Playful Cities, Digital Heritage [and Fall 2025]

In the past 2 years downtown Rochester has undergone a massive revitalization, and created the US's first intentional community centered around play and games. It was a 10-year project that involved the city, state and federal governments; design and construction firms; financial institutions; and community organizations - and it's still a work in progress. In less than a month, I'm bringing 12 of EGD's Game Studio Program Fellows to the Neighborhood of Play. Through walking tours, discussions, and site visits, students will see firsthand how play intersects with urban design, cultural institutions, and professional game development.

The Strong's new Hasbro Game Park

The focal point of the Neighborhood of Play is the Strong National Museum of Play. It's the only collections-based museum anywhere devoted solely to the study of play, with 14 exhibits (and a very large outdoor park!) specifically related to games, including the World Video Game Hall of Fame. It has 150,000 square feet of exhibits (to put into perspective - that's about the size of 63 houses!). The museum’s electronic games collection encompasses some 400 pinball and arcade machines, 65,000 video games, and hundreds of thousands of notes, sketches and other archival materials from developers. Attendance here is almost evenly split between children and adults, with 52% being people 16 and older. It also houses a preschool that has been open for almost 20 years and is a pioneer in teaching and learning through play in early childhood education.

The weekend we are in attendance, the Strong will be hosting the first Conference on BIPOC Game Studies, an event that celebrates and explores the contributions of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the gaming industry through presentations, panels, and a showcase. Fellows will also get to tour MAGIC Spell Studios, RIT's dedicated research facility and production studio for games and interactive media, and attend a few of the Rochester Fringe Festival events. One of the events is Rocitecture, an interactive theatrical experience that highlights the ways in which our built environment influences societal values and economic forces through audience participation and game board influenced by Rochester’s architecture.

From an educational perspective, the site offers a rare opportunity to observe the holistic application of multiple disciplines: game history, museum studies, urban design, cultural economics, and labor relations within a single neighborhood-scale development. The trip’s objective is to situate students’ understanding of games within a broader civic, cultural, and economic framework. The Neighborhood of Play occupies land reclaimed from the eastern leg of Rochester’s Inner Loop expressway. This transformation was funded in part by a $17.7 million TIGER grant awarded in 2013 to “bridge the moat” between downtown and adjacent neighborhoods. The removal of the highway enabled new mixed-use construction, including residential units, retail space, and a 125-room hotel, all coordinated through design partnerships to ensure architectural cohesion. The development strategy emphasizes a “live, work, play” model, combining 240 residential units and 17,000 sq ft of retail, a Hampton Inn & Suites with accompanying hospitality venues, the Hasbro Game Park as a free, public extension of the museum’s mission, and collaborative marketing initiatives through the Play Rochester partnership, linking multiple local cultural institutions.

Source: Bloomberg

This field experience immerses students in Rochester’s Neighborhood of Play to bridge theory and practice by connecting concepts from game studies, cultural heritage management, and urban planning to real-world environments. Through interdisciplinary exploration, students will examine how museums, public spaces, and private industry interact within a shared cultural district. The conference serves as both a scholarly anchor for the trip and a thematic counterpoint to the district’s more commercial and institutional approaches to play. Topics such as Decolonial Frameworks and Indigenous Voices, Diaspora and Cultural Tropes, and Race, Representation, and Resistance in Story-Driven Games complement site discussions on cultural heritage and representation. GSP Fellows are embedded in interdisciplinary, game-adjacent, and not-exactly-a-game activities through monthly required "Horizons" trips as a part of their programming each year - much more close to home usually. I started these last year in response to some discoveries regarding the exploration opportunities (or lack thereof) available to these students in K-12. I also believe that interdisciplinary knowledge produces the most effective designers. I did a test run over the summer where I found out some of the students had never been to a museum before, even though we live in NYC. Since then, GSP students have visited glassblowing factories, went zip-lining, took a dance class, visited a planetarium, played games about death in a cemetery, and even learned about theme park design at a workshop at Disney World.

Here are some students "listening" to plants and making music at Lincoln Center!

All that is to say Rochester is almost like a weekend intensive of the kind of things I normally do with them. I've spent half of today (yesterday? it's 1AM) prepping for this trip creating worksheets and getting last minute bus tickets for late additions, and the other half prepping my course content for my freshman writing seminar that starts in a week. I'm also going back to graduate school (finally!), but put off all the required courses I didn't want to take and took my electives first so it's coming back to bite me (I have applied stats and econ for nonprofits... as much as I love yummy data I'm not a quantitative human). The last of my roommates is moving into EGDorm tomorrow, and I have the first official orientation for CCNY digital game development majors week, so there are a lot of busy things (I'll definitely do a post on EGDorm at some point). I don't know how to end these yet, so I'll sign this off with a quote from my favorite book. "A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral" ― Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince