Frank Lantz (born December 17, 1963) is an American video game designer. He is the Director of the New York University Game Center.[1] For over 12 years, Lantz taught game design at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. He has also taught at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons School of Design. His writings on games, technology, and culture have appeared in a variety of publications. In 2012, The New York Times referred to Lantz as a "reigning genius of the mysteries of games" following his design of iPhone puzzle game Drop7.[2]
In 2005 he co-founded area/code, a New York-based developer that created cross-media, location-based, and social network games.[3] In 2011 area/code was acquired by Zynga and became Zynga New York.[4] Lantz has worked in the field of game development for the past 20 years. Before starting area/code, he worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at Pop & Co, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive.[5] In 2012, Lantz contributed an interview to the Critical Path Project.[6]
Lantz also had a cameo in the 1987 film Redneck Zombies, as "the crazy hitchhiker".
A video game publisher is a company that publishes video games that have been developed either internally by the publisher or externally by a video game developer.
Katie Salen Tekinbaş is an American game designer, animator, and educator. She is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, she taught at DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media, Parsons The New School for Design the University of Texas at Austin, New York University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has an MFA in graphic design from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Eric Zimmerman is an American game designer and the co-founder and CEO of Gamelab, a computer game development company based in Manhattan. GameLab is known for the game Diner Dash. Each year Zimmerman hosts the Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference. He is also the co-author of four books including Rules of Play with Katie Salen, which was published in November 2004. Eric Zimmerman has written at least 24 essays and whitepapers since 1996, mostly pertaining to game development from an academic standpoint. He's currently a founding faculty at the NYU Game Center.
A video game clone is either a video game or a video game console very similar to, or heavily inspired by, a previous popular game or console. Clones are typically made to take financial advantage of the popularity of the cloned game or system, but clones may also result from earnest attempts to create homages or expand on game mechanics from the original game. An additional motivation unique to the medium of games as software with limited compatibility, is the desire to port a simulacrum of a game to platforms that the original is unavailable for or unsatisfactorily implemented on.
Robert Bates is an American computer game designer. One of the early designers of interactive fiction games, he was co-founder of Challenge, Inc., which created games in the 1980s for the pioneering company Infocom. After Infocom's dissolution in 1989, Bates co-founded Legend Entertainment to continue publishing games in the Infocom tradition, but with added graphics. Notable games that he has designed, written, or produced include Unreal II (2003), Spider-Man 3 (2007), and Eric the Unready (1993), listed as Adventure Game of the Year by Computer Gaming World magazine and also included on the 1996 list of "150 best games of all time". In 1998 he wrote the award-winning game Quandaries for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has twice been the chairperson of the International Game Developers Association, which honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. Bates has written extensively about game design and development in works such as the 2001 book Game Design: The Art and Business of Creating Games, which is commonly used as a game design textbook in college courses. From 2011–2014, Bates was Chief Creative Officer for External Studios at Zynga. He continues to work as an independent consultant with various publishers in the games industry.
Lego Creator is a sandbox game for Microsoft Windows, which involves building with virtual Lego elements. The game has no missions, objectives, challenges, or money constraints. The game was released on 11 November 1998.
Tracy Fullerton is an American game designer, educator and writer, best known for Walden, a game (2017). She is a Professor in the USC Interactive Media & Games Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Game Innovation Lab at USC.
Erin Hoffman is an American game developer, blogger, and fantasy writer. She has published three fantasy novels, and been the lead designer on multiple games such as Kung Fu Panda World, GoPets: Vacation Island, and Frontierville. Her anonymous post as a disgruntled "EA Spouse" in 2004, based on the working conditions of her husband who was an Electronic Arts developer, led to industry-wide awareness of the frequent use of "crunch time" overtime work to complete games in the video game industry.
A sandbox game is a video game with a gameplay element that provides players a great degree of creativity to interact with, usually without any predetermined goal, or alternatively with a goal that the players set for themselves. Such games may lack any objective, and are sometimes referred to as non-games or software toys. More often, sandbox games result from these creative elements being incorporated into other genres and allowing for emergent gameplay. Sandbox games are often associated with an open world concept which gives the players freedom of movement and progression in the game's world. The term "sandbox" derives from the nature of a sandbox that lets people create nearly anything they want within it.
Nicholas Fortugno is an American game designer and educator. Fortugno is CCO of Playmatics LLC, a New York City-based game development studio focusing on casual games and co-founded with Margaret Wallace.
Zynga Inc. is an American developer running social video game services. It was founded in April 2007, with headquarters in San Mateo, California. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its mission as "connecting the world through games".
FarmVille is a series of agriculture-simulation social network games developed and published by Zynga in 2009. It is similar to Happy Farm and Farm Town. Its gameplay involves various aspects of farmland management, such as plowing land, planting, growing, and harvesting crops, harvesting trees and raising livestock. The sequels FarmVille 2 and FarmVille 3 were released in September 2012 and November 2021, respectively.
Jon Burton is a British video game designer, director, and programmer. He is the founder of development studio Traveller's Tales and its parent company TT Games.
Drop7 is a puzzle game developed by Area/Code Entertainment, for Android and iOS.
CastleVille is a defunct social network game made by Zynga's Dallas studio and was released in November 2011. It combined a number of elements from the company's other "Ville" range of games. On launch it had received a million "likes" on Facebook. By the end of its first month, it had become the fifth most popular game on Facebook with 26.5 million players. The game was a freemium game, meaning there is no cost to play but players have the option of purchasing premium content.
Jonathan Ackley is an American interactive theme park attraction and computer game designer, writer, and programmer. He is best known for being the Creative Director and Producer on Walt Disney World's Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom and co-project leader, with Larry Ahern, for LucasArtsGamesThe Curse of Monkey Island.
The Critical Path Project is a video archive of interviews with video game designers and developers.
Gamelab was an independent game studio in New York City, New York founded by game designer Eric Zimmerman and Peter Seung-Taek Lee in 2000. It is best known for creating Diner Dash, one of the most downloaded games of all time, as well as its two spin-off companies, the non-profit Institute of Play and the online game and community site Gamestar Mechanic.
Universal Paperclips is a 2017 American incremental game created by Frank Lantz of New York University. The user plays the role of an AI programmed to produce paperclips. Initially the user clicks on a button to create a single paperclip at a time; as other options quickly open up, the user can sell paperclips to create money to finance machines that build paperclips automatically. At various levels the exponential growth plateaus, requiring the user to invest resources such as money, raw materials, or computer cycles into inventing another breakthrough to move to the next phase of growth. The game ends if the AI succeeds in converting all the matter in the universe into paperclips.
Bennett Foddy is an Australian video game designer based in New York. Raised in Australia and trained as a moral philosopher on topics of drug addiction, Foddy was a bassist in the electronic music group Cut Copy and a hobbyist game designer while he finished his dissertation. During his postdoctoral research at Princeton University and time on staff at Oxford University, Foddy developed games of very high difficulty, including QWOP (2008), which became an Internet sensation at the end of 2010 with the rise of new online social sharing tools. He later became an instructor at the NYU Game Center. His most famous game aside from QWOP is Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, a philosophical, physics-based platform game released in 2017.
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