Extreme Makeover Game School Edition: Do It With or Without a Grant

[Music] i'm here today from nyu game center i'm a project coordinator there which means i work on a bunch of projects mainly i run our grant fund grant program so this is me as a bird so i run our grant program at nyu and i'm mainly going to be talking about one grant from new york state outside of managing grants i have a little newsletter called the sportswoman and that's a weekly email that goes out about all the news in women's sports so if you're interested in that in addition to games i'll share the link with you later and you can check that out as well but first we're gonna talk about uh grants basically so what i'm gonna do is take you through three micro case studies um about three different schools who got a great a great state grant um and then for the second half of talk i'm

going to tell you how you can do some of these things yourselves if you don't have a huge grant from the state or somewhere else mostly we wanted to share our budgets i don't think a lot of grant programs and academic programs obscure those things so i think it's sort of interesting that all three of these schools have gotten together and are sharing these things so i want to share those with you and then give you some tips and show you a lot of cute birds okay so first a quick sort of big picture overview new york state has a grant program funding digital gaming so for this grant three new york state universities had game programs applied for this grant and they were given money to increase the awareness of the industry inside the state and outside the state california you guys have a lot of jobs and a lot of game companies and new york wants those jobs and those game companies so so we're here to hopefully bring some of those jobs to

new york so this is a three-year matching grant and that means that the school spends every dollar that the school spends towards the grant the state will also spend a dollar so they did that up to 150 per year so we were each spending 300 roughly 300 thousand dollars a year so that's 900 000 total per school and about 2.7 million dollars overall so the state was really investing in this it's really important to bring jobs out to new york so before i tell you about the schools i wanted to do a shout out to the other schools uh who are working on this so rob and jen from rit amanda and ben from rpi judy and matt they are our new york state um contract officers that are really great and helpful dylan kevin and colin at nyu they're the people who work with me on this every day and then also gwen and paul who listened to me fret about talking in front of a room full of people okay so now we're into the fun part of the talk where

i briefly explain how does this work new york state uh empire state development said okay we have a lot of money and we want even more money and we want to get that money by bringing games to the state um so they want economic growth and they're trying to do that through games so our three schools said hmm okay we have a bunch of students who want jobs we know the local industries um and we could use some money so we all said great we would absolutely love to do that so um the three of us got this grant and uh this is sort of how we felt when we got the grant we're just like money this is nice it's pretty exciting to get a grant you feel like you can do anything so then we started working on the grant and state's like alright great we're really excited to have you you've got to match all of your spending we're not going to just give you money um you got to send in a bunch of reports you're going to attend a bunch of events we want you to create jobs that's the goal here uh you have three years create a bunch of jobs um and maybe if you can do it like get

riot or blizzard or somebody get them to move to new york it's a really cool place like we want them here uh don't you think you can do that and we're like yeah we got a bunch of money we know everybody like let's do this um wait a minute what are those little stars the little stars are all of the things that happen when you get a grant that you're not ready for so for example there are a lot of spending restrictions you can't just spend whatever you want um the state tells you you can't spend certain ways your school tells you you can't spend it in certain ways so you're working within some certain constraints based on what both of those places say you spend a lot of time waiting on signatures um let's see sometimes the categories for how you can spend are really specific and you know exactly how you can spend it and other times they're incredibly vague and you're like can we spend a lot of money on pizza then you spend a lot of money on the pizza and the state's like you can't spend money on pizza so so these things happen uh it's it's

not always as easy and as danceable as you would like [Music] things take a lot of time and a lot of paperwork so how you actually feel when you're managing your grant is more like this you're just sort of in it you're like they're trying to do all the paperwork trying to keep the school happy trying to keep the state happy trying to create jobs you really are doing a lot of things at once okay so now that i've given you a quick little review about that i want to tell you about each of the schools that got the grant i'm going to do just a really brief intro on each of the three programs and then tell you how they what their goals were and how their budgets looked um and um the the other schools are actually right here in the front so at the end during q a if you have questions for them about the specifics they're here and they can help you a little better than i can okay so everyone got to pick their birds first of all uh so nyu we're the skateboard the skateboarders um but we're gonna start

with rpi so rpi's in troy their academic program is the game simulation and arts and sciences program it's an undergrad program roughly 160 students 14 faculty and the goal of the program is to give students a comprehensive understanding of interactive digital media including games from a really great wide range of perspectives so their goal goals for the grant their main goal was to provide a three-step path for students to enter the game industry while retaining local talent so we want people who are here going to school to stay here and get jobs and we want the people who are already here to also stay and like grow that community so they did that through incubator programs local partnerships economic development partnerships and increased presence at events you're going to see that a lot of these are similar this this first breakdown of spending though is actually sort of an outlier so

as you can see they spent the most amount on an incubator program other programs um in this grant are running an incubator as well um but rpi is putting the most effort behind their incubator out of the three the other big categories are salary and fringe and that's sort of a recurring thing you need people to run these programs and so that's a lot of spinning for all three of us is going and then the next big category was community partnerships and you can speak with them a little bit more about those because i think that they're pretty specific and interesting equipment and travel are other things okay for rit they're in rochester new york and they run the rit magic center and there's an undergrad and graduate program in interactive games and media and um they're a little bit larger 220 admitting i think i believe admitting 220 students per year yeah okay great and so they have a university-wide research center that's more multidisciplinary and entrepreneurial

so they're they're all about like creating and sustaining careers growing the industry like in that center separate from this grant and they focus a lot on digital media education and production so that focus on education means that they collaborate with a lot of k-12 institutions schools and after-school programs they also spend a bunch of time with entrepreneurial activity similarly they want to keep their local talent and they want to grow the businesses so their bigger goals were changing public perception around games and so just like telling people games are here they're not just like something you should play with they're like really important in a lot of other ways um and transforming industry attitudes saying new york state is great california is sunny but new york is also really wonderful bring your bring your business here if you're from california let me know at the end of this if you're convinced we have another deck

okay so rit this one's a little different the most of the spending is going towards salary and fringe but a huge chunk is um on things like events and travel so gdc is one of those things they're here every year they've got a really great booth be sure to check it out in addition they've got some money going towards marketing and also students and contractors finally the game center this is where i'm from we're in brooklyn it's really great we have an mfa and a bfa program and we have roughly 200 students in both of those programs and 10 faculty and we are dedicated to the exploration of games as a cultural practice of a cultural form sorry and game design is a creative practice and our goals so again these are very similar we wanted to create a more sustainable game ecosystem in new york city that's an expensive place to live we have a lot of indies so we wanted to sort of help support those

indies and help them grow and we want to help our students start and work in those companies we also been working on tax incentives um that's an important thing to move a large company out you need to have tax incentives so we've been working a little bit on that and also we really wanted to bring together local stakeholders the city is a really big busy place and it's hard to get people together so one of the things we did was we started an advisory board we also grew our incubator so we opened it up to the public it was previously just open to nyu students so now it's open to other folks in new york state and over around the country we also have improved our career services and we continue to grow and expand our free public events so our grant spending looks like this again a lot of money into salary and fringe and also our incubator so we have a summer incubator that's uh three

months funding for teams we put a lot of money into our events we like to host a bunch of different events we have a conference we have an artist no quarter event which is uh commissioned artists um and then we have a bunch of weekly play test events and a bunch of stuff like that uh and also gdc we have a booth too actually all three schools have a booth so you should check them out uh so here's the spinning side by side so you can sort of get a better idea of who's spinning what and where let's leave this up for just a second okay so for a few takeaways um all the schools we had similar goals um in the end we wanted to bring companies out to new york and make people more aware of games so there's no right way i think we all sort of approached it similarly but in

in ways that made sense for our individual institutions and communities so there was no right way um another thing incubators are really popular not only within games but new york state has a bunch of incubator related initiatives so right now i think a lot of people are sort of thinking about that structure as a way to grow companies and finally grants are not as easy as you think it is nice to hear you're getting a bunch of money but it's it's there's no golden ticket with grants so getting a huge grant doesn't necessarily mean you're getting an extreme makeover though rit did get a really new nice cool building um i don't have a picture of it but you can you can you can check it out it's very nice uh okay so now we're gonna switch gears and i'm gonna give you um four sort of tips on what you can do if you don't have a grant it's maybe not a huge problem the first thing that i would recommend if you are a university is to

get some university support there are three specific offices at nyu that i had no idea about and had never worked with until we got this grant and those are governmental affairs sponsored projects and the development office um i did a little test before this to just sort of see how easy it was to track down who these departments are at other institutions so i just picked a couple of schools i don't really know much about i picked carnegie mellon american university and just googled those school names plus department of governmental affairs or sponsored programs and i found them right away so this is that's super easily googleable at least for big schools so i would say get in touch with those folks when you get in touch with them they can sort of give you the lay of the land in terms of what's going on locally with like your state government or your local government maybe there's like a games or media or technology initiative in the area that you you know haven't heard of you can also tell them to like keep an eye out for those things so you don't

have to do that work of like always paying attention to what's going on you can have like backup somebody else looking into it the sponsored programs and development office once we talked to them they started reaching out to places they thought might be interested in sponsoring game programs so that's another option if you don't know exactly where to go for funding those resources exist in most institutions and you can use them or you should use them i would totally recommend it from my experience they're all really nice really smart people who just want to help you so first of all number one university support use it number two is to map out and make connections with your local stakeholders this has been super important for us at the game center and i think at the other schools as well in new york city there are like two or three other university programs with game programs and usually we're like those are our competitors we don't want to talk to them but once we started talking to them we realized that their students were having the same trouble like finding

jobs locally as ours were so talking to other universities helped us sort of like figure out that all students in the area were having trouble with this and we needed to better prepare them to look elsewhere or we needed to like bring this you know keep working to bring the companies to us um other examples are alumni uh they are students who have experience finding jobs and you can you know have like little mini interviews with them and and see how they did it and what they would recommend similar to the university offices local government sometimes has good tips and it's great to have them on your side because they can sort of help advocate for you when they see an opportunity um that you wouldn't have access to otherwise so this this list can be like dozens of other places but these are some of the most common ones that i think all of us have tried to build relationships with all right number three i think this is actually the most important one so i'll

probably spend a little bit longer on it one of the things that we did at the game center was we created an advisory board this we started with the local stakeholders we figured out who's important in these places who are we not talking to and we built this board of advisors and we invited them to regular meetings and at those meetings we did some something called field reports and you can structure this based on what sort of needs your group has but what we did was everyone would sit down and the first thing that we would do is we would go around and ask each other um what has surprised or frustrated you lately and you're only allowed to say one thing and so we would go around and we had people from everything from indies to aaa companies media companies game journalists other schools we had like a pretty wide range of people games for change and non-profits we had everybody together and when we did these field reports just asking like

what's been surprising to you in games or what's been frustrating for you um we found a lot of common ground and also it sort of exposed us to places we weren't familiar with so like i don't really know as like someone who works at an academic institution that tax breaks are super important for a aaa studio the folks we worked with from like take two were saying like yeah we like send a bunch of our stuff out to california to be done because they're tax breaks there or to canada so we learned a lot we all learned a lot about what people were struggling with and um we sort of built relationships with each other and once we started learning what everybody was struggling with it was much easier to sort of make action plans so that's what we started to do next we started making some plans of action so one thing we realized was that um new york city specifically has like some really good funding and support for film programs but not necessarily for other types of media so

um we have been working for like all three years on um developing like a good relationship with new york city's like office of media and entertainment and it's taken so much time people change jobs people forget about meetings like we forget about meetings like it took a long time so once you've got your advisory board start making plans and then start putting those plans into action i know it sounds super basic but you know if you can just like sort of hold yourselves and your your communities like accountable for these things like you can like get people together and you can sort of like find that one person at the government office governmental office who wants to answer your email and have coffee with you um all right so once you do the plans of action yeah you got to know it's going to take some time probably the the idea that you had in your head of how this is going to work out is not how it's going to work out similarly to when you have a grant and things will probably take you on a different path which is not always a bad

thing it can be really great okay in conclusion money can help but community building and goal setting once you have a community can actually get you pretty far and once you've established a board or you know a regular sort of meeting group it's a lot easier to get funding because you've sort of already built that structure up and you have stuff to work off of you've sort of proven that you know what's at stake and how to get there all right so that is the end of my talk thank you it was really fast there's so much more i think i could probably spend the entire talk just explaining how the grant worked um and uh so i guess i'm gonna leave the rest of the time we got about like nine ten minutes about ten minutes for questions if you have questions we've also got the other schools here i won't make you come up here but they're here so if you want to chat with them about their specific programs please do that i think they'd probably

be really excited to chat with you and then finally my last plug is for the sports woman which is the sports newsletter again about women it's great it's very fun thank you all right we got a couple of questions um and if you can um i don't have a paper with me but i think you're supposed to introduce yourself to say like your first name okay hi i'm andre thomas from texas a m i'm great talk thank you so much have you measured the effectiveness of this program how effective actually has it been how many companies have been created how many big publishers have moved to new york totally do you have some data on that yeah that's a super great question um when i was putting this together i was like oh my gosh there's so much more i should add and that was actually the first thing that i um wanted to add um we do have that i don't have a slide for that right now um i guess i would say that in terms of like measurable success

new york state at least thinks it has been um a worthy investment the grant ended in 2018 but now all three schools have been refunded as centers of excellence which is basically like double the funding for um for each year so um we have continued funding from the state so i think they've seen that we are sort of making improvements um i don't have the exact number of like jobs created on me um but if you email us i can put together a few slides it might take us a week to get for me to get in touch with everybody and get all these info all this info but we do report that on our reports to the state so i can get that together and i can put those up on twitter those slides with those numbers and stuff so far no aaa company has notified me that they're moving here but tell them we're waiting hi my name's chris and i'm trying to do exactly what you folks did uh in my part of the uk

i wanted to ask you how did you manage expectations at the beginning of this collaboration between the universities because much like in the uk universities here are their own and financial corporations so how did you decide who to cry it if they decide to come today and so on yeah great question um i think we really lucked out the three of us the three schools um we all get along really well we're operating as individual institutions so we all have our own sort of goals and ways of doing things but we've all been really flexible in terms of coming together and like working together and making sure we've got like we said i send out the like invites to their community events and they send out ours and stuff like that um so i don't know if we we really like set up expectations we just sort of like that i think you should set up expectations but i think we just sort of naturally um we're excited to work together um there's another part of your question and it is oh if riot decided to come how

would we decide i think riot would probably decide where they were going each of our parts of the state are very different in terms of the population and like what sort of housing is available and what sort of infrastructure for companies is available so i think probably that would fall to the company and i think any of us would be like super stoked if a company moved into any of our towns so i think since we're all really excited and like we would consider it a win if any of us um had that sort of success so i think it's not particularly competitive it's more collaborative okay thank you yeah hi i'm michael i'm a program director for a middle school in uh dallas fort worth and so i'm coming here as a researcher but also coming as a interested admin to figure out how i can expand our program and so i'm interested in figuring out uh how we can start creating some university partnerships at the middle school level from a public educational institution and to connect that with privatized educational research institutions or collegiate

partners or just to expand our network so that we can keep our growth because we received a grant but now we don't have additional funding any longer besides what we have to maintain salaries sure okay well it's great i'm sure your um your students are very excited yeah um let's see our university works at least our department works less with um elementary middle school and like high school programs we don't work with them a ton but i know one of the other schools does do that yeah ben is shaking his head so um i would say chat with these guys afterwards because they have more experience working with them all right great thank you so much yeah hi i'm uh juno moro from the city university of new york um so i was wondering so we have nearly 400 students um in our program and two full-time faculty members and no staff and i was wondering if you had any recommendations for grants if we don't have money to match funding

for like a public school i don't know if you do yeah it's a very different situation yeah that's it so yeah that is a good question um hmm okay uh off the top of my head um for getting grants i would say i mean you could also check out the um i'm sure like cuny the cuny schools have some sort of like governmental affairs this stuff is happening in new york state so i would imagine there are some i know like we could put you in touch with the folks um at least with new in new york state who work with like the um sort of like grants and incubator programs and like accelerators for that sort of stuff um hmm i don't know if i have something off the top of my head but um i mean maybe um your school is someone who we should like get into our mix of like advisory board members because i don't have an answer for that right now but i imagine there is some resource available sorry

hi my name is victor do you have any international programs partnerships i am a professor at brazil in brazil and i already have contact with incubators that may help con create game game development studios but the problem there is the well there are plenty of problems there to create a business there game business there so sometimes better for us to create something in united states and control it over there something like that i don't know if you could help me in that way let's see we don't i don't know about the other schools i know i don't think right now we have any um international any partnerships with any other schools

um but uh i think like to the extent that we have those sort of like relationships it's more of a like we'll travel somewhere and like give a talk or we'll invite people to come be like a visiting scholar in our program um i don't know i don't know much and haven't really worked on those sorts of partnerships um but again we could totally talk about it and see what you're looking for and yeah we'll do be open to to negotiate something yeah we talk yeah definitely we're happy to like listen to like where other folks are what other folks are working on so yeah we can again chat afterwards i can give you my card and we can maybe follow up on email or something or later at the conference great yeah thank you all right i think we have time for one more [Music] howdy i'm terry from aie uh over at the seattle campus i just want to know or rather what do you feel like you do you get most out of your advisory board you

mentioned putting together one was very useful uh we have one um but i my colleagues and i always wonder about like how to get the most out of them like we're not sure how to kind of guide them to do that okay so uh that's a great question i think we so our advisory board has been really useful like i said in those check-in meetings where we sort of do the um the field reports doing the field reports sort of creates um i don't know if it's quite like an emotional like connection with everyone but it's sort of you get it on the same page because you know you're struggling with similar things um or you can at least empathize with other people's struggles um and so i think that has really that sort of helped uh bring our advisory board together at that level and from there it was a lot easier to advocate with and for each other and it sort of just like got into people's brains when they'd be like oh okay i know games for change is looking for help with their high school programs and then the universities if we see like oh our high school program is coming up

next semester like we need to remember to send them to the games for change folks it just sort of i think it just like having regular meetings will create like better relationships between people um and i think it just like for us at least that has turned into just like being better at advocating for each other um so i guess that's sort of how it works and so i would just recommend i mean you could try something like the field reports and see if that sort of helps connect people a little bit better um i think we've sort of found like when people were doing it um they like when people were like willingly showing up um that is when it worked better when it wasn't like okay time for the meeting but when we were like all right we're having a meeting wednesday night join us if you can and when they like were showing up on their own accord that is when we sort of knew that they were like all in it for each other and cool that's what i would say okay i think we are out of time thanks for coming