The Games Major at UCLA provides a uniquely challenging and rewarding adventure into the wonderful world of games––one of today’s most influential artistic media forms. The program invites students to join us in exploring games as a creative practice and cultural medium. You’ll develop the practical and critical skills to make games and game art that reflect your own voice and vision, working with leading artists, technologists and scholars in a research-based studio environment. And you’ll graduate from the program prepared for life-long learning and empowered to pursue a variety of creative, professional, and educational pathways.

Our program is grounded in an arts-first perspective, practice, and philosophy, with an innovative and experimental approach to game design and development. Unlike some game programs that approach games through industrial design or computer science, our program takes advantage of its position within the Department of Design Media Arts to offer a broad variety of complementary artistic, technical, and conceptual methods for studying and making games and game art.
For example, throughout the program you will make about 20 different games, from small to big, from solo to larger group collaborations, from digital to analog, and from traditional to experimental. Our program is rigorous but highly supportive, and you will learn A LOT: how to code, how to design systems, how to create game art in all its forms, how to write for games, how to analyze games, and understand about their history and theory, how to collaborate, how to play, how to create worlds, and how to imagine and build the future of where this amazing medium can go.

The Games Major begins with a comprehensive series of lower-division courses. These courses form the technical, formal, and critical foundation for making and studying games. Each of these courses covers a different core proficiency: Computer Programming, 3D modeling, Digital Image Making, Animation, Critical Game Studies, Media Theory History, Graphic Design, Digital Fabrication.
From this foundation, students pursue upper division core courses in Game Design, Game Engines, Worldbuilding, Interactive Animation, Collaborative Game Studio, Experimental Game Studio, and a broad range of elective and theory courses to choose from culminating in a two-quarter-long Senior Capstone Project and Senior Exhibition. This project reflects the culmination of all the critical and creative development of a student during the program.
Nearly all of our courses are taught as small studios of 15 to 20 students, which encourages individual growth and allows for strong mentorship from our world-renowned faculty, who blend their broad array of art and technology expertise with personal encouragement and support. This includes hand-on guidance in using the latest hardware, software, and other resources to make games, such as our 3D rendering and VR labs, print lab, digital fabrication lab for making physical materials and electronic games, live gaming performance spaces, cameras and shoot rooms for photography and video, and more.

Ensuring a supportive and friendly game and art making community is a core value of our tightly knit, and highly selective Games Major. We often make and play games together to learn from each other and to grow as people and as artists. The program also installs regular exhibitions of student work to inspire each other and to promote constructive art critique and public-facing feedback. A wonderful feature of the Games program is the UCLA Game Lab, a collaborative, advanced research lab in which students actively work on experimental projects together with faculty, graduate students, guest researchers, industry professionals, and artists in residence. The lab also provides a venue for many visiting artist talks and workshops that introduce students to people, projects, and ideas in the larger game art community.
More broadly, the Games Major provides a home base for further exploration of the many resources and opportunities provided by UCLA–the top-ranked public research university in the US for arts education–and by the Los Angeles area. Southern California offers a globally influential ecosystem of cultural venues and commercial studios, software development, emerging technology, entertainment, and media culture. In short, our Games Major presents a top-tier, affordable education and an ideal place for students to expand their academic, artistic and professional horizons.

This is just a brief overview of what makes the Games Major at UCLA Design Media Arts an exciting and compelling adventure. If you’re passionate about games–and eager to develop your own creative voice and vision–we encourage you to apply to the program. We’re here to help you build the foundation for your creative and professional future… and the future of games as a deeply humanistic form of artistic expression. We hope you will join us!
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