My name is Eric and I practice game design.
My first industry job was at R/GA Interactive, collaborating with Frank Lantz in the mid-1990s on the design of Gearheads. In the late 90s, I partnered with Word.com on SiSSYFiGHT 2000, a game about playground social conflict of which I am still very fond. In 2000, Peter Lee and I founded Gamelab, a studio that grew to 30 people over a decade and produced dozens of award-winning games. Gamelab created original titles like the best-selling Diner Dash and worked with companies like LEGO, Disney, Mattel, VH-1, Leapfrog, Fisher-Price, Nickelodeon, and HBO. Gamelab was a fiercely independent studio before "indie games" became a buzzword, and many from our merry band have gone on to do amazing things.
One of Gamelab's bigger projects was Gamestar Mechanic, a site that let kids design their own online games. Gamestar Mechanic was originally a collaboration with literacy scholar James Paul Gee and was funded by one of the MacArthur Foundation's first game-related grants. In the wake of Gamestar's success, Peter Lee, Katie Salen, and I co-founded The Institute of Play, a nonprofit that transforms education through play. Under the leadership of Katie Salen, the Institute opened Quest to Learn, a grade 6-12 public school where the entire curriculum is based on games and play as a model for learning. The Institute of Play is still thriving under the guidance of Rebecca Rufo-Tepper and Arana Shapiro and recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. I currently Chair the Board of the Institute.
Teaching is very much part of my design practice. I have taught at universities including MIT, Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and have led hundreds of classes and workshops on game design around the world. I am a founding faculty at the NYU Game Center in Tisch School of the Arts, where I am a full-time Arts Professor.
For the last several years I have been collaborating with Nathalie Pozzi and her company Nakworks on large-scale installation projects that combine game design and space design. Our work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and in museums and festivals in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Berlin, Paris, Moscow, and the Netherlands.
Along with Colleen Macklin and John Sharp, I am co-founder of game design collective Local No. 12. We have published The Metagame, a card game about cultural debate. The latest Local No.12 project is the award-winning Dear Reader, a game that uses public domain literature as the basis for word puzzles, published by Apple. Dear Reader was profiled in the New York Times Book Review’s first ever videogame review, where it was praised as “an interactive way to do an extremely close reading.” Other current projects include a Zoom-playable game with Josh DeBonis about rats fleeing a sinking ship and an interactive narrative set during the May 1968 protests in Paris.
What motivates me as a designer today are still the things that drew me in the first place: finding delight in design collaborations, exploring how games create meaning, giving players contexts for creative expression and deeper understanding, and bringing new kinds of mischief into the world.
Be playful.
Written by a volunteer collective of designers, publishers, manufacturers, and climate researchers, the Green Games Guide is a freely available guide for making card and board games more sustainably. It details best practices for material selection, approaches to design and packaging, and discusses how we might shift the culture of games to a more responsible place.
As an activist gesture, the Green Games Guide seeks to intervene into the production processes and culture of the entire tabletop industry. This project has been a real learning experience for me and I am incredibly grateful to my hard-working collaborators.
- ► Download the Green Games Guide Here: greengamesguide.com
A design book that asks you to play.
The Rules We Break is a book of recipes for teaching design. Filled with hands-on exercises and micro-essays, the book uses games and play as the method for understanding fundamental design concepts. The Rules We Break will help you brainstorm ideas, understand how systems work, creatively solve problems, design interactive narratives, and engage with the collaborative process of prototyping and iteration. It is a book for all kinds of designers, artists, and others who create culture and manage organizations.
- ► more information and to order the book: theruleswebreak.com
- ► published by Princeton Architectural Press with the collaboration of editor Jennifer Thompson
- ► delicious graphic design by Benjamin English
- ► website design by Studio Lebleu
A conversation with Doug Rushkoff on his podcast Team Human. Taking a cue from The Rules We Break, we discuss how game design can offer a model of critical systems thinking as a survival strategy for the 21st century.
A conversation with Emma Larkins and Gil Hova on the game design podcast Ludology. We explore how the systemic quality of games might help us understand systemic problems in other contexts. This is also the episode that launched the Green Games Guide: we discuss games and sustainability in detail and after the interview I was contacted by several folks who became the initial members of that initiative.
Play the classics. In Dear Reader, the text from public domain literature becxomes the raw material for procedural word puzzles. Created with Peter Berry, Eddie Cameron, Anna Garbier, Diego Garcia, Mehak Khan, Alexander King, Colleen Macklin, Toni Pizza, Karina Popp, John Sharp, and Michael Sweet.
Published by Apple as a launch title in Apple Arcade, Dear Reader has received finalist and nominee recognition from the IndieCade festival of Independent Games, Games for Change, Indie MegaBooth, and the Wordplay Festival. We are particularly proud of being the only videogame to receive a review in the NY Times Review of Books. Available for Apple and iOS platforms.
- ► Much more about the game here: dearreadergame.com
- ► Dear Reader in the iOS Appstore
Waiting Rooms is a building-sized installation that is series of interconnected rooms. Inspired by Nathalie Pozzi’s experience of immigration bureaucracy, each room has rules that visitors are instructed to follow - rules that are often unfair and ambiguous. Waiting Rooms is a frustrating series of social spaces that encourages players to cheat the system as they work with and against each other.
Thanks to Tim McHenry at the Rubin Museum for commissioning the initial verison of the project and to Lisa Monrose and James Wetzel at the Boston Museum of Science for the second run. Thanks to production coordinator Ember Suthers and all of the many playtesters, Visitors, Guards, and Attendants.
- ► Waiting Rooms on Nakworks.com
- ► photo credits: Ida Benedetto, Cris Moor
I was thrilled to be a featured guest on one of my all-time favorite podcasts, 99 Percent Invisible. The episode focuses on the strange history and quirky design behind Monopoly. The show has a special focus on The Landlord’s Game, Lizzy Magee’s politically radical game design which was later stolen and in a bitterly ironic twist of fate, became Monopoly - the icon for greedy American capitalism.
An epic struggle over the known universe. Each die is a starship, and with a quantum-inspired roll, can make a radical change into a different form. Quantum comes with several pre-made star maps and encourages players to design their own. The aesthetics harken back to mid-20th Century science fiction and the story is a reverse fable of destructive colonialism, where everyone gets to play the villain.
Quantum received critical acclaim, including the Game Design Award from IndieCade. Thanks to Philippe Nouhra and FunForge for the striking graphic and production design. Thanks to John Sharp for crucial design collaboration on the original “version, Armada D6.
Five hanging steel walls, each a millimeter thick, are the vertical playfields for a game installation designed in collaboration with architect Nathalie Pozzi. You play a 2-player game on a small area of one of the walls, but each move you make requires you to interfere in the games of others. Evoking organic systems like angry beehives and messy bodily organs, Interference erases the normal boundaries between who is and is not allowed to play in your game.
Thanks to curators Lynn Hughes, Heather Kelley, and Cindy Poremba, who along with la Gâite Lyrique Director Jérôme Delormas, commissioned Interference for the exhibition Joue le jeu. Made possible with design collaborators Rebecca Jones Sterling and Tim Szetela. Steel walls manufactured with Caino Design. Interference has been exhibited in Paris, Los Angeles, Dublin, and St. Petersberg.
- ► Interference on Nakworks.com
- ► photo credit: Maxime Dufour Photographies
A social card game that helped inspire Cards Against Humanity, in The Metagame you and your friends argue and debate about media, art, technology, and design. The Metagame is not a single game but a kind of game OS. It comes with rules for several ways to play with the deck and encourages players to invent their own ways to play.
The design has undergone many evolutions over the years, from a massively multiplayer conference experiment to a product sold at Target and Barnes & Noble. We have released a number of expansions, including a Game-themed deck with Shut Up & Sit Down and a limited edition Queer Culture Booster Pack. A project of Local No. 12, co-designed with Colleen Macklin and John Sharp.
A fictional archive of 200 board games, Flatlands is a theatrical game about the sometimes perverse meanings of play. Players seek out game boards based on randomized criteria and then defend their selections before the authority of the Director.
Flatlands was originally commissioned by Babycastles and has been exhibited in New York, Atlanta, and Paris. These images are from the 2017 installation at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris. Flatands has been acquired by the Centre national des arts plastiques, the French institution under the Ministry of Culture and Communication that manages the collection of the Fonds national d’art contemporain (National Foundation for Contemporary Art).
- ► Flatlands on Nakworks.com
- ► photo credit: Baptiste Heller
Rules of Play is an influential game design textbook from Katie Salen Tekinbas and I that takes a deep look at games on and off the computer. It is a standard textbook in the design and study of games and has been translated into several languages.
The book looks at games as formal systems of rules, as the human experience of play, and as works of culture. Each chapter is a “schema” that acts like a lens for understanding what games are and how they function to create meaning. Includes an introduction from Frank Lantz and commissioned games and essays by designers Reiner Knizia, Kira Snyder, and James Earnst.
I’m greatly indebted to Katie for our years of collaboration on this book and support from MIT Press editor Doug Sery. Katie is also responsible for the book’s smart graphic design.
A multiplayer game inspired by classical game theory, the outsider art of Henry Darger, and the scars of childhood. You play a little girl in a social conflict on a playground, trying to reduce the self-esteem of the other girls and be one of the two survivors. The success of your actions depends on what others do: teasing, for example, only works if two or more players all tease the same target together.
SiSSYFiGHT 2000 was a feminist intervention into game culture, the first browser-based game with real-time chat, and a retro-pixelated indie game before “indie games” became a thing. In 2015, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Naomi Clark and I kickstarted and re-launched the game to work in contemporary browsers.
I have been part of the Game Center since its very start, teaching game design (first as an adjunct, then as a full-time professor) and designing its initial curriculum with Frank Lantz, Jesper Juul, and Katherine Isbister. Since those early days, the faculty and staff has expanded greatly to include an incredible lineup of brilliant and talented minds. Shoulder to shoulder with other Tisch programs in filmmaking, theater, and dance, we teach the design, development, and scholarship of games as a form of creative cultural production.
Our first game was BackChatter, a game about Twitter trendspotting. Designed around the backchannel of tweeting that happens at a conference, in the game, players bet on which words they thought would appear most in tweets about the conference.
Our next game was the Metagame, a massively multiplayer card game in which players debate videogame aesthetics that we launched at the 2010 Game Developers Conference. The Metagame was a such a success that we launched a Kickstarter campaign. The current version of The Metagame goes beyond just videogames to include all kinds of entertainment, art, design, and media.
Nakworks and I have collaborated on several large-scale installations that are part space design and part game design. Our projects have appeared in events and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, as well as museums and festivals in Berlin, Dublin, Moscow, Los Angeles, and The Netherlands.
The installations take a variety of forms, from a fictional archive of 200 game boards, to hanging steel walls one millimeter thick. From a game design point of view, our projects often question the assumptions of more traditional games.
I have learned so much from collaborating with Nathalie: a heightened awareness of light and space and physical materials; a deeper understanding of how the human body is part of design and play; a more nuanced sense of how games fit into larger categories of art and design. Our collaborations continue to be a challenge and a pleasure.
Website credits
Design by studio lebleu
Lead designer:
Amélie Lebleu
Designer:
Zoé Langris
Development by Claude Perdigou
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