Nicholas
Fortugno
Nick Fortugno is a designer of digital and real-world games and cofounder of Playmatics, a game design company in New York City. Nick has been a designer, writer, and producer on dozens of games, serving as lead designer on the downloadable blockbuster Diner Dash, award-winning serious game Ayiti: The Cost of Life, CableFAX award winning Breaking Bad: The Interrogation, and MUSE award winner Body/Mind/Change as well as games with Red Bull, Disney, AMC, the Red Cross/Crescent, PBS, and USAID. Nick is cofounder of the Come Out & Play street games festival, and teaches game design and interactive narrative at Columbia University and the New School. Nick holds an MFA in design and technology from Parsons School of Design.
I’m most excited to work on projects that… allow people to learn or feel something through their own process of discovery.
I’m looking for partners that can help me… forge partnerships to build impactful and powerful games for change.
A moment when I felt most inspired in my work was… seeing adults being silly, rolling a pair of giant inflatable dice at the request of their children, and seeing the release that having fun gave them.
Innovations in my field I’m most excited to work on… are new disciplines such as healthcare, journalism, philanthropy, and public policy that want to use games to forward their messages.