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For most of his life, Sagan Yee didn’t know video games could be art.

But in 2013, at an energetic game party in Toronto, Yee encountered a strange accessory: a handmade arcade machine fashioned as a backpack. The backpack soon drew a crowd of gamers who took turns playing on the old-fashioned arcade-style controls. As Yee played games on the back of Eddo Stern, the director of UCLA’s Game Lab, who had flown in from Los Angeles for the party, he learned that those games weren’t vintage arcade titles but rather created by students under the guidance of Stern.

Years later, when Yee was searching for Master of Fine Arts programs after the pandemic, he recalled Stern and his bizarre arcade backpack. After hopping on a call with Stern and researching the Game Lab online, Yee applied for UCLA’s Design | Media Arts MFA program as his top choice. To him, no other program encapsulated the indie game scene so authentically.

From computer science students pushing the technical limits of game engines to English faculty experimenting with interactive narrative mediums, video game development at UCLA is as amorphous as it is robust – even without a formal game development program. Student game developers have found communities and collaborators across a variety of organizations, highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of game development by bringing together the fields of art, coding, writing and sound design.

Now a second-year design media arts graduate student, Yee’s workspace sits across from the same arcade backpack that introduced them to the MFA program at UCLA. The backpack is one of many colorful decorations in the Game Lab; it sits alongside a wall of event promotion posters, floor-to-ceiling shelves of books and copies of games, and remnants of massive installation pieces strapped to the ceiling.

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