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Naomi Clark (game designer)

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Naomi Clark
Occupation(s)Game designer, professor
EmployerChair of NYU Game Center
Notable workConsentacle
AwardsIndieCade

Naomi Clark is a Japanese American game designer,[1] writer, and professor who currently serves as the departmental chair of NYU Game Center at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. During Clark's term as chair of the department, NYU Game Center has been ranked by The Princeton Review as the top school for game design.[2] Her games often address LGBTQ themes. She designed Consentacle, a science fiction cooperative board game, which raised $154,609 on Kickstarter and won the IndieCade Impact Award.[1][3][4] Clark co-wrote the book A Game Design Vocabulary with Anna Anthropy.[5] Clark is a member of New York City's Game Development Industry Council.[6]

Career

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Clark began developing games for a living in 1999. As of 2018, she has worked on over thirty-five released games for various companies, including Lego.[7][8] Clark became a full-time faculty member of NYU Game Center in 2015, after teaching courses at New York Film Academy, Parsons, and the School of Visual Arts.[7]

In addition to Consentacle, Clark has written multiple games that explore queerness, gender, and sexuality. Clark was a co-developer of Sissyfight 2000 in the 1990s and helped relaunch it as an open source game through a Kickstarter campaign in 2013.[9][10] Leigh Alexander for Game Developer (website) writes that "New York-based veteran developer Naomi Clark is fundamentally a brilliant designer first, a sexual politician second."[11] Clark appeared in the 2014 documentary film Gaming in Color by MidBoss about queer people in gaming.[12][13][14] In 2015, Clark developed Lacerunner, an eighteenth-century reimagining of Netrunner.[15] Clark was interviewed for Polygon about how interactive fiction games on Twine help generate empathy for LGBTQ experiences.[16] Clark wrote the essay “What is Queerness in Games, Anyway?” in the 2017 anthology Queer Game Studies.[17] She wrote the foreword of Honey & Hot Wax, an anthology of sexuality-themed live action role-playing games edited by Sharang Biswas and Lucian Kahn.[18]

Keith Stuart for The Guardian named Clark and Anthropy's book A Game Design Vocabulary as one of twenty books every player should read, writing that, "this excellent manual gives you an entire framework and language for thinking about how games are constructed."[5]

Clark focuses on the significance of games in society. In a 2022 interview with Axios, she said that "play and games, even when we think of them as escapism, gain part of their power and meaning from the roots they have in the rest of society and culture.”[19] She has been a member of New York City's Game Development Industry Council since its inception in 2022.[6]

References

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  1. ^ a b "Consentacle is a board game about having consensual alien sex in space". SYFY Official Site. 2019-11-01. Retrieved 2024-09-20.
  2. ^ Communications, NYU Web. "NYU Ranked the Best School for Game Design by The Princeton Review". www.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2024-09-27.
  3. ^ Narcisse, Evan (2014-09-25). "Tentacle Alien Sex Card Game Isn't As Perverted As You'd Think". Kotaku Australia. Archived from the original on September 26, 2014. Retrieved 2024-09-20.
  4. ^ "Her Story takes home the top honor at IndieCade 2015 awards show". www.gamedeveloper.com. Retrieved 2024-09-20.
  5. ^ a b Stuart, Keith (2021-02-18). "Why do video games matter? 20 books every player should read". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-09-27.
  6. ^ a b "Mayor Adams Takes Steps to Transform New York City Into Global hub for Digital Games Industry". The official website of the City of New York. May 16, 2022. Retrieved 2024-09-27.
  7. ^ a b "New Game Center Faculty". tisch.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2024-09-27.
  8. ^ Clark, Naomi (2018-07-18). "Game devs have three choices interacting online: be a robot, log off — or risk the mob". VentureBeat. Retrieved 2024-09-27.
  9. ^ Tach, Dave (2013-05-01). "Sissyfight 2000 co-creators attempting Kickstarter resurrection". Polygon. Retrieved 2024-09-28.
  10. ^ Sarkar, Samit (2013-05-11). "Reviving and open-sourcing Sissyfight 2000, the psychological schoolyard web game". Polygon. Retrieved 2024-09-28.
  11. ^ "Consensual tentacles: Naomi Clark's provocative card game". www.gamedeveloper.com. Retrieved 2024-09-28.
  12. ^ "Groundbreaking Queer Video Game Documentary Needs You". The Advocate. May 6, 2013.
  13. ^ "Kickstart This Documentary About The LGBT Gaming Community". Kotaku.
  14. ^ "[Midboss] Turns To Kickstarter To Fund Documentary". Forbes.
  15. ^ Rubeck, Levi (2015-02-05). "Inside Lacerunner, the Victorian-era redux of the best tabletop game on the planet". Kill Screen - Previously. Retrieved 2024-09-27.
  16. ^ Sarkar, Samit (2015-04-24). "Twine makes game development more accessible, but to whom?". Polygon. Retrieved 2024-09-28.
  17. ^ "'Queer Game Studies' Aims to Break Entrenched Binaries, PopMatters". www.popmatters.com. 2017-11-03. Retrieved 2024-09-28.
  18. ^ "Honey & Hot Wax". Pelgrane Press Ltd. Retrieved 2023-04-13.
  19. ^ Totilo, Stephen (May 9, 2022). "NYT's Wordle swap is part of an ongoing gaming debate". Axios. Retrieved September 27, 2024.
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