The GAME School

What a weekend! 🎮🏆 The LCS Spring Finals Driven by Kia brought 2,000+ attendees to ASU’s Mullett Arena on both Saturday and Sunday. The packed house witnessed the final leg of the League of Legends tournament where the three top teams competed for the title. The energy in the room was electric!

We were also excited to host additional events with Riot Games and Cloud9 Esports' C9 Kia Rally Point: ASU. The events included industry panels, team practices and after parties held in ASU’s Memorial Union, Stauffer-B and our Esports Lounge. Congrats to all the players, and a big thank you to all who made it such a successful event!!

Got a short film ready for the big screen? 🎥

Future Film Festival 2026, hosted in Hong Kong, is offering a $66,000 prize pool and opportunities for emerging filmmakers under 30. Current students and recent alumni can seek ASU nomination for narrative shorts (up to 30 minutes) or AI short films (up to 10 minutes), or they can submit directly to the festival's open call AI short category.

📩 For ASU nomination consideration: Submit to [email protected] by June 19.
⏰ Festival submission deadline: June 25

Share your creativity on an international stage! Learn more at filmfreeway.com/FutureFilmFest.

Are you an esports fan? Join us for Cloud9 Esports' Rally Point event on Saturday, June 13, during the LCS Spring Finals weekend!

💡Check out an industry panel at 9 a.m. in the ASU Esports Lounge.
🎪 Visit the Cloud9 Kia booth during the tournament.
🎉 Celebrate at the ARAM Afterparty in ASU’s Memorial Union (complete with exclusive prizes).

Hosted at ASU and open to the public!

It’s been a great first week of our Digital Culture Summer Institute so far! Students are practicing 3D printing and modeling, creating sound design, learning 3D animation, making crafty robots and designing video games. Congrats to all our campers on the great projects they've been creating. The fun continues next week with four new classes!

🎉Please join us in congratulating Isabella Zelasko, our spring 2026 outstanding graduate student for The GAME School! 👏👏Isabella, or Bella, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in media arts and sciences with a concentration in games and interactive media. She was recognized in a special ceremony on May 12 for all of this semester's Herberger Institute outstanding graduates was joined by her parents and The GAME School’s Director Pavan Turaga, Clinical Associate Professor Kimberlee Swisher and Program Coordinator Senior Connor Rawls.

Faculty in The GAME School recognize Bella as a high performing student, as well as a skilled 3D fabricator, illustrator and UX designer. Bella excels in designing people-centered digital spaces, with a passion for creating meaningful and experimental multimedia experiences. Her work focuses on creating new ways for people to interact with media arts in the ever-evolving digital age. She was also employed by our FabLab, where she assisted students in using wood shop machinery, operated laser-cutting and CNC machines and managed 3D printers. During summer months, she routinely assisted The GAME School staff in hosting our signature summer camp — Digital Culture Summer Institute — designed for middle school through high school students interested in digital media and the arts.

Congratulations, Bella! We can’t wait to see what you do next!

☀️Our Digital Culture Summer Institute starts Monday, June 1! If you have an 11–18 yr old interested in 🎮 game design, 🤖 robots, 🎤audio recording, 👾 maker machines and more, don’t miss your chance to grab a spot for them in this unique, two-week camp taught by The GAME School faculty, staff and graduate students.

Classes are almost full, so be sure to register ASAP at links.asu.edu/DCSI!

📣 Calling all students with 45+ credits: Have you ever wondered what it takes to launch your own game? Find out this fall in AME 494: Indie Game Studio, which runs Wednesdays from noon–2:45 p.m. starting Aug. 20 at the ASU MIX Center.

🎮 During the course, you’ll operate as an indie game studio, taking a game from concept through production to public release. Leave with a shipped game and a portfolio-ready postmortem!

👉 Learn more and register at https://ow.ly/sPMy50Z4Xys

👏👏Congratulations to all the recipients of the recently announced ASU Humanities Institute spring 2026 seed grants, including four faculty from The GAME School: Adam Nocek, Stacey Moran, Kristy Kang and Pavan Turaga!!🌱✨

From philosophy-guided experiments around microbial ecologies, environmental design and ecological health to using AI to help identify Pacific barkcloth patterns for digital repatriation and revitalizing lost design traditions, there are some wonderful projects being funded by these awards!

👉 Read more about the recipients and their projects at news.asu.edu/b/20260519-asu-humanities-institute-announces-spring-2026-seed-grant-recipients 🔗

🎉🎉Congratulations to the newly minted Dr. Lein De Leon Yong, our spring 2026 outstanding graduate student for The GAME School! She has completed her PhD in media arts and sciences after successfully defending her dissertation, “Cognition, Computation, and Cinema. Tracing an Interdisciplinary Bridge to Test the Use of Computational Vision Tools in Film Studies.”

Join us in giving her a big round of applause for this huge achievement!👏👏👏

👉Read more about Lein and her research here: https://news.asu.edu/20260504-arts-humanities-and-education-phd-grad-reframes-media-research-through-computer-science

💛🎓Congratulations to all our spring 2026 graduates from The GAME School! We have been so happy to celebrate with you this week!🎓💛

After years of assignments, tests, work in the Fab Lab and/or Electronics Lab, late nights, projects and more … you did it!! We hope you look back with pride on all you’ve accomplished during your time at ASU. We can’t wait to see what you do next! 🎉