Master of Arts in Independent Games and Playable Experience Design

at Goldsmiths, University of London United Kingdom

This degree is ideal if you have a passion for using performance for social change. You will learn performance and facilitation skills, while exploring the ideas that underpin them. The degree equips you in a wide range of careers in the arts, charities, education, and beyond.

The BA Drama: Performance, Politics, and Society has been running since 2017 and is highly valued by its students, alumni, staff, theatre professionals, and external examiners. Our students come from diverse backgrounds and enthusiastically embrace our blend of practice and theory, producing their own innovative and original work. Students on the programme contribute substantially to the vibrance of the Theatre & Performance Department, as well as College life more widely.

Why study the BA Drama - Performance, Politics and Society at Goldsmiths

• Work alongside students from all backgrounds, and learn from each other’s different perspectives.
• Join a community – our alumni are involved as mentors and allies, our staff are friendly and accessible, and we promote a supportive and generous working culture.
• Be an independent learner and create your own learning pathways supported by tutors.
• Study in a democratic environment, and have a say in decision-making about course content and ways of learning.
• Build links and partnerships with our local community in South-East London, arts organisations, and increasingly through international networks.

It’s really important for us that you graduate with a set of core digital journalism skills so half of the degree focuses on the computing side of the discipline and half on media and communications. This means you get a holistic MA, where you study the foundations of digital journalism and practise it in its most current forms.

You’ll have the chance to study multimedia and interactive journalism, look at interactive documentaries, digital reporting, and video journalism. You’ll also learn coding, so you can get to grips with using algorithms and data sets, and do social network analysis to monitor what’s going on behind the screens.

Through our partnerships with BBC news labs and The Times’ development team, we make sure we’re keeping up with industry but also working with it.

We want you to reimagine the medium while you’re here, so you get the chance to specialise in your own area of interest for your final project. This could be anything from an interactive website to a video production using interactive story telling and text.  We offer a lot of support when it comes to the coding side of the course. A boot camp before the start of the programme gives you an introduction to some of the techniques and languages.

What you go away with are the core skills for news writing, video, and computational techniques and some amazing industry contacts.

The world of news and journalism is changing at an unprecedented rate. This programme offers an individual and innovative blend of contemporary multimedia journalism that ensures you will be prepared for the future of a rapidly developing news industry.

You’ll learn a range of cutting-edge digital skills to help you investigate news stories. You’ll also learn how and why good journalism matters by putting it in its wider cultural context.

Why study BA Journalism at Goldsmiths?

• Learn from media professionals with extensive industry experience and leading academics involved in ground-breaking research.
• Work on a real-world news website (EastLondonLines), covering breaking news stories that really matter to the local community.
• Develop an arsenal of digital skills, and learn to integrate them with a core of essential reporting and news-writing skills. Digital skills taught on this programme include:
  • Video journalism
  • Data Journalism
  • Mobile Journalism
  • Web programming
• Get training with a range of digital video equipment to support your practice, including DSLRs, and ENG (electronic news gathering) cameras.
• Produce a long-form news feature on a subject of your choice, which will allow you to bring together all the digital and news-writing skills learned over the course of this degree. Examples of previous projects can be found below.
• Build up a portfolio of work, get advice on careers and work experience, and benefit from our close links with London’s thriving world-class media industry.

This programme is an innovative and interdisciplinary exploration into how social, cultural, and political institutions, decisions, and events have shaped societies and nations around the world.

There is much cross-over to explore between the disciplines of History and Politics. The BA History with Politics at Goldsmiths combines and synthesises methods and concepts from both disciplines to inform and stimulate study. Many History modules, such as those dealing with revolutions, ideas, and social movements, are, of course, centrally connected to politics. Meanwhile, Politics modules on feminism and anarchism are strongly informed by the historical precedents of modern movements and ideologies.

Combine the study of History and Politics

• Rather than focusing on chronology or strict historical periods, combining History and Politics encourages and facilitates explorations and analyses of key issues, controversies, themes, and debates. The study, analysis, and understanding of the past are as important today as they have ever been. Understanding past societies fosters emotional intelligence and allows us to appreciate the diversity and adaptability of human life. Understanding our pasts can help us to shape our futures in more intelligent, insightful, and compassionate ways.
• By combining the two disciplines, you will be able to peel back the formal veneer of political parties and institutions to reveal the major ideological, economic, social, and cultural conflicts which must be investigated to understand our world. This programme crosses boundaries between the traditional and the more radical understandings of political phenomena. Politics is much more than simply what happens in parliaments, it pervades the whole of society, domestically and internationally.

The MMus Popular Music builds upon our international reputation in the popular music field established by our ground-breaking undergraduate degree.

The Popular Music pathway is designed for music artists who are seeking to deepen their creative practice. We are songwriters and composers, producers and performers, engaged in making work that has relevance to real music scenes.

The programme centres the creative artist in a stimulating and supportive environment where critical enquiry, testing of songs/compositions/performance and experimentation in practice lead to a portfolio of new work.

The development of industry-relevant skills and key cultural-theoretical understandings is led by the needs of our own projects and foundational knowledge. Typically, students make records, explore performance and production methodologies, present shows, write and release new sets of songs/works. The programme offers the opportunity to extend the boundaries of artistry and critically reflect upon our own creativity in music.

You’ll also be able to extend your own practice through options in sonic and studio art, advanced music technology, exploration in audiovisual media, and ethnomusicology.

You’ll acquire graduate-level training in creative practice and subject-specific skills that could set you up for a career as a composer-performer or studio practitioner/producer, as well as other jobs in the popular music sector.

This MA will enhance your narrative skills as an editor of fiction for film and television. This Masters is a pathway of MA Filmmaking, so that in addition to your specialised training you will collaborate with students across all specialisms on a variety of film projects.

Experienced tutors and guests provide expert guidance designed to enhance the flow of your individual research, experimentation and artistic achievement. You will complete your degree by working in your specialist role on a major production in the final term.

What we offer

• The programme is housed in a new purpose-built media facility equipped with state-of-the art teaching spaces including a film studio equipped with Arri lighting and Green Screen facilities. Edit suites are equipped with Avid Media Composer and tuition is offered, giving the opportunity to gain Avid Certified User accreditation (Media Composer 101 and 110). Edit suites, screening rooms and sound studios are linked via Avid’s industry standard ISIS storage area network.
• You will work to professional standards using high-end digital formats. You will also learn sophisticated postproduction workflow techniques, gaining a wealth of experience in off-line editing and an understanding of how this fits in with on-line editing, visual effects and picture grading.
• In addition to your specialist area, you can attend classes in related disciplines. This framework is designed to stimulate collaborative practice by providing you with a breadth of filmmaking knowledge combined with a high level of expertise in your chosen filmmaking discipline.

MA Filmmaking (Sound Recording, Post-Production & Design), is housed in a new purpose-built media facility equipped with state-of-the-art teaching spaces including a film studio for sound shooting, Pro Tools suites, Audio Postproduction facilities with Foley recording studios, Avid Media Composer, screening rooms and an Avid ISIS SAN network linking all teaching spaces.

You'll learn the fundamental technical skills necessary to begin a career in screen sound, both as a location sound recordist and post-production sound designer. But equally importantly, you will gain an understanding of how a film’s narrative relies on the precise partnership between image and sound.

Within this MA programme you'll expand your existing knowledge of sound. Through recording and design you'll investigate what it means to listen with awareness and to translate that experience to your audience. And you'll study how sound is created, how you can manipulate its form, whether it’s natural, synthesised, digitised or analogue, and how to work with sound as a storytelling medium.

The Sound curriculum focuses on the structure of the soundtrack, deconstructing it from its beginnings in pre-production to the final mix, experimenting with the ways in which different components (dialogue, atmospheres, sound effects, music) allow an audience to engage with a film’s story. Through iterative exercises, group reviews and regular feedback, you gain the awareness and ability to construct soundtracks that interpret stories through sound.

As a sound specialist you work on one film each term, ending with a major production. You learn about related fields such as directing, editing, producing and documentary, and work with students across specialisms within Goldsmiths Screen School. As well as developing your awareness of the discipline and learning software such as Pro Tools, the Options modules provide the opportunity to learn the concepts and debates informing the wider filmmaking industry. This means you have the chance to explore your craft with other filmmakers and get used to the unique dynamics of the industry

This unique international laboratory programme brings diverse individuals into collaborative research, acknowledging the challenges of creating original, performer-driven theatre in today's complex, globalised culture.

Why study MA Performance Making at Goldsmiths?

• Studying at Goldsmiths gives you access to all the cultural stimulus that London offers, allowing you to enhance your practice and develop compositional, critical, technical and management skills and strategies for forging independent and self-motivated careers. Our graduates work as practitioners, teachers and cultural leaders worldwide.
• The Masters will help you conceive, research, construct and deliver your ideas, and articulate what motivates them. You will study with distinguished international artists and scholars. The emphasis throughout will be on encouraging collaboration across disciplines and cultures, and on contextualising practice within its social, political and architectural environment.
• You’ll undertake physical training, scenographic/environmental exploration, and hands-on introduction to technologies (lighting, video and sound), to support your composition and artistic experimentation. You will identify your own practice within the historical and contemporary field, and write critically and creatively.

Professionally validated by the National Youth Agency, this programme brings together community development and youth work practice with the research methods and theoretical preoccupations of anthropology.

This MA is the first of its kind in the country, combining academic and professional qualifications. It is aimed at students who wish to pursue a career in youth and community work and who need a professional qualification.

This degree provides a grounding in some of the major aspects of politics and international relations. You'll learn about international systems and global governance political theory, UK, European and US politics, international political economy and undertake area-based studies of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Why study BA Politics with International Relations at Goldsmiths?

• We offer a distinctive approach that combines the study of politics and international relations, giving you the opportunity to gain broad knowledge and experience of both disciplines.
• The Department of Politics and International Relations provides a lively interdisciplinary environment, specialising in the study of institutions and conflicts in a way that crosses boundaries between traditional understandings of political phenomena.
• You’ll be able to choose from an unusually wide range of module options which explore the aesthetics of terrorism, critical approaches to security, the politics of development, US politics and foreign policy, the geopolitics of the Middle East, and contemporary movements from the Arab Spring to ISIS. We offer a range of area-based modules covering the Middle East, China and East Asia, Africa and Latin America.
• We have a lively events programme that attracts renowned speakers, meaning that you'll have the opportunity to hear the latest political arguments, theories and ideas.
• Our unique work placement module gives you the opportunity to gain work experience relevant to the degree and we also give you the opportunity to study abroad.