Eric Zimmerman
“Increasingly, the ways that people spend their leisure time and consume art, design, and entertainment will be games – or experiences very much like games.” – Eric Zimmerman.
“What I realized was there was so much more opportunity in the idea of game play. It allows the audience to get invested in the story in a way that’s so intimate.” – Aya Ogawa
A play, like a game, is composed from a series of elements. But how do these elements—setting, plot, character, props, lights, etc—combine to make meaning?
Join us for an interactive post-show conversation with premiere game designer and scholar Eric Zimmerman and Ludic Proxy writer/director Aya Ogawa. Taking the role of designer as our starting point, we will explore the relationship between game design and theatre making and the impact of designer and authorial choice on the experience of players and playgoers.
Moderated by Geoffrey Jackson Scott the conversation is part of Play Company’s Idea Lab series, and is free and open to the public.
The conversation will happen immediately following the performance on Monday April 27 (approximately 9pm) at Walkerspace, 46 Walker Street. The conversation is free and open to the public and you do not need to have attended the performance in order to attend the event.
Eric Zimmerman is part of the founding faculty of New York University’s Game Center at Tisch School of the Arts and was the the founder and Chief Design Officer of Gamelab, a New York City-based game development company. In addition to creating an extensive number of paper and digital games, Eric has created a series of award-winning large-scale physical games exhibited in museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has taught courses at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program, New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and Game Center, Parsons School of Design’s MFA in Digital Technologies Program, and School of Visual Arts’ Designer as Author MFA Program. He is the co-author with Katie Salen of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, the definitive textbook on game design (MIT Press, 2004).
Aya Ogawa is a Tokyo-born and Brooklyn-based writer, director, and translator for the theater. She challenges traditional notions of the American aesthetic and identity by creating plays infused with a multiplicity of perspectives, and by incorporating influences from outside the U.S. – of style, form, and content. She is the recipient of New York Theater Workshop’s Artistic Fellowship; New Dramatists’ Van Lier Fellowship; LMCC’s WorkSpace Residency; HERE Artist Residency. She wrote and directed oph3lia at HERE, and Journey to the Ocean, commissioned by The Foundry Theatre. Ogawa is one of the preeminent Japanese-to-English translators of contemporary Japanese drama. Her acclaimed translations have been produced in the U.S. and London, and published by Samuel French and various university publications and journals.
