“In the future, everyone will be a game designer,” suggests Eric Zimmerman, who will open the 2018-2019 Humanities Center Speakers Series with a talk entitled Living in the Ludic Century.
“Games,” he argues provocatively, “are an ancient form of human expression, but they have gained new relevance in recent decades. Our dawning 21st century seems increasingly defined by play, the way that culture in the 20th century was dominated by the moving image. As media, art, and entertainment become more systemic, interactive, and social, they give rise to new forms of literacy—new forms of creating and understanding meaning. Literacy is an umbrella term for how we create and understanding meaning, something increasingly dependent on media. Our relationship to media is changing as our forms of culture become more systemic, interactive, and social. Game design is one model for how we might think about literacy in our current age of play.”
Zimmerman has worked in the game industry for more than 25 years, designing everything from massively multiplayer online games to retail PC/console titles to card and board games to large-scale installations. He is a founding faculty member at New York University’s Game Center in the Tisch School of the Arts. He has also taught at MIT, the Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts. For several years he has been collaborating with architect Nathalie Pozzi and her company on large-scale installation projects that combine game design and architecture. Their work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at Washington’s Smithsonian, and at museums and festivals in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Berlin, Paris, and Moscow.
Eric Zimmerman’s talk will take place tonight at 7:00 p.m. in the Student Union Building's Senate Room and will be followed by a reception.
For more information about Mr. Zimmerman, please visit Eric Zimmerman.
For more information about the Humanities Center, visit Humanities Center.
