NYU Game Center Lecture Series Presents Meghna Jayanth

Game Design during polycrisis

Meghna Jayanth designs narratives and worlds which explore fantasies and pleasures counter to capitalism-colonialism. Her work includes 80 Days and the upcoming Thirsty Suitors, as well as contributions to Sable, Sunless Sea, Horizon: Zero Dawn, This War of Mine and others. She won an IGF award for Narrative in 2015, a Writer’s Guild award – in the UK and in the US – and has been nominated for several BAFTAs, amongst other awards and accolades. Her writing and speaking work critiques contemporary technopolitics and excavates video games’ potential as sites of radical and liberatory re-imagination, alongside advocating for better labor conditions for industry workers. Her talk will question the political, artistic and cultural role of the video game and designer in this era of deepening polycrisis. In our work and throughout our careers, we will be invited to collude with dominant culture by the structural tendencies of the industry. But some of these invitations can be refused and subverted, by asking candidly “what do we do when we game design?”

Poster artwork is by Molly Mendoza. Find more of their work here: https://www.mollymendoza.com/

This event will be held in person and streamed online.

• To attend in person, RSVP at the link below and arrive at 370 Jay Street, 2nd Floor Lecture Hall 202 by 7:00pm
• For remote viewers, tune into twitch.tv/nyugamecenter at 7:00pm ET on Thursday, October 26th.

The NYU Game Center would like to thank our event sponsors: Take-Two Interactive, Dots, and Empire State Development. Their generous support makes our events possible.