The students are loud, you can hear Super Smash Bros blasting through the hallway, and there are boxes and Diet Coke cans everywhere. It’s as if you’ve entered a secret tech start-up hidden on the 12th floor of E. 16th street. This is the New School Game Club, led by women, who occupy four of the six club leadership roles. Students come to this video game oasis after class, to take a break from doing homework, and trade in school pressure for some friendly competition.
Early in 2017, the long-standing, student-run Game Club wasn’t cutting it for several of the members. A few friends banded together and decided to bring it back to life. After grinding it out, and strategically planning to get funding for their members, they received $3,800 in funding from the University Student Senate (mostly for pizza). As of right now, the club is now up to over 40 members.
“Everyone went out and broadcasted about the club, advertised it, made posters, and updated all the social media, which was dead,” said Dahee Lee, Design and Technology major at Parsons. “We got email lists from the people at student organizations and started reaching out.”
If you’ve ever seen a Playstation advertisement, a commercial for the hottest new video game system, you’d expect the club to be male-dominated, and you’d be wrong. With this female leadership, other women have been encouraged to join. Currently, women outnumber men with a 3:2 ratio with a regular membership of 15-20 people. They say they have built a community for students to come together to play video games and board games. They also serve as an outreach and contact point for the NYC game design community.
“We worked really hard and built it from the ground up,” said Lee. “We collaborated with Pratt Institute to get in touch with other art schools about game clubs and held a really big Super Smash Bros tournament at Pratt. It was a big event, about 50 people.”
In the beginning of the fall semester, New School Game Club proposed a budget of $3,800 for the 2018-19 school year to the University Student Senate. They were denied.
“They said we weren’t inclusive and that the club was just for Design & Technology and Parsons students, even though there was a slide [in the presentation] that specifically stated that it was for everyone,” said Lionel Miele-Herndon, a Design and Technology major, one of the Game Club organizers. “Most of their criticism was that they wanted a really detailed spreadsheet on what we were spending, down to the dollar. In that sense, they were really thorough and that’s a good thing.”
The club took the feedback from the USS seriously, and reworked their proposal to procure the necessary funding to give their newfound members the club they were promised. On September 28th, they went in, presented, and were awarded the full amount of $3,800, according to the USS Fall 2018 Meeting Minutes.
“The student senators approve and fund everything, based on the strength of the proposal,” said Ahad Ali, a NSSR USS Senator. “The proposal includes a budget, what they need the money for, and how many New School Students will benefit from it.”
If you’re wondering where all this money comes from, look no further than your tuition bill. USS collects $8 from every New School student each semester, so all organizations are funded by New School students themselves.
“We need receipts for every event and USS handles the money. All the USS cares about are the receipts. They’re not involved with the club at all, and they’ve never showed up to a single meeting,“ said Miele-Herndon.
This niche community thrives on a shared passion for gaming — they hold weekly Thursday meetings with its members, a number they say is increasing as more students are signing up. Students from the Design and Technology program come into the room asking questions about games they’re creating themselves.
The club leaders provide the members a full Dell PC setup with an all-access Steam account, an entertainment platform that allows users to interact with over 100 million other members, join game groups, and create new content that can be shared across the platform. The desktop is also used for research, so if students want to create a game there, they have everything they need.
“[Design and Technology] is a really small major so we’re all really close to each other,” said Lee. “We’re so proud of this club. It’s our baby. We’ve created this community where gamers can come in here and feel a sense of acceptance because we’ve finally created a free space in a school where it’s often hard to find community. It’s really great.”