net”).
“[It’s] where we invite a person who is an established creative from the industry and they come in and they run a project and it’s their game,” Lantz said. “They’re the creative director and they have a team of students that work under them.”
How Lantz—and the Game Center as a whole—find a balance of artistic immersion and professional preparation will be a long process, and that’s not unique. This is a process that every department in Tisch goes through. In Drama or Film/TV or Game Design, Tisch often finds its curriculum stuck between artistic immersion and professional preparation. Lantz, however, remains confident.
“Trying to find that balance within the program is important,” he said. “And we do that in conversation with the students.”
