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Game Development
Research
Henrik Engström
G AME D EVELOPMENT R ESEARCH
G AME D EVELOPMENT R ESEARCH

Published by the University of Skövde, Sweden

ISBN 978-91-984918-7-6 (print), 978-91-984918-8-3 (digital)
First edition, November 3, 2020
©2020 Henrik Engström

Keywords: game development; research overview; production studies;

studio studies; software engineering; management of creativity;
interdisciplinarity; game production; game user experience; GUX;
game user research; GUR; game design; game publishing; game
analytics; game industry; serious games

About this Book

This book was created within the Game Hub Scandinavia 2.0 project.
Project id: NYPS20201849, EU Interreg Öresund-Kattegat-Skagerrak.
Image credits
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, photos are by Neimi Engström.
Several figures have been created using yEd Graph Editor.
Permission to use this book
This work can be used and cited freely.
No further reproduction or distribution is allowed without explicit
permission.
 Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Structure and aim of this book 6
1.2 The gap 8
1.3 Definitions and scope 12
1.3.1 Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.3.2 Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.3.3 Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.3.4 Game development research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1.4 A brief history of games and research into these 24
1.4.1 Analogue games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.4.2 Digital games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
1.4.3 Digital game research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
1.4.4 Serious games, educational games and gamification . 31
1.4.5 A note with respect to KCC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
1.5 A note on technology and tools 35
1.6 Limitations 39
1.7 Acknowledgments 42
2 Software development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.1 Software engineering 47
2.1.1 Research overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.1.2 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
2.2 Information systems 53
2.2.1 Research overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
2.2.2 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2.3 User experience 58
2.3.1 Research overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.3.2 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
2.4 Other software areas related to games 66
2.4.1 Artificial intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
2.4.2 Computer graphics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.4.3 Hardware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.4.4 Internationalisation and localisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
2.4.5 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
2.5 Forums for game research in software areas 70

3 Game studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.1 Game production studies 76
3.1.1 Research overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
3.1.2 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
3.2 Game design 81
3.2.1 Game design books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3.2.2 Game design patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.2.3 Research overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.2.4 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
3.3 Other game studies topics related to development 86
3.3.1 Gameworkers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
3.3.2 Game jams and cocreation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.3.3 History, culture, and regional aspects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
3.3.4 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
3.4 Forums for game studies research 91

4 Media production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
4.1 Games and narratives 95
4.1.1 Research overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
4.1.2 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
4.2 Various media types and their relation to game
development 100
4.2.1 Film, television and games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
4.2.2 Theatre and games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
4.2.3 Art and games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
4.2.4 Music, audio and games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
4.2.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
4.2.6 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
4.3 Forums for media production game research 110

5 Management and business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

5.1 Creativity management 115
5.1.1 Research overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
5.1.2 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
5.2 Business 124
5.2.1 Research overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
5.2.2 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
5.3 Publishing and analytics 129
5.3.1 Research overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
5.3.2 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
5.4 Other aspects 137
5.4.1 Recommended reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
5.5 Forums for management and business game research 139
6 Serious game development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
6.1 Research overview 143
6.2 Recommended reading 147
6.3 Forums for serious games development research 148

7 The game industry perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

7.1 Game Developers Conference 154
7.2 Gamasutra, 80 Level, Gamer Network and more 158
7.3 Wikipedia, MobyGames, Twitch and more 160
7.4 International Game Developers Association 162
7.5 Books with industry sources 164

8 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
8.1 The paradigm gap 169
8.2 Types of research 172
8.2.1 Why should researchers create games? . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
8.2.2 Who is the author? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
8.3 Themes in game development research 178
8.3.1 Project management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
8.3.2 Technology and tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
8.3.3 Size and motivations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
8.3.4 Access and research funding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
8.4 Conclusions 188

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
 1. Introduction

Digital games have become a ubiquitous part of our society. In many

countries, game development is a substantial and important industry.
Furthermore, academic institutions provide programmes aimed at
preparing students for careers in game development. Such programmes
should rest on solid academic grounds and students should receive
orientation in the research that underpins the theoretical and practical
contents of their courses.
Over the past 20 years, there has been great interest in game research.
However, very few studies address game development and even fewer
have focused on development of the games most people play. The
processes that game companies and their motley crews of developers use
to produce successful game titles are not well understood from an
academic perspective. To further complicate things, existing research is
scattered across several communities that have fundamentally different
academic perspectives.
Students enrolled on academic game development programmes are
this book’s primary target audience. Said students are often left
unsupported when figuring out: how the disciplinary research presented
by their professors relates to the world of work after graduation; and,
equally importantly, how said research relates to the possibly completely
 Chapter 1. Introduction

different academic perspectives of their future colleagues.

I argue that it is important for everyone to understand that: there are
many different elements that are essential in digital game development;
and, the academic homes for these elements are scattered and, as things
now stand, often “incompatible”. There are many reasons behind this
scattering and incompatibility. For example, the software element in
digital game development involves the construction of complex systems
governed by rules of logic that have great freedom. However, the
resultant games are ultimately executed on hardware that is governed by
physical limitations (e.g. the speed of light). The cultural element of
digital game development rests on the “meaning” that emerges from the
gaming experience being placed in a cultural context. Here, literature,
music, movies and other human forms of expression also all have their
place. The social dimension of gameplay requires developers to
understand and provide mechanisms that support communication and
interaction between many different players. Finally, the business element
of game development introduces the demand that each game’s
production, promotion and support costs are covered by revenue.
All these elements (and more) are handled by ambitious game
developers. However, very few (if any) research studies address all of
them. Researchers typically focus on one of the above aspects in
isolation.
This book aims to present research focused on applied game
development and map out the various disciplines involved. It does not
seek to present a synthesis of all such (sometimes contradictory) studies.
Instead, it seeks to promote understanding of the multitude of
perspectives involved. Acknowledging the complexity of the map is a
good starting point for anyone who wants to understand game
development research. It is important to appreciate how different
academic communities may be involved. One important message of this
book is that there are many disparate “game studies” communities that
contribute to the understanding of game development.
This book’s focus on studying “game development in the wild” (i.e.
typically undertaken by game companies) rather than “game

2
development in the lab” is deliberate. In the wild, interesting gameplay is
necessary for survival; development costs have to be covered one way or
another. Development in the lab, on the other hand, may be allowed to
disregard some relevant aspects so that something else can be studied.
This has development implications and it may be misleading to transfer
conclusions from lab to wild and vice versa.

The boundaries between disciplines have given rise to something that

can be characterised as a nationalism that restricts research spanning
many disciplines or lying outside the scope of traditional areas. This has
caused some researchers to object to the concept of disciplines. One such
approach is the antidisciplinary movement at the MIT media lab (Oxman,
2016; Ito, 2017). They argue that disciplinary thinking belongs to the
age of enlightenment and that the challenges we face today, in the age of
entanglement, require us to leave disciplinary structures behind:
The world, certainly the academic world, can be seen as a bunch of
circles, which are the disciplines, and there’s a lot of white space
between those circles. You can argue about how big the white
space is, but there definitely is white space. If you work in the
white space, you often can’t get federal funding, which, in turn,
makes it difficult to generate the body of work necessary for tenure
in traditional academic departments. (Ito, 2017, p. 23)

The Krebs Cycle of Creativity (KCC) shown in Figure 1.1 is a model

proposed by Oxman (2016) that shows the four modalities of human
creativity and how they relate to each other. Oxman uses the Krebs
Cycle1 as a metaphor for how science, engineering, design, and art
energise each other:
The role of Science is to explain and predict the world around us;
it ‘converts’ information into knowledge. The role of Engineering
is to apply scientific knowledge to the development of solutions for
empirical problems; it ‘converts’ knowledge into utility. The role

1 A series of biochemical reactions in a cell and far beyond the scope of this book.

3
 Chapter 1. Introduction

Perception &
Culture
Culture < > Nature Perception &
Nature

e
Information

nc
ie
Ar

Sc
t

NA NA
Perception

Philosophy

A A
< >

Behaviour Knowledge

NA NA
Production

Economy

A A
En
gn

g
si

in

Utility
De

ee

Key
ri
ng

A Applied
NA Non-Applied
Production & Production &
Culture Nature

Figure 1.1: The Krebs Cycle of Creativity (Oxman, 2016) – slightly

modified. Reproduced in accordance with the CC-BY 4.0 licence.

4
 of Design is to produce embodiments of solutions that maximize
function and augment human experience; it ‘converts’ utility into
behavior. The role of Art is to question human behavior and create
awareness of the world around us; it ‘converts’ behavior into new
perceptions of information. (Oxman, 2016)

Game study and development involves all parts of the KCC. Consequently,
KCC offers a good map for discussing game research and the breadth of
perspectives that need to be considered. However, the antidisciplinary
approach is not widely accepted in academic institutions. This makes it
hard for many individuals and groups to espouse it wholeheartedly.
Students aiming for a career in games can use the KCC map to
navigate the academic landscape. While profession-related tasks may
require a deep dive into discipline-specific studies, the other parts of
the KCC will always be relevant when returning to a focus where game
development is seen as a compound activity. A professor teaching on a
game programme can have a single perspective. A game producer in the
wild has to care about many perspectives.

5
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1 Structure and aim of this book

This book focuses on research that specifically targets the development
of (regular) games. Chapters are structured to reflect the main disciplines
in which said research was conducted. The main goals of this book are to:
characterise game development research in each discipline; and, provide
pointers to articles that report results from studies of game development.

The majority of the articles cited in this book were collected via a major
literature review led by myself and conducted with the much valued
assistance of colleagues. Said collection was detailed in two journal
articles (Engström et al., 2018; Berg Marklund et al., 2019). Additionally,
I also conducted a review of academic game development research from
the perspective of the Game Developers Conference (Engström, 2019b).
This list of studies was extended with game development focused articles
published in the past four years. The presented material is by no means
exhaustive and it is very likely that some important texts have not been
included. The appendix gives some further details on the reviews.
Previous reviews have identified a number of areas where game
development research has been conducted. Figure 1.2 shows a
visualisation of these areas and how they are covered in this book’s
chapters. The map seeks to illustrate how different areas relate to each
other and where there are overlaps. This is by no means a perfect
representation. Some strongly linked areas (e.g. computer graphics and
art) are shown as distant from each other in figure 1.2. Many alternative
mappings are possible.
The research community has manifested disproportionate interest in
games that have purposes over and above providing an interesting
experience for the player. Given this overwhelming attention to
“utilitarian” development (serious games, gamification, etc.), combining
the results of research therein with those from research into regular game
development would risk giving an entirely imbalanced picture.
I argue that it would be more than unfortunate if results from the
development of games that have utilitarian goals were allowed to

6
1.1 Structure and aim of this book

CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 4
Serious Games Audio Music

CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 5 Art Theatre Film & Television

Business Games and Narratives

Software Engineering
Hardware Information Systems Management of Creativity
AI
Game Design CHAPTER 3
Computer Graphics User Experience Analytics Production Studies Culture
Localisation Publishing Gameworkers Co-creation
Regions History

Figure 1.2: A map of the game development research areas covered in

this book.

dominate. Thus, as illustrated in figure 1.2, this book addresses these

studies separately.
For each area highlighted in the following chapters, I present some
reading suggestions. One article is designated “must read”. In total, there
are thirteen such articles. Together, they give a good overview of the
breadth of perspectives represented in studies of game development in
the wild.
At the end of each chapter, main forums for publishing research in
the corresponding discipline are highlighted. These are good starting
points for students who would like to go deeper into any specific field.
This book focuses primarily on highlighting research published as journal
articles, conference papers or book chapters. Access to and reading of
the highlighted material is facilitated by the adopted approach. Books are
largely excluded from the analysis and presentation in the present text.
Going deeper into specific fields would require whole books to be added
to the types of source information.

The remaining sections of this chapter minutely set out the scope of this
book and provide a brief introduction to, and remarks on, the history of
game research and the role of technology and tools.

7
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.2 The gap

In understanding research into games and game development, the
differences between game development and academic research provide
an important backdrop. There are fundamentally different forces acting
in these latter two areas. In academia, there are “repelling” forces that
make it hard to bridge disciplines and address problems that span the
whole KCC. In game development, the common goal of creating a game
constitutes an “attracting” force that leads to collaborations between
people representing different parts of the KCC.
Ironically, the world of research can be said to share many
characteristics with the world of religion. The different faiths have some
similarities (e.g. believing in a higher power) and some fundamental
differences that make it hard for them to unify (e.g. monotheistic versus
polytheistic and different paths to salvation). Some followers are
orthodox and seek to follow a chosen path. Others adopt and adjust more
pragmatically to the surrounding society. Some followers are open to
converting to other faiths, but most follow the traditions with which they
have been brought up. Game development research can be seen as a
gathering in a multifaith space (Crompton, 2013) at an airport. All
religions are welcome, but the walls are white and empty.
Academic education and research are organised on the basis of
disciplines. In turn, universities are divided into faculties, schools or
departments that typically focus on specific disciplines (e.g. Faculty of
Arts, Engineering Department, School of Business, etc.). Researchers
from disparate fields (e.g. software engineering and communication
studies) might not even accept each other’s research methods. There is a
huge difference between defining formal complexity measures (e.g.
Weyuker, 1988) and conducting autoethnographic studies (e.g. Blinne,
2012). As many students (and even professors) are never exposed to
research outside their own disciplines, they may assume some type of
conformity amongst researchers. Said conformity simply does not exist.
The criteria measuring the success of an academic career are relatively
clear, namely, scholarly articles (or books) and citations. These should
preferably have the cachet of emerging from or featuring in established

8
1.2 The gap

academic conferences and/or journals. Journals usually accept an article

if two or three reviewing peers consider it to be of interest. The peers
and the journal are typically part of the same community as the article’s
author. Consequently, most academic communication is cabalistic and
does not primarily seek to bridge different perspectives. This is despite
recent decades’ increased interest in multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary
and transdisciplinary research and education. Presumably, the prevailing
system is not well prepared for these new approaches and interdisciplinary
articles may be harder to publish than those that stick to a single tradition.
An editorial in Nature summarises it as follows:
If governments, funders and universities want to encourage more
basic researchers to leave their trenches, then they need to make
the no-man’s-land of interdisciplinarity a more welcoming place
to build a career. (Nature, 2015, p. 290.)

Thus, the academic system still seems to steer researchers away from
interdisciplinary collaborations. Conversely, game development more or
less forces people together. Moreover, as regards research, collaborations
do not have to be very tight – meetings, discussions and written
documents are often enough. These activities do not necessarily need a
specific combination of competencies. Even with a wide mix of
disciplines, pulling off a meeting should not be impossible. All
researchers can discuss and write.
Creating a digital game is a far more regimented and unforgiving task.
It involves a mix of quite specific competencies. Furthermore, assembling
a game is a challenge in itself and very few people master all the necessary
skills. If a game were to be created solely by ten 3D modellers in
a meeting, there would be a major risk that the product would lack
interactivity, AI, gameplay, music and maybe even a storyline. The result
would most likely have beautiful, detailed images and animations, but
it might not have any interesting gameplay. Similarly, ten programmers
would probably create a solid interactive experience, but the visual and
auditory presentation might be primitive and the theme of the game
stereotypical and shallow.

9
 Chapter 1. Introduction

When an academic environment gives few opportunities for

interdisciplinary collaboration, researchers may gain the necessary
experience in other ways (e.g. participation in applied game
development). However, this is not always possible. Many researchers
are not focused on applied work and others have only experienced
production in their own discipline. For example, a computer science
researcher may have done some individual coding and a media scholar
may have produced a film. Game jams and small individual game
projects are common in the game studies community, but it is rare with
participation in large interdisciplinary projects where the goal is to
produce a game that attracts the interest of players. Not many scholars
have participated in, or observed, applied game development themselves
and they may not have been exposed to the large variety of perspectives
involved. The economic dimension of development (i.e. that production
costs need to be covered in some way) is addressed almost exclusively in
business communities.
Many scholars are not even aware of the gap between academia and
applied game development. This is apparent in a recent study presented
by Passarelli et al. (2020). They present a project aimed to explore the
relationship between social science research and game development, and
the result reveals a big gap between the two sectors. This is presented as
something surprising:
The considerable gap between these two sectors became apparent,
the extent of which we did not anticipate before project
investigations got underway. (Passarelli et al., 2020, p. 2.)

The main messages of this book are that: good game development
requires more than one disciplinary perspective; and, all existing
research approaches that do not acknowledge this are likely to suffer
from shortcomings. Sadly, failure to combine perspectives is more
common than not in academic studies of games. The computer
science/software engineering community addresses games from its
perspective and the humanities/social science community from its own.
Their contributions are targeted at their own academic communities and

10
1.2 The gap

only rarely at game developers. This was also the conclusion in

Passarelli et al. (2020, p.7):
. . . our researcher interviewees, when talking about non-academic
dissemination, mostly focused on reaching teachers and educators
rather than developers, confirming that developers are often not
considered the main targets of research results.

Passarelli et al. appear surprised by the gap between developers and

research. Unfortunately, the existence of this gap was no surprise to me
after my almost 20 years of game research. Yet, it is very encouraging
that there are studies explicitly highlighting the problem. Change may be
on its way.

11
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.3 Definitions and scope

To frame the scope of this book, a definition of game development
research is required. In turn, this necessitates a closer look at the
individual concepts, i.e. game, development and research. This
examination is followed by a discussion in which the compound term
and the scope of this book are presented.

1.3.1 Game
What does the term game cover? Presenting over 60 definitions of game
found in the literature, Stenros (2017) discusses their various perspectives
and components. Some definitions see elements such as rules, challenges,
clear goals and winning conditions as necessary components of a game.
This means that Sims or creative mode Minecraft may not qualify as
games. For the purposes of this book, it is important to have a definition
which includes artefacts that the general public perceives as games. This
is achieved by the definition used by Elias, Garfield and Gutschera (2012,
p. 6) who state: “A ’game’ is whatever is labeled a game in common
parlance”2 .
Another popular definition that is worth mentioning is one accredited
to Sid Meier: “A game is a series of interesting choices”. This definition
emphasises the need for a game to present players with choices
(interactivity) that, in some way or other, are meaningful. Many research
projects result in interactive artefacts that appear to overlook the
importance of providing interesting choices. For example, White, Tian
and Smith (2016) reported that 75% of their participants found the
studied game to be “not at all entertaining” and none found it to be “very
entertaining”.

2 They also define a subset that they refer to as orthogames. For them, an orthogame is:
“A game for two or more players, with rules that result in a ranking or weighting of
the players, and done for entertainment.” (Elias, Garfield and Gutschera, 2012, p. 8.)
This is a useful term. It refines the very broad concept of games by defining a subset
based on particular characteristics.

12
1.3 Definitions and scope

It is not easy to evaluate whether a game provides interesting choices.

Players provide the most reliable evaluations of games3 . If a game
receives a lot of player attention, it is most likely providing interesting
choices. Given the above, the Elias, Garfield and Gutschera (2012)
definition of game is sufficient for this book.

Even focusing on game development in the wild, this book still

acknowledges there are huge variations between produced artefacts.
There are examples of highly successful games developed by very few
developers, e.g. Undertale, two developers. Other games credit several
thousand developers, e.g. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, 3,355 developers.
(Toftedahl and Engström, 2019). It is only natural that there are huge
differences between the development processes in small indie projects
and those in full scale AAA projects.
As regards attracting players, another important aspect is whether the
game is externally funded (e.g. as a hobby project), or if the developer
needs to survive in a commercial market. Conditions are much tougher
in commercial game development. Here, games must attract not only
player interest, but also player payments that will cover development
costs. Thus, the business model has a major impact on game design
and development (Davidovici-Nora, 2014). A game development project
conducted with research funding, or as a hobby project, does not have to
worry about return on investment.

As regards development and research, games have some additional,

important characteristics that need to be considered. First of all, there are
some fundamental differences between digital and non-digital games.
Most of the studies cited in this book have a digital game focus.
However, it should be noted that many game characteristics are
independent of the digital/analogue aspect. From a development
perspective, digital games introduce a substantial number of additional

3 Players includes game journalists, YouTubers and others influential in the gaming
world.

13
 Chapter 1. Introduction

challenges. They also offer many additional possibilities. Consequently,

the games can be far bigger than their analogue counterparts. From a
game development perspective, there is thus a big difference between
analogue and digital. From a game design perspective, the difference
may not be as large.
The genre of a game and whether it is single or multiplayer also
affect the development process to some degree. Some sports games (e.g.
Electronic Arts’ FIFA and NHL) have massive audiences that expect
to pay for yearly updates. The developer can thus plan and manage
development in a controlled way. One developer referred to this as
“printing money” (Murphy-Hill, Zimmermann and Nagappan, 2014, p.
6). In other genres, expectations are very different (e.g. new gameplay
and content). A genre may also have certain characteristics common to
all its games. This encourages the study and sharing of experience and
knowledge of said characteristics. Some skills in game development are
not applicable to all genres. Gaming hardware and the development skills
associated therewith are extremely important factors in digital games.
Hardware can empower, constrain or limit developers. In the past, new
hardware has given rise to new gameplay (Lê, Massé and Paris, 2013).
An obvious example is the impact the internet has had on digital games.
Finally, it should be noted that there is a big difference between
regular games and serious games. The element of seriousness imposes
a requirement over and above the need to attract player interest. Said
imposition introduces development (and playing) constraints that have
huge consequences.

1.3.2 Development
In the present context, development is the creation process behind a
game. The use of the term is most likely attributable to the software
development tradition that is present in digital game creation. When
games are approached from other fields, terms such as design, creation,
authoring or production may be used instead.
For many people, development is not strongly associated with

14
1.3 Definitions and scope

creativity4 . A little like assembling, it is a process that is subservient to

creation. However, in this book, development is used to cover all the
elements involved in the birth of a game. It includes not only highly
unstructured and spontaneous processes that give rise to new ideas, but
also tedious and systematic processes used to avoid, find and eliminate
software bugs.
It should be noted that interest in development processes and methods
varies significantly between fields. In software engineering, there is a
very strong tradition of proposing and using systematic, well-described
methods. These often include standards for documenting the developed
artefact. In art, design and other creative fields, there is less focus on
following predefined steps. Instead, there is a much stronger emphasis on
creative individuals, it being believed that any project has greater chances
of success if the right screenwriter, director, composer, conductor and
architect are contacted. Games differ slightly here. In general, the
creativity in games is a collective process. There are some examples of
game designers acquiring star status (e.g. Hideo Kojima, Sid Meier and
Shigeru Miyamoto), but these are exceptions.

Game development can be seen as part of a broad and established design

tradition that has been the object of theorising since long before the
advent of digital games. In this context, design can include anything
from the creation of visual communication, material objects or organised
services to the creation of complex systems for environments and daily
life (Buchanan, 1992). This field has identified and addressed many of
the challenges that are also present in game development. For example,
Buchanan (1992) highlights the fact that problems addressed by designers
rarely fall within the boundaries of a single discipline:
Thus, we have the odd, recurring situation in which design is
alternately regarded as ‘applied’ natural science, ‘applied’ social
science, or ‘applied’ fine art. No wonder designers and members

4 In some articles, the term developer is used as a synonym for programmer. This book
does not follow said usage.

15
 Chapter 1. Introduction

of the scientific community often have difficulty communicating.

(Buchanan, 1992, p. 19.)

In the same article, Buchanan stresses the implications of design

typically addressing “wicked problems”. Wicked problems have certain
characteristics that make them hard to handle. For example, they cannot
be definitively formulated, there are no “stopping rules” and no definitive
solutions. Hence, wicked problems cannot be solved. Nonetheless,
designers have to handle this “indeterminacy” as well as they can.
Traditional, rational approaches to problem solving cannot be applied.

Since its start, the software industry has attracted the interest of
academic research in areas related to information technology. Academia
has been interested not only in studying the industry’s development
processes and methods, but also in proposing new, and assumedly
superior, methods. One possible reason for this is the fundamental
challenges developers experienced when early IT systems were deployed.
The mix of complex technology and user interaction made developers
realise that engineering processes were not applicable. This challenge
has been inherited by digital games and partnered with requirements
related to non-utilitarian usage and art. Other parts of the entertainment
industry (e.g. movies and music) do not have to handle the same type of
formally modelled interactivity. A movie director always knows that
audiences will see scenes in the prescribed order. Research communities
focused on movies, literature and music do not seem to be strongly
interested in the production processes behind the artefacts. Instead, the
majority concentrate on analysing the resulting artwork.
The overarching risk that the work will result in nothing at all is a
fundamental characteristic of software development. I feel this is often
overlooked by people who have limited programming experience.
Software bugs can appear at any stage of development. They can be
game-breaking (the program may not even launch) and it may be
impossible to determine how much time is needed to correct them. Of
course, art, music or narrative creation can also suffer from software

16
1.3 Definitions and scope

failures or mistakes that necessitate additional work (see e.g. Whitson,

2018). However, the creator rarely has to worry about not producing
anything at all. Here, it is the quality of what is produced that is at stake.
If a movie’s special effects have glitches, the movie can still be watched.
This paves the way for less structured working processes and more
relaxed attitudes to the produced artefact. The advanced tools, debuggers
and testing techniques used by programmers are a consequence of the
high stake risks they constantly live with. Even the smallest patch can
make a whole game crash. Isolating the underlying reasons for the crash
can be immensely difficult.

Within academia, the management research community does focus on

production processes in the creative industries. As product sales become
increasingly driven by non-functional properties (e.g. design and
lifestyle values), companies want to control how these values are created.
Along with other parts of the IT sector (e.g. social media, music and
movie streaming, etc.), games are commonly mentioned in creativity
management studies. Some of the most insightful characterisations of
game development have been presented in this field.

To conclude, studies of collaborative development have primarily been

the focus of management and IT research. When applying results from
traditional industrial contexts, the cultural, creative and non-utilitarian
elements that are central to games call for caution. The qualities that are
most important for games are similar to those that are used to evaluate
movies and music. However, the interactivity and technological elements
of games mean that they have inherited the challenges of IT development.
The situation is summarised well by Tschang (2007, p. 990):
Game development differs from the development process of other
creative industries in that it needs computer programming, design,
project management, and substantial amounts of testing.

Since this article was published in 2007, new application areas have
arisen (e.g. social media and lifestyle apps) that have characteristics

17
 Chapter 1. Introduction

similar to those of games. Developing such applications will require the

partnering of IT development and the “production of culture”. Creativity
is important not only in game development.

1.3.3 Research
The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines research as: “A careful study of
a subject, especially in order to discover new facts or information about
it”. Such research is conducted in many different contexts, not least in
companies seeking to solve problems and develop new products. This
book focuses on academic research. The additional characteristics of this
latter differentiate it from most research conducted by companies.

Important characteristics of academic research

There are some pragmatic aspects of academic research that must be
highlighted and which justify it vis-à-vis corporate development. First of
all, academic research should be available. Traditionally, since the days
of the ancient Greeks, research has had to be published so that its claims
can be scrutinised and discussed by peers. It is no coincidence that the
Greeks invented both democracy and science. Research conducted in
non-democratic contexts may have to be adjusted so as not to fall foul
of the ruling powers. Such adjustment can jeopardise quality. One of
the best-known examples of this is Galileo Galilei’s trial for promoting
heliocentricity. The Roman Catholic Inquisition could not accept a model
in which the planets revolved around the sun.
As intimated above, peer review is another important characteristic
of research. Most results published in academic contexts have been
reviewed and studied by other academics in the same field. Results are
not made available unless approved, in some way, by worthy reviewers.
The peer review system does not entail all researchers agreeing on
everything. Quite the opposite. Different academic fields have developed
very different traditions and very different theories on how knowledge is
created. Something that is considered solid research in one field can be
completely rejected in another. To the point of polemic, some
researchers contest any explanations that challenge their own. The

18
1.3 Definitions and scope

prestige of being the person behind a promoted perspective should not be

underestimated5 .
A third characteristic is that research should be independent or at
least have any conflicting interests clearly presented. For example, to
establish its credibility, cancer research funded by a tobacco company
has to overcome the real or apparent risk of a conflict of interest.
Finally, there are ethical guidelines that researchers need to follow.
This is something that has not always been emphasised. History has
terrible examples of humans being exposed to cruel treatment in the
name of scientific research. There are no clear boundaries between
what is and what is not ethical research. For example, animal testing
is a controversial topic. When does it become unethical? However,
the important point here is that there are ethical rules, regulations and
principles for academic research. In some cases, these go beyond the
requirements of civil/common law.

Research philosophy
The above-identified characteristics embody a quite pragmatic view of
research. A more formal characterisation might require a review of
research philosophy. This is not the place for such an examination.
However, there are some fundamental tenets of research philosophy that
are worthy of attention.
Game development research covers a very wide range of disciplines
and traditions. Many readers of this book may have been exposed to only
one or a few different traditions. The most fundamental differences relate
to research paradigms (Guba and Lincoln, 1994) and how reality and
knowledge are perceived. A research paradigm is a fundamental pillar on
which research rests. It transcends the issue of whether a qualitative or
quantitative method is to be used. Guba and Lincoln (1994) describe a
paradigm as a set of basic beliefs, or worldviews:
The beliefs are basic in the sense that they must be accepted simply

5 Interestingly, this can be seen in the struggle between the church and Galilei. A
geocentric view is not inherently wrong. However, it makes modelling planetary
motions far harder.

19
 Chapter 1. Introduction

on faith (however well argued); there is no way to establish their

ultimate truthfulness. (Guba and Lincoln, 1994, p. 107.)

Commonly mentioned paradigms are positivism (and post-positivism),

critical theory, constructivism and pragmatism. In their ontological6
assumptions, there is a fundamental difference between the positivist and
the other paradigms. In positivism, reality is assumed to exist irrespective
of humans. The other paradigms do not rely on this assumption, but
emphasise the roles human culture, social systems, context, etc. play
in shaping reality. This fundamental difference in the perception of
reality has implications as regards how knowledge is believed to be
created (epistemology) and how a researcher can generate knowledge
(methodology).
The positivism paradigm has long dominated traditional science.
Studies in physics, medicine, etc. often focus on concrete phenomena
whose existence most people would not doubt and where the scientific
results have led to tangible results (e.g. laser cutters and antibiotics). Such
research seeks to explain the studied phenomena and to generate results
that can be used to look into the future. The success of the paradigm
in science led to a movement for applying it in other fields as well. It
was often less successful here. In areas where human behaviour and
social interaction play a central role, it is harder to see absolute realities.
Our language, culture, personalities and group interactions influence
both the researcher’s understanding and the characteristics of the studied
phenomena.
Another problem with positivism is that it excludes the discovery steps
in research and focuses on testing existing observations. Conversely, in
the constructivism paradigm, the focus is on understanding a specific
reality (acknowledging that it is socially constructed). Here, there is less
focus on looking into the future. The aim is to understand and present a
perspective in an informed and rich way.
Critical theory is similar to constructivism, but focuses more on
social transformation rather than on simply explaining and understanding.
6 Ontology is the philosophical study of being.

20
1.3 Definitions and scope

Finally, pragmatism focuses on using the components that work for each
specific problem. It is not primarily concerned with the ontological
perspective discussed above. In the pragmatist paradigm, rather than
deep discussions about truth and reality, the major concern is the solving
of real problems.
Much more can be said about research philosophy and research
paradigms but, for the purposes of this book, there is no need to go into
greater detail. The important thing to note is that game research features
all the above-discussed paradigms. There is no consensus on any of
these aspects. Thus, it is misleading to talk about a game research
community. The democratic principles discussed above apply to
individual communities just as if they were countries. Although there are
many countries in the academic game world, there is no United Nations.

Art research
Art research is not addressed above. Mainly due to my very limited
experience of such research, this section will not be very long.
Nonetheless, because some games can be seen as art (Rough, 2016), art
is relevant in game development. There are several academic art
institutions that study games. Art research has echoes of constructivism,
but is different in that it is concerned with the “artist process” itself. The
experiences in this process can be documented, shared and used to
inform other researchers/artists. Lilja (2015, p. 14) proposed the
following definition: “Artistic research is research conducted with
artistic practice as its base and artistic practice as its object”. Art
research can thus be seen as having both the means and the goal in the
same activity. This makes it different to other types of research.

Multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary

research
There are many different terms used to characterise collaborations
between disciplines. To complicate things further, there is no unified
definition of these terms. In some contexts, interdisciplinary work is
defined as the transfer of methods from one discipline to solve a problem
in a different discipline. Multidisciplinary research is different in that

21
 Chapter 1. Introduction

several disciplines address the same problem, but unified results are not
the aim. However, this is the focus of transdisciplinary research. Here,
disciplines collaborate to address a shared problem and to create a
shared, unified, new understanding, theory, etc. Common to all these
approaches is that they are defined and based in the concept of
disciplines. How far researchers drift from their disciplinary structures
varies, but it is always assumed that they have a base in a single
discipline.
In this book, interdisciplinary is used as an umbrella term for
approaches that involve some kind of collaboration over disciplinary
boundaries.

1.3.4 Game development research

After this quite extensive presentation of the individual terms, it is time
to focus on the compound term game development research. This book
focuses on presenting research results from studies of game development
in the wild. In other words, empirical data used and presented as part of a
research project and originating from game development as (typically)
conducted in a game company.
I exclude studies of games developed in a purely academic context.
Hence, a large percentage of game-development focused publication
is excluded because it has numerous studies based on student projects
or in-house development at universities. Although many such studies
contain high quality research that may be useful in game development, it
is often apparent that the development is not representative. For example,
the team may have been comprised entirely of programmers or the game
may never have been completed.
The game industry involves a lot of support activities (community
management, business development, etc.). While these activities may be
central to the business aspects of these companies, they are only included
in this book if they have a clear link to core development activities. Thus,
studies that address companies’ social media strategies are excluded
unless they relate to how game development is affected by, for example,
social media integration.

22
1.3 Definitions and scope

This book includes research from many different communities and

traditions. The criteria for source inclusion are based on the principles
applied in the search databases that were used. Primarily, these were
Scopus and Google Scholar. The latter indexes student dissertations.
Such dissertations were excluded as, in general, their quality is lower
than that in work conducted by senior researchers. The types of
publication cited in this book are: journal articles; conference papers of
at least 4 pages7 ; and, book chapters (e.g. from an edited collection)
indexed in research databases. As mentioned above, books are largely
excluded from the analysis and presentation.

7 Some conferences publish abstracts that can be one or two pages long. This is mostly
too short to convey results clearly.

23
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.4 A brief history of games and research into these

Spending some time on reviewing history is a very good way of gaining
greater insight into why things are the way they are. This is true for most
subjects. When teaching technology, it can be hard to get students to
look at the old dusty stuff. They tend to focus on the new shiny things.
Nonetheless, the dust may hide many interesting ideas and experiences
that can illuminate our understanding of shiny things. Thanks to the
strength and longevity of a retrogaming trend, it is somewhat easier to
promote the value of history in a game context. The joy these old games
give is a good starting point for studying the people, technology and
contexts that gave rise to them. Aycock (2016) reports that his work on
“retrogame archaeology” gave him this insight:
What I found surprising in my research was that many retrogame
implementation techniques had modern applications, and not only
in games. I won’t go so far as to say that retrogames were the first
to use these techniques or that modern uses are directly inspired
by retrogames, but I will claim that retrogames are an interesting
way to learn about them. (Aycock, 2016, p. vii.)

Non-digital games have long been studied by (predominantly)

historians and sociologists. At its start, the digital game revolution did
not attract much attention. However, in recent years, many game
researchers have begun to focus on the history of digital games (e.g.
Swalwell, Ndalianis and Stuckey, 2017; Jørgensen, Sandqvist and
Sotamaa, 2017; Eyles, 2016; Montfort and Bogost, 2009). This includes
documenting and analysing the important discoveries, inventions and
productions of mostly small studios in various places in the 20th century.
The history of games academic conference series (History of games,
2020) is organised and run by researchers from all over the world.
In recent years, museums and archives have also put increased effort
into preserving and presenting the history of games8 .

8 I can strongly recommend the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin.

24
 1.4 A brief history of games and research into these

This section gives a brief introduction to the history of (mainly) digital

games. It also presents the history of game research and the history of
serious games. The final subsection contains reflections on the history of
video games in relation to the KCC.

1.4.1 Analogue games

This book focuses on studies of digital game development. Thus, it does
not go into detail about studies of games or gameplay (analogue games
are particularly glossed over). I make an exception for three scholars,
namely, Huizinga, Caillois and Csíkszentmihályi. They have had a major
influence on digital game research and game design.
In 1938, Johan Huizinga presented a seminal work, Homo Ludens (the
playing man), in which he suggests that play is central in the development
of culture (Huizinga, 1955). He further characterises play as an activity
and introduces the concept of the magic circle. This has frequently been
used in later studies of games.
In the early ’60s, Huizinga’s ideas were developed by the French
sociologist Roger Caillois in his book Man, Play and Games (Caillois,
2001). Besides core characteristics of play, Caillois proposes categories
for different forms of play. The results are principles that can be used to
characterise play in a wide sense (sport, amusement parks and “free play”
included therein).
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a psychologist, identified and defined the
concept of flow. Flow is a state of mind that people can enter when they
perform various activities. It is characterised as an “optimal experience”
(Csíkszentmihályi, 1990). Playing games is one activity that can lead
people to enter a flow state. Csíkszentmihályi highlights the importance
of having a balance between challenges and skills. This is essential for
flow and has been applied in game design (e.g. see Schell, 2008).
Huizinga and Caillois were mainly concerned with play as an activity.
Csíkszentmihályi focused more specifically on the state of mind that
players may enter. Although none of them studied game development,
their theories have had repercussions for game design studies.
Consequently, it is relevant to mention them in this context.

25
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.4.2 Digital games

Alan Turing was one of the first scholars to address digital games. In
1937, he presented On computable numbers (Turing, 1937), an article
that targeted a mathematical problem, but which proposed a computer
and computation model that is still used today in computer reasoning.
During the Second World War, Turing was one of the key people behind
the creation of one of the first programmable digital computers. He was
also one of the first to see the potential of computers for playing games
(Turing, 1953).
After the war, Turing was involved in the development of the
Manchester computer. His contribution to the hardware was a random
number generator. He needed this to create a random love poem
generator (at a time when computers were mainly used for military
purposes). Turing also started to study how to create a computer chess
program. His reasoning on machines and intelligence initiated the field
of artificial intelligence (AI). Since then, AI research has been an
important part of game research. Interest has largely focused on
orthogames but, in recent years, increased attention has been paid to
human-like AI. Here Turing’s proposed “imitation game” is still highly
relevant to attempts to create believable AI in games (Livingstone, 2006).
Turing is clearly a central figure in the history of computing and games
(Björk, 2013).
In Scandinavia, Piet Hein was an early game scholar. Surprisingly,
the game community has paid him little attention. A polymath, he was
mainly known for his poems9 and his use of the superellipse in the
design of furniture and roundabouts10 . He was also a mathematician
and game designer. His best-known game is Hex, which he presented as
Polygon in 1942. The same game was later re-invented by the American

9 One of his best-known poems was published during the Nazi occupation of Denmark.
The Danes realised it was an allegorical call to maintain resistance: “Losing one glove
is certainly painful, but nothing compared to the pain, of losing one, throwing away
the other, and finding the first one again”. Nazi censors entirely missed the allegorical
meaning.
10 His work on Sergels Torg in Stockholm received a lot of attention in the ’60s.

26
1.4 A brief history of games and research into these

mathematician John Nash. They appear to have “discovered” the game

independently (Maarup, 2005). Another of Hein’s games was Nimbi.
This simple board game was designed as an extension of the ancient
Nim. In 1901, French mathematician Charles L. Bouton had published
an article (Bouton, 1901) revealing the optimal strategy for winning Nim
games. Hein thought that Bouton had killed the game and wanted to
resurrect it with Nimbi. His game did not have any obvious winning
strategies and Hein became interested in exploring how a computerised
Nimbi player could be created. Through a collaboration with the Danish
Regnecentralen, a digital version was presented in 1963 (Jørgensen, 2009).
Besides being one of the first digital games in Scandinavia, it was also one
of the first digital games to have an interesting game design. The majority
of earlier projects had been implementations of noughts-and-crosses and
Nim, both of which have clear winning strategies.

In the ’50s and ’60s, digital computers were little known outside scientific
communities; digital games even less so. As computers were extremely
rare and expensive, digital game research was very much the preserve of
engineers and scientists. Early research projects in digital games were
mainly conducted on a proof-of-concept basis or to get the general public
interested in computers. Some researchers saw the projects as steps
towards the goal of using the technology to address other problems:
It seems reasonable to assume that these newer techniques will be
applied to real-life situations with increasing frequency, and that
the effort devoted to games or other toy problems will decrease.
(Samuel, 1960, p. 192.)

This attitude persisted for a very long time. For example, most research
funding was (and still is) aimed at applying results from game
development to “real-life situations”.

SpaceWar! (figure 1.3) is one of the early games that had immense
impact on the digital game revolution. It was created in 1962 by a group
of programmers at MIT (Monnens and Goldberg, 2015). The creation

27
 Chapter 1. Introduction

Figure 1.3: Screenshot of a PDP-1 computer running SpaceWar! Image

by Kenneth Lu, reproduced in accordance with the CC-BY 2.0 license.

of SpaceWar! was not initiated by research questions or business plans,

but by curiosity and a desire to create something that could provide
amusement. The game was a success11 and started to be copied and
replicated at other computer centres across the USA:
Programmers who encountered the game became addicted and
eventually brought a copy to their own labs or programmed new
versions based on what they remembered. (Monnens and Goldberg,
2015, p. 126.)

Eventually the game reached entrepreneurs who developed it into arcade

machines. Computer Space, considered to be the first commercial digital
game (1971), was produced by Nolan Bushnell who later started the Atari
game company. Soon after, Atari released Pong, the first major digital
game success. The success of Pong led to strong growth in the game
industry in the ’70s.
Interest in games saw a dip in the ’80s when the market suffered a
severe recession. Even major stakeholders such as Atari had to close
down. This video-game crash mainly affected western companies. In the
same period, the Japanese game industry grew strongly and started to
expand westwards (Izushi and Aoyama, 2006). Simultaneously, various
11 Interestingly,
the game was used in the very first e-sport event; the 1972 SpaceWar!
Olympics at Stanford University.

28
 1.4 A brief history of games and research into these

Figure 1.4: A poker game I developed in 1983 for the TI-99/4A home
computer.

types of home computers (microcomputers) started to be released,

attracting, in particular, the interest of teenagers who wanted to play
digital games. Some users, myself included therein, also developed an
interest in developing their own games (see figure 1.4). This led to a real
boom in game releases. It was followed by strong expansion in
ownership of home PCs and improved hardware such as 3D graphic
accelerators (graphics cards). All elements of the gaming experience
developed rapidly in the ’80s and ’90s. The social dimension of playing
was added when the internet reached most (western) households in the
’00s.
The most recent big shift for digital games began with Apple’s
introduction of the iPhone in 2007. Hand-held gaming had been
introduced very early, but the smartphone enabled gaming for the masses.
Today, mobile games dominate the market. More or less everyone plays
digital games. This revolution has taken place in just 70 years. My
mother was born four years before Alan Turing published “On
Computable Numbers. . . ” She now plays games on her iPad.

1.4.3 Digital game research

It took a long time for the research community to show serious interest in
the remarkable digital game revolution. Although the first games were
conceived in research labs, digital game development was mainly driven
by commercial interests and personally motivated individuals (e.g. who

29
 Chapter 1. Introduction

wanted to express themselves or to amuse themselves and others). With

little time for reflection, development methods were devised along the
way:
Not only have game developers been constructing the labyrinth
of game development as they go, they have been doing so in such
a hurry that they have not bothered carrying any thread along.
(O’Donnell, 2009, p. 12.)

The research community’s interest in games started to soar by the turn of

the millennium. Figure 1.5 presents statistics from the Scopus research
database when queried for articles having “video game”, “computer
game” or “digital game” in their title, abstract or keywords. In parts
per million (PPM), the figure shows each year’s result as a fraction of
the total number of articles published in that year. The reason for this
metric is that the total number of research publications also increased
across the same period. For example, compared to 2010, 2019 had 39%
more articles. Thus, the PPM metric shows the relative interest in game
research.
In total, there were more than 35,000 articles matching the search
terms. Only 3% of these were published before 2000. By that time, digital
games had grown to be an important force in the entertainment industry.
Furthermore, a generation that had grown up with such games was then
starting to get involved in research12 . The fraction of research involving
games has seen an almost linear growth. Since 2015, more than 1,000
PPM (or 0.1%) of all research articles address digital games. However,
of this research, only a tiny fraction addresses game development (see
figure 1.6).
With the establishment of the Game Studies Journal (Aarseth, 2001),
the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and the DiGRA
conference, the field of game studies was born in the first years of the
’00s. Analogous to media studies, the main perspective of game studies
has seen a focus on games and gameplay. In other words, with the
12 Myselfincluded therein. My first article on games was published in 2001 (Niklasson,
Engström and Johansson, 2001).

30
 1.4 A brief history of games and research into these

1200
PPM
1000

800

600

400

200

0
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020

Figure 1.5: Fraction of digital game articles in relation to total number

of articles in Scopus. The y-axis scale is parts per million (PPM).

spotlight on play and players, there has been very little focus on game
creation. Game design has been included to some extent, but research on
technical aspects of games has mainly been conducted in other
communities organised by bodies such as ACM or IEEE.
Over the past ten years, the area of game user experience (or game user
research) has received increased attention from both research and industry.
With a tradition of experimental user studies, this is a field with roots in
human-computer interaction and user experience. Game user experience
has managed to establish good integration between industry and academia
(Engström, 2019b). This may be because, when establishing their game
user experience labs, many large game companies recruited researchers.
These researchers maintained their networks in the academic community.
Such connections are lacking in many other fields where staff recruitment
has mainly focused on game developer skills. Many game companies do
not even require recruited staff members to have a bachelor’s degree.

1.4.4 Serious games, educational games and gamification

Since the very start, the academic community has had a strong interest in
using games for purposes other than amusement. Analogue games such
as chess and other board games have long been used as educational tools.

31
 Chapter 1. Introduction

An interesting, early 20th century example is The Landlord’s game. This

was created by Elizabeth Magie as a way of showing the shortcomings
of capitalism. The game was later “borrowed” by Charles Darrow who
managed to get it patented. Since then, under the name Monopoly, it
has been one of the most profitable board games ever. Interestingly, the
original principle Magie sought to show has survived. The end of any
Monopoly game is a really disappointing experience for everyone except
the richest.
Games and simulations share many traits. Training was an early use
of games and game technology. This includes different waves of virtual
reality research. Dating back to 1970, Simulation & Gaming (Sage,
2020c) is one of the oldest journals focusing on games.
When digital games started to appear, they were soon used for
educational purposes. One of the first such games was The Oregon Trail,
first released in 1971 (Djaouti et al., 2011). In the ’90s, the concepts of
edutainment, educational games and learning games received a lot of
attention. In the ’00s, this was replaced by a strong focus on serious
games. These have a wider scope. They include, for example, games
designed for advertisement and attitude change. In the ’10s, the focus
changed once again, this time towards gamification, i.e.: “The use of
game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding et al., 2011, p.
10). The differences between these concepts can be debated. For the
purpose of this book, it is not important to draw a big distinction
between educational games, serious games or gamification. They all
share the idea that these games (or game design elements) should be
used not only for amusement. The term serious games will be used as a
collective term that includes all approaches that use games or game
design for functional purposes13 .

There are several reasons for not combining research results from serious
games and simulations with those from regular games. Firstly, despite the
huge research interest, there are very few examples of successful serious

13 Functional games is a term that is used in, for example, China.

32
1.4 A brief history of games and research into these

500
Gamification [PPM]

400 Serious games

Edutainment, Educational games or Learning games
300 Game development

200

100

0
1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020

Figure 1.6: Fraction (in PPM) of articles in Scopus matching different

terms related to serious games and the term “game development”.

games that have survived once research funding has ended. Secondly, the
requirement that such games satisfy some goal in addition to attracting
player interest makes their development very different from that of regular
games. Finally, for the past 30 years, research has overwhelmingly
focused on the serious rather than the regular.
Figure 1.6 shows the fraction (as PPM) of all Scopus-indexed
research containing different terms related to serious games. Three
title-abstract-keyword searches were made. The first was for
“gamification”, the second was for “serious games” and the third was a
disjunction of terms related to learning games14 . As a comparison, a
search was made for “game development”. Note that this last search
overlaps with the other15 . From the figure, it can be concluded that game
development has always appeared less frequently than the other terms. In
relation to all the other terms, game development occurs approximately
an order of magnitude less frequently.

14 “edutainment”OR “educational game” OR “learning game”.

15 As
an example, a search for “game development” AND NOT “serious games” returns
15% fewer results.

33
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.4.5 A note with respect to KCC

It is interesting to note that game history can be said to have evolved
clockwise around the KCC (starting in the upper right corner). The first
digital games were created by applied mathematicians and scientists
(e.g. Alan Turing and Piet Hein16 ). These pioneering scientists saw the
potential of a recently invented machine, but the games they created were
only proof-of-principle prototypes and did not reach a large audience.
Engineers were needed to turn these early prototypes into useful
solutions that could reach the mass markets. This brings us to the lower,
right corner of KCC. In the early days of arcade games, development
was driven by engineers. Ralph H. Baer, who created the Magnavox
Odyssey17 , was a television engineer. Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari,
is an electrical engineer. In Japan, Tomohiro Nishikado, an engineer,
developed Space Invaders and Gunpei Yokoi, who had a degree in
electronics, developed the Game & Watch handheld consoles. The games
created by engineers were technically useful, but often lacked a cultural
grounding.
While the west’s game industry was deeply rooted in engineering
traditions, Japan’s was tightly bound to the manga and anime industry
(Izushi and Aoyama, 2006). This brought in influences from a design
perspective (the lower left part of KCC). Shigeru Miyamoto, who started
as an apprentice to Yokoi, entered the game industry with an exam in
industrial design. He also had a strong interest in manga and made use
of this perspective in creating games such as Donkey Kong and Super
Mario Brothers. Another well-known game developer with a mixed
background is Will Wright, the (leading) creator of Sim City and the Sims.
His background is architecture, mechanical engineering and robotics.
Although these ’80s and ’90s games had a clear grounding in popular
culture, they can be seen to lack deeper meaning and artistic depth.
Over the past 20 years, games that express more complex,

16 Although both of them were polymaths, their main academic contributions were in
scientific areas.
17 This is considered to be the first home video game console.

34
 1.5 A note on technology and tools

emotionally and artistically interesting experiences have become more

common. People with artistic intentions have started to use games to
express themselves (i.e. we have moved to the upper left corner of KCC).
One example is Jenova Chen, a Master of Fine Arts (University of
Southern California) who, for example18 , created the game Journey,
which could be regarded as a work of art (Rough, 2016). Jason Rohrer is
another example of a game developer who has developed games that may
qualify as art (Devine, 2017).

Oxman argues that science, engineering, design and art are the four
“modalities of human creativity” (Oxman, 2016). From the examples
above, it is clear that they are all present in game development. It is no
longer possible to reduce games to only one of these modalities. I would
argue that games have now reached a point where all four modalities are
relevant and that development approaches that do not use all of them will
fail to unleash any game’s full potential.

1.5 A note on technology and tools

The academic community can be said to have sat in the back seat and
let others do the driving. Nonetheless, hardware-related results have
been one important input from academia to the digital game revolution.
Hardware innovations have been embraced and used to create new forms
of gaming. The following are examples of innovations that have led to
new forms of digital games19 :
- 1950s – Programmable, digital computers made digital games
possible.
- 1970s – Integrated circuits led to a breakthrough for home consoles.

18 He also conducted research where he addressed the concept of flow in games (e.g.
Chen, 2007).
19 The years do not relate to first appearance, but to approximately when the innovations

had a major impact on games.

35
 Chapter 1. Introduction

- 1980s – Microcomputers led to a breakthrough for bedroom game

development.
- 1990s – Graphics cards led to a breakthrough for 3D games.
- 2000s – The internet led to a breakthrough for massive multiplayer
games.
- 2010s – The smartphone led to a breakthrough for mobile games.
- 2020s – Virtual reality (VR) devices may lead to a breakthrough
for VR gaming. . .

It is hard to argue that these inventions did not lead to major shifts in
the types of digital games people could, and wanted to, play. Academia
had a central role in the invention of the majority of these technologies.
Although the game industry has been good at utilising and fertilising new
technologies (as well as bringing them to a mass market), the role of
academia cannot be ignored here.

Technology is why digital games came into being. It has continued to play
a central role in the development of the field. Early studies highlighted
the choice and development of game engines as being challenging for
developers. For example, Tschang (2005) examines a case involving
legendary company id Software and observes:
However, while this solved the issue of building an engine from
scratch, it created problems with their level design, since each
time id Software modified the engine and provided a new “code
build” (i.e., a version of the code incorporating the recent changes
in the programming) to the developers of Elite Force, the latter’s
level designers had to alter all their levels to keep up with ‘changes
in the code and how it handled surfaces, lights and architecture’.
(Tschang, 2005, pp. 122-123.)

Since then, powerful game engines with high-level interfaces have

become available to anyone who wants to develop a game. Engines such
as Unity or Unreal provide powerful capabilities at a reasonable cost.
However, the general-purpose engine is not the only tool needed to
develop games. To deflect focus from the game engine, a colleague and I

36
1.5 A note on technology and tools

PRODUCT-FACING
TOOLS
Core engine components.
PIPELINE TOOLS To generate game binary.

GAME PRODUCTION USER-FACING

TOOLS TOOLS
NON-PIPELINE Content production.
TOOLS To draw, code, write etc.

Tools for creating tools.

Tolls for marketing, TOOL-FACING
planning etc. TOOLS
Integration tools.
Middleware.

Figure 1.7: A taxonomy of game production tools (from Toftedahl and

Engström, 2019).

(Toftedahl and Engström, 2019) propose a distinction between the

various tools used in the game production pipeline and present a
taxonomy of tools used in game production (figure 1.7). This
differentiates between: product-facing tools that ultimately produce the
game binaries; user-facing tools that are used by developers to produce
game content; and, tool-facing tools that integrate or extend other tools.
There are also tools used in game development that are not integrated in
the pipeline, but are used to support other functions such as business and
marketing.
The technical characteristics of the product-facing tools are still very
important to game companies. The core of a game engine performs
extremely advanced tasks. For example, it compiles all code and assets
into a binary that can be executed efficiently on target platforms. Some
game developers need to work close to this type of tool. However, the
majority work with high-level, user-facing tools. Having a user-facing
tool that integrates with the production pipeline and makes tasks easier
is important for most game developers. Whether or not this tool is an
integrated part of the game engine is less important. A too strong focus on

37
 Chapter 1. Introduction

general-purpose game engines may result in a misleading understanding

of the role of tools in game development.

38
 1.6 Limitations

1.6 Limitations
All material presented in this book has been published in English. The
perspective of said material is predominantly that of western research
and western game development. In a previous literature study involving
myself (Engström et al., 2018), 85% of the analysed articles studied
North American or European game development.
The regional dimension in game development cannot be ignored.
Several studies have shown great variations between countries (Cao and
Downing, 2008; Banks and Cunningham, 2016; Casper and Storz, 2017).
There is a difference between North America and Europe (Izushi and
Aoyama, 2006) in how games are created. The Japanese game industry’s
many unique characteristics (Ernkvist and Ström, 2018) strongly
differentiate it from western industries. Studies from Japan published in
Japanese are not easily accessible to western researchers. China has
grown to be the largest game market. It is also the largest country in
terms of game production. Other parts of the world such as South
America and South Korea have significant game production and gaming
communities. I have more than once found game development articles in
Portuguese that appear to contain interesting studies, but which cannot
be included owing to language barriers.
The implications of regional differences are often not highlighted in
game development studies. This book does not delve into them either.
Thus, it is important to remind the reader that there is a strong western
perspective here.

The research that is included was identified through searches in research

databases such as Scopus, SpringerLink and Google Scholar. Although
these cover a broad range of disciplines, they may be biased towards
certain fields. They may also contain texts that are typically not accepted
as original research by the community in question. The present book
includes journal articles, conference papers and book chapters. This
means that complete books (monographs) have not been included in the

39
 Chapter 1. Introduction

analysis20 . It also means that doctoral dissertations have not been

included. Some PhD students only publish their research as monograph
dissertations. However, the vast majority also publish their main results
via conferences and journals. In some academic communities,
monographs are used to publish original research that is not published
elsewhere. Thus, the exclusion of monographs is potentially a limitation.

One objection to having a very strong focus on the existing game industry
and existing games is that it risks perpetuating problematic structures.
A potential example is the existing representation of people who do not
identify as young, white, heterosexual males. Academia has a role to play
in questioning existing norms and finding new expressions. This is an
important role. However, a system has to be understood before changes
can be rationally proposed. It is very hard to improve something that is
not well understood. Game development is not well understood in the
academic community. Thus, this book deliberately focuses on studies of
development in the wild. Rather than questioning the norm, this often
focuses on it.

Another question that is commonly raised when discussing digital games

is that of gaming’s potentially negative consequences. These include the:
negative effects of consuming and enacting violent content; social and
medical problems excessive gaming can lead to; and, connections to
gambling and non-ethical business models. All these areas are well
covered in academic studies and it is important to address them.
Nonetheless, they are not very important given this book’s aim, context,
etc. For example, a text focused on creative writing would not be
expected to spend a lot of time analysing the: prevalence of
near-sightedness amongst librarians; working conditions in Kazakhstan’s
printing industry; or, copycat suicides linked to The Sorrows of Young
Werther. Excessive gaming can have negative consequences and games
can include morally questionable content. Game developers have a
20 The inclusion of game design books is an exception (see section 3.2.1).

40
1.6 Limitations

responsibility to avoid producing harmful products. This is a

responsibility that the game industry shares with many other industries,
not least the weapons industry.

Another limitation was my own understanding of the fields in question. It

is impossible for anybody to have a detailed understanding of all aspects
involved in game development. My academic background is mainly
technical. My understanding of art, social science and humanities is
primarily from observations and discussions with colleagues and friends
as well as from books and other media consumption. In some research, I
have noticed other authors’ lack of understanding of technical aspects.
For example, some authors treat complex technical challenges as if they
were simple tasks anyone could be asked to solve. I realise that my text
will contain the same sorts of weaknesses, but in relation to other areas.

This book’s characterisation of disciplines is only one of many possible

such characterisations. The placing of individual studies and individual
researchers in specific disciplines is schematic. It is not sure that all
authors highlighted in a certain area would agree that they belong to it.
Thus, I preemptively apologise for any “undesired labelling”.

Throughout this text, I refer to my own work and opinions using “I”,
“me” or “mine”. The use of the first person in academic texts varies
greatly between different paradigms. Adhering to a positivistic paradigm,
it may make sense to remove the author from a study and “focus on the
objective truth”. In other paradigms, it is important to acknowledge that
an author’s background affects the understanding of studied phenomena.
“Pretending” that an author is not part of the research would be senseless.
Thus, while some readers may perceive any use of “I” as sloppy, others
might object to the use of passive formulations. In themselves, such
differences in writing styles illustrate the great divide between research
paradigms.

41
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.7 Acknowledgments
A lot of people have contributed to the projects and articles on which
much of this book is based. I would like to thank the following colleagues
and co-authors for valuable contributions to my understanding of game
development:
- Anna-Sofia Alklind Taylor
- Erik Ambring
- Per Backlund
- Fernando Bevilacqua
- Jenny Brusk
- Carl-Johan Dahlin
- Patrik Erlandsson
- Marcus Hellkvist
- Jonas Hultén
- Mikael Johannesson
- Tobias Karlsson
- Shuichi Kurabayashi
- Mikael Lebram
- Björn Berg Marklund
- Lars Niklasson
- Linus Nordgren
- Erik Sjöstrand
- Yanhui Su
- Sanny Syberfeldt
- Marcus Toftedahl
- Arslan Tursic
- Thomas Westin
- Ulf Wilhelmsson
- Per Anders Östblad.

I would also like to express my thanks to: Jennifer R. Whitson for

an insightful and careful review of this book; Per Backlund, Tobias
Karlsson and Mattias Strand for valuable feedback at various stages of

42
1.7 Acknowledgments

the manuscript process; my proofreader for his assiduity; an anonymous

reviewer of a previous conference article who provided valuable pointers
to literature on game development in the game studies field; and, finally,
my family for their great support and patience.

43
 2. Software development

Arguably, digital game development is deeply rooted in the fields of

software development and computer science. As these have their origins
in computer engineering institutes, digital games share their heritage with
“traditional” software sciences and have followed similar development
paths. Early computer science institutions had a strong emphasis on
technological aspects. This was followed by a focus on organisational
aspects and, eventually, on human aspects of sociotechnical systems. The
latter includes a focus on man-machine interaction and user experience.
In recent decades, information technology has established a presence in
all facets of our society and is used by everyone – from toddlers to senior
citizens. This has many repercussions for development.

As will be apparent in this and later chapters, game development has

many elements that differentiate it from traditional software development.
These differences are so substantial that it can even be questioned whether
game development should be considered part of the software industry.
O’Donnell (2012) argues that it is not and highlights important differences
in, for example, the: role of the user/player; studio environment; and,
production of culture. These are valid arguments and should be borne in
mind when mentally approaching the studies in this chapter. However,
 Chapter 2. Software development

the production challenges addressed in this chapter are present in most

software and game development. So, even if the game industry is not a
software industry, the former inherits many of the latter’s challenges.

46
 2.1 Software engineering

2.1 Software engineering

When software development evolved in the ’50s and ’60s, the growing
complexities of new technologies and their use contexts created
challenges in the planning, management and execution of software
projects. To deal with this complexity, software engineering increasingly
assimilated influences from methods found in applied sciences,
mechanical and industrial engineering and management research
(Mahoney, 2004). Although many principles from these fields were
found to be highly applicable and useful in software development, there
were some fundamental mismatches between the theoretically correct
way of developing software and the hands-on development of
commercial software when dealing with real-world constraints. While
the academic world embraced the structured and formal approach to
software development, many practitioners in the field struggled to
combine structured development models (e.g. waterfall planning) with
the sometimes chaotic and entangled nature of customer requirements,
prototyping and feature creep.
The above mismatch led to practitioners creating their own
alternative, more flexible approaches to software development. Here the
agile manifesto (Agile Alliance, 2001) in particular constituted a
paradigm shift within the software development community. Said
manifesto presents four core values that constitute the ethos of flexible
development. They all echo strongly in the game development industry.
These values are:
- individuals and interactions over processes and tools;
- working software over comprehensive documentation;
- customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and,
- responding to change over following a plan.

Since 2001, the software research community has gradually adhered to the
practitioner guidelines established in the manifesto. Agile development is
now widely considered an integral part of software development practices.
The modern software engineering community is no longer looking for
answers in traditional physical engineering. Software engineering is now

47
 Chapter 2. Software development

a field in itself:
The nature of software itself thereby raises the question of how
much guidance one may expect from trying to emulate the
development patterns of those engineering disciplines. (Mahoney,
2004, p. 17.)

Here, it is important to mention that digital game developers were

perhaps particularly strongly affected by the mismatch between
structured software development and real-world constraints. Game
developers were early in experimenting with less structured means of
software development and were using agile approaches long before the
agile manifesto was formulated (Murphy-Hill, Zimmermann and
Nagappan, 2014). However, the agile manifesto popularised a unifying
term for these types of flexible development methods. As a result of this,
game development is nowadays seen as being inextricably linked with
agile development methods. Nonetheless, there are many indications that
the game industry’s interpretation of “agile” differs from that in other
software industries (Berg Marklund et al., 2019; McKenzie,
Morales Trujillo and Hoermann, 2019).

2.1.1 Research overview

One of the most ambitious research studies of game development and
software engineering is Murphy-Hill, Zimmermann and Nagappan
(2014). This study focuses on the differences between game
development and non-game development. To a large extent, it is based
on the experiences of Microsoft employees. It combines: a qualitative
interview part with experienced developers; and, a survey part that tested
the interview observations quantitatively on a large group of developers.
The participants in the survey were “Microsoft employees who just got
off public buses” (Murphy-Hill, Zimmermann and Nagappan, 2014, p.
8). The results of this study give a clear indication of differences
between game development and traditional software development. The
following observations from the interview part of the study were strongly
confirmed in the subsequent survey part:

48
2.1 Software engineering

• Game developers have less clear requirements than non-game

developers.
• Game developers tend to use what they perceive as an Agile
process more than non-game developers.
• Creativity is valued more in game development teams.
• The ability to communicate with non-engineers is valued more
on game development teams.
• Game development requires a more diverse team.
• People are more impressed by game developers’ work.
(Murphy-Hill, Zimmermann and Nagappan, 2014, p. 9.)

Software engineering research involving empirical data from game

companies is dominated by studies of development methods. There are
several studies of methods that emphasise agile approaches. There are
many observations that studios rarely follow proposed conventions (e.g.
Musil et al., 2010; McKenzie, Morales Trujillo and Hoermann, 2019;
Politowski et al., 2016). To some extent, the reasons for this are explored,
but it is also presented as something of an enigma:
What limits the findings of the survey is the lack of data on why
studios adapt or ignore agile processes. Exploring this in more
depth may help to explain why studios have an unrealistic view
of their agile adaptation but could also provide clues if and why
agile practices were purposely modified to better meet the needs
of the game development industry. (McKenzie, Morales Trujillo
and Hoermann, 2019, p. 190.)

In this community, there is a solid belief that development should rest on

structured and explicit methods. Many studies conclude that this is not
always the case in game companies. Often, the explanation is that this
is due to immaturity or lack of insight. However, informants frequently
report that there are reasons behind their approach:
We’ve got so many specialists on the team, so the kind of planning
that you usually do in Agile doesn’t work quite so well. . . You
know [specialists] are more concerned about the creative process
than an engineering process. (Murphy-Hill, Zimmermann and
Nagappan, 2014, p. 7.)

49
 Chapter 2. Software development

In a few cases, software engineering literature highlights that the lack of

structure can actually be a deliberate choice by the companies:
At the same time, it is possible that this less-structured approach
to game development might be, precisely, what fuels these firms to
be drivers of innovation. (Pereira and Bernardes, 2018, p. 4:12.)

In addition to its interest in methods, the software engineering

community also has a clear interest in testing (e.g. Kasurinen and
Smolander, 2014; Murphy-Hill, Zimmermann and Nagappan, 2014; Liu
et al., 2019). In this community, testing often focuses on functional
requirements (Bertolino, 2007) such as behaviour being logical/correct
and play being bug-free. This is frequently handled by automated tests.
Several studies conclude that such approaches are less common in game
development (e.g. Murphy-Hill, Zimmermann and Nagappan, 2014;
Pascarella et al., 2018). Non-functional requirements (e.g. player
experience) are more in focus in the user experience community, but they
are also addressed in software engineering studies.
Collaboration between disciplines is addressed in a case study at a
mid-sized North American game company (McDaniel, 2015; McDaniel
and Daer, 2016). These two articles focus on technical communication,
conflicts and constraints. Two aspects are highlighted as a source of
conflicts:
Much conflict has to do with technical limitations involved with
the game projects and the often chaotic circumstances in which
game design unfolds. (McDaniel, 2015, p. 5.)

As one potential explanation of the tension between disciplines,

McDaniel and Daer (2016) highlight the differences in expectations and
goals. Another source of conflict is where the development of tools
reduces the workload of one discipline at the expense of another.
The remaining software engineering studies of game development
have some focus on: tools (e.g. Kasurinen, Strandén and Smolander,
2013b); management (e.g. Pereira and Bernardes, 2018); and, business
aspects (e.g. Vanhala and Kasurinen, 2014). However, interest in those

50
 2.1 Software engineering

areas is marginal in comparison to the major focus on development

methods.

Research methods used in the software engineering community are

predominantly quantitative, but there are also many mixed-method
studies. Several studies use a grounded theory approach (e.g. Daneva,
2014; Kasurinen, 2016). The way empirical data are collected ranges
from single case studies and interviews to questionnaires. There are also
studies that mine open-source repositories (e.g. Pascarella et al., 2018).
Finally, there are surprisingly many postmortem studies (e.g. Washburn
et al., 2016; Lu, Peltonen and Nummenmaa, 2019) that analyse publicly
available, game project postmortems.
Europe is well represented in this field. In particular, Finland has a
large number of published studies. Jussi Kasurinen appears as an author
in the majority of the Finnish studies (e.g. Kasurinen, Palacin-Silva and
Vanhala, 2017; Kasurinen, Maglyas and Smolander, 2014; Kasurinen and
Smolander, 2014; Kasurinen, Strandén and Smolander, 2013a; Kasurinen,
Laine and Smolander, 2013).
Most software engineering research (in particular that from Finland)
focuses on mobile game development. Small development studios are
also well represented. AAA development has a weaker representation.

2.1.2 Recommended reading

This is a must-read for anyone interested in software engineering game
development research:
- Murphy-Hill, E. et al. (2014). “Cowboys, ankle sprains, and
keepers of quality: How is video game development different from
software development?” In: ICSE Conference Proceedings. ACM,
pp. 1–11. DOI: 10.1145/2568225.2568226.

For those who wish to continue reading about game development from a
software engineering perspective, I recommend the following articles:
- McDaniel, R. and A. Daer (2016). “Developer discourse:
Exploring technical communication practices within video game

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 Chapter 2. Software development

development”. In: Technical Communication Quarterly, 25 (3),

pp. 155–166. DOI: 10.1080/10572252.2016.1180430.
- Washburn, M. et al. (2016). “What went right and what went
wrong: An analysis of 155 postmortems from game development”.
In: ICSE Conference Proceedings. ACM, pp. 280–289. DOI:
10.1145/2889160.2889253.
- Kasurinen, J. et al. (2017). “What concerns game developers? A
study on game development processes, sustainability and metrics”.
In: WETSoM Workshop Proceedings. IEEE, pp. 15–21. DOI:
10.1109/WETSoM.2017.3.
- Koutonen, J. and M. Leppänen (2013). “How are agile methods
and practices deployed in video game development? A survey into
Finnish game studios”. In: XP Conference Proceedings. Springer,
pp. 135–149. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-38314-4_10.
- Wang, A. I. and N. Nordmark (2015). “Software architectures and
the creative processes in game development”. In: ICEC Conference
Proceedings. Springer, pp. 272–285. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-
24589-8_21.

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 2.2 Information systems

2.2 Information systems

Information systems (IS) development has clear overlaps with software
engineering. Both fields focus on technology and computers and how to
best approach the development of software systems. IS1 has a greater
focus on organisational aspects and is more closely akin to management
and business studies:
information systems deals with systems for delivering information
and communications services in an organization and the activities
and management of the information systems function in planning,
designing, developing, implementing, and operating the systems
and providing services. (Davis, 2000, p. 62)

When computerised transaction systems were originally introduced

in companies and organisations, they were operated by experts. When
they became increasingly common, more groups and employees with no
formal training as computer operators started to use them. This presented
a lot of challenges for the: developers of such systems; organisations that
deployed them; and, end users who had to operate them.
With its greater focus on organisational aspects and users, the IS field
has, compared to the software engineering field, a stronger tradition of
including research based on a constructivism paradigm. Nonetheless,
positivism is also represented in the IS community.

Information system experts focus on developing systems for a receiving

organisation. Depicted in 2.1, this situation is the norm for IS researchers.
The combination of skills needed to develop an information system is
captured in IS development methods. Iivari, Hirschheim and Klein (2004)
identify a corpus of IS development knowledge and suggest that an IS
expert should have the following competencies:
- IS development process knowledge. This covers tools, techniques,
methods and approaches used in systems development. It is

1 Different terms are used to characterise this field (e.g. management information
systems, information management or management of information systems).

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 Chapter 2. Software development

IS developer organisation User organisation

Technology IS application

IS developer User
IS development Domain
process Organisational

IS developer User

Figure 2.1: A typical IS development scenario.

considered to be a core competence for IS development experts.

- IS application knowledge. This covers an understanding of typical
IT applications and their use. It too is considered to be a core
competence for IS development experts.
- Application domain knowledge. This relates to the target domain
for the system and is mainly assumed to be a competence provided
by the target organisation.
- Technology knowledge. This covers knowledge of different types
of hardware and software such as computers and operating systems.
- Organisational knowledge. This covers social, organisational and
human elements as well as economic processes.

It is clear from the characterisation of this body of knowledge that there

is a strong focus on organisational aspects. The assumed receiver of an
information system is an organisation. This is rarely the case for games.
Figure 2.2 shows my understanding of how a typical game development
scenario interfaces with the concept of a corpus of IS development
knowledge. With games, the organisational aspect is not very central.
Instead, there is a close relationship between the developers and the users
(i.e. the players). Players do not use games for utilitarian purposes or as
part of their paid job. Their main aim is recreation. The development
team comprises not only IS developers, but also a number of other
professionals. This implies that the organisational dimension is mainly a
concern within the development team. While some team members may

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 2.2 Information systems

Game developer organisation

Technology

IS Dev. Process

Organisational
IS developer

Player
Producer

Experience

Audio Writing Player

Design Art

Figure 2.2: A typical game development scenario.

be focused on the IS development process and technological elements,

these may not be a relevant or important focus area for other members.

2.2.1 Research overview

The IS community focuses less on games than does the software
engineering community. However, via its focus on organisational
aspects, its perspective of game development is somewhat broader. The
analysis presented below covers research published in forums explicitly
focused on information systems, informatics and similar terms. Topics
covered in these studies range from development methods (e.g. Weerd,
Weerd and Brinkkemper, 2007; Stacey and Nandhakumar, 2008;
Amanatiadou and Weerd, 2009), documentation (e.g. Stacey and
Nandhakumar, 2009; Alves, Ramalho and Damasceno, 2007) and
management (e.g. Petrillo et al., 2009; Schmalz, Finn and Taylor, 2014)
to innovation (e.g. Freeman et al., 2019).
Most studies in the IS community acknowledge differences between
game development and traditional information system development. The

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solution proposed for handling these differences is to always adopt the

approaches and techniques available in the targeted community:
“Careful risk management is still required to ensure projects meet their
success targets” (Schmalz, Finn and Taylor, 2014, p. 4334). This usually
entails introducing some relaxation of structured methods and inviting
“unstructured” professionals from other domains:
A particular problem in game development is the integration of
disciplines from non-engineering domains like graphic design,
since their unstructured, opportunistic workflow differs
considerably from the conservative approaches in engineering.
(Musil et al., 2010, p. 88.)

In an analysis of postmortems, Petrillo et al. (2009) conclude that all

problems found in the traditional software industry can also be found in
the game industry. However, they do not demonstrate the reverse, i.e. that
all problems in game development can be found in software development.

With case studies and interviews dominating, methods used in IS

research resemble those used in software engineering. There are slightly
more qualitative studies in the IS community. Regional representation is
relatively balanced between Asia, Europe and America. Singapore is
represented via several studies by Patrick Stacey and Joe Nandhakumar.
Studies of mobile game development and smaller, independent studios
dominate IS research (as was also the case in software engineering).

2.2.2 Recommended reading

This is a must-read for anyone interested in IS game development
research:
- Stacey, P. and J. Nandhakumar (2009). “A temporal perspective
of the computer game development process”. In: Information
Systems Journal, 19 (5), pp. 479–497. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-
2575.2007.00273.x.

For those who wish to continue reading about game development from

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2.2 Information systems

an IS perspective, I recommend the following articles:

- Schmalz, M. et al. (2014). “Risk management in video game
development projects”. In: HICSS Conference Proceedings,
pp. 4325–4334. DOI: 10.1109/HICSS.2014.534.
- Weerd, I. van de et al. (2007). “Developing a reference method
for game production by method comparison”. In: ME Conference
Proceedings. Springer, pp. 313–327. DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-
73947-2_24.
- Stacey, P. and J. Nandhakumar (2008). “Opening up to agile
games development”. In: Communications of the ACM, 51 (12),
pp. 143–146. DOI: 10.1145/1409360.1409387.
- Petrillo, F. et al. (2009). “What went wrong? A survey of problems
in game development”. In: Computers in Entertainment, 7 (1),
DOI : 10.1145/1486508.1486521.

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2.3 User experience

While software engineering and information systems focus on
technology and organisation, the user experience area has a clear focus
on the individual. Said focus has its roots in design studies and the
design of non-digital interaction. When digital interfaces started to be
common, theories and methods from cognitive science, design and
ergonomics were applied to this new field. The introduction of graphical
user interfaces to software systems in the late ’70s was an important
starting point for human-oriented computing. ACM founded a Special
Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) in 1982.
For many years, the term human-computer-interaction (HCI)
dominated. In this field, there was a strong focus on utilitarian software
and how to create efficient user interfaces, i.e. usability. When the World
Wide Web was growing in the ’90s, this received a lot of attention from
the HCI community. Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and
how to create systems that supported work collaborations between
geographically separated humans became a focus area. Very little
attention was paid to the play aspects of computing (utility remained the
focus).
From the early days of HCI, the focus on designing interfaces and
evaluating them has always been split.
As regards evaluating, the community has been strongly influenced
by quantitative, formative evaluation methodologies such as
laboratory-based experiments using metrics that are believed to give
robust, objective and reliable results. These led to the rigorous (and slow)
evaluation of designs. Designing was also guided by rigorous
methodologies strongly influenced by engineering and ergonomics
traditions. Consequently, the design process became quite rigid and the
resulting interfaces were conservative. This primarily influenced
utilitarian software.
With a shift away from utilitarian aspects towards the human
experience, the focus on user experience started to grow by the end of
the ’90s (Pagulayan et al., 2018a).
User experience can be defined as: “A person’s perceptions and

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2.3 User experience

responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system
or service” (Law et al., 2009, p. 727). This is a shift of focus from
utilitarian aspects towards the human experience. This led to an awareness
that “design-as-engineering” (Wright, Blythe and McCarthy, 2005, p.
1) had to change. In other words, design should not be seen purely as
an engineering exercise; perspectives from other disciplines (e.g. arts
and humanities) were also needed. This philosophy matched the focus
in game development well. Game companies that had always created
interfaces for non-utilitarian purposes did not know or care much about
HCI principles (Jørgensen, 2004). When the internet reached homes,
the game industry started to develop systems that supported massive
multiplayer games, something that can be characterised as computer
supported cooperative play (Wadley et al., 2003).
These developments were made without interest in CSCW results.
Eventually, the HCI community started to acknowledge the achievements
of game developers (Dyck et al., 2003; Jørgensen, 2004). Over the past
15 years, user experience research has become the area that is probably
best integrated with game development. Game user experience (GUX)
has evolved as a subfield with its own identity2 . This integration is visible
in, for example, the number of GUX researchers employed by game
companies.
A possible explanation to the integration of researchers in GUX
departments is that game evaluation can, and often should, be externalised
from production. This has paved the way for specialised professionals to
enter game companies (frequently as consultants). These GUX specialists
do not have to be integrated into the main development team. They can
operate relatively independently with tight connections to only a few
designers and producers. This model has contributed to a successful
integration of GUX researchers into game companies.

2 The terms GUX and Game User Research (GUR) are used almost interchangeably.
Based on the fundamental differences between playing a game and using utilitarian
software, there have also been attempts to promote the term Player Experience (PX)
(Nacke and Drachen, 2011). Nonetheless, the term PX appears not to be widespread.
GUX is used throughout this book.

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 Chapter 2. Software development

As a consequence, there are research publications (see, for example,

Azadvar and Canossa, 2018) where all authors are affiliated to a game
company. This is rarely seen in other areas.

It should be noted that testing in game production is split between

software testing, quality assurance (QA) testing and GUX. Software
testing is primarily the concern of programmers and relates to aspects
such as: unit, system and integration testing; compatibility testing;
performance analysis; and, profiling, etc. QA can be said to be between
software testing and GUX:
[QA] is essentially functional testing rather than usability or
experiential testing. The QA team are keen gamers with a good
understanding of the market and what to expect from a high
quality game. (McAllister and White, 2015, p. 15.)

Compared to the research focus on GUX, that on QA is minimal. The

only focused study, in my material, is one by Bulut (2015). This presents
a politico-economic analysis of QA game workers. QA is commonly
mentioned as an important activity in many articles, but very few details
are given. There are no sharp boundaries between the different types of
game testing and, in smaller studios, there is certainly an overlap between
QA and GUX.

Another activity related to user experience and testing is game analytics.

One part of game analytics is targeted at business functions and is used
to support business intelligence. Another part of game analytics is used
to support design intelligence:
Business intelligence, as the name suggests, is the practice of
using customer data to make business decisions that, typically,
are focused on optimizing revenue. The data may be used to
understand what happened in the past (e.g., daily average users),
the present (e.g., real-time usage and purchase data), or the future
(e.g., predicting how a new product will sell). Design intelligence,
on the other hand, is the use of data to optimize the experience of

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 2.3 User experience

a product or service while it is in development. (Pagulayan et al.,

2018a, p. 320.)

Although design intelligence is that part of analytics most closely linked

to GUX, design and business intelligence are related because there are
clear ties between business and design decisions. Analytics can also be
used to support QA aspects. As illustrated in figure 1.2, analytics falls
between software development, management and publishing.
The distinguished scholar Anders Drachen has contributed to both
GUX and game analytics. For example, he is a co-editor of one of the
first books addressing GUX (Drachen, Mirza-Babaei and Nacke, 2018)
as well as of a book addressing game analytics (El-Nasr, Drachen and
Canossa, 2016). When discussing the dual role of analytics, Drachen
(2015) distinguishes between players and customers. This provides an
intuitive embodiment of the differences between the design and business
perspectives.

2.3.1 Research overview

AAA game companies are strongly represented in GUX research. This
is apparent in, for example, the above-mentioned book by Drachen,
Mirza-Babaei and Nacke (2018). The book has contributions from several
leading AAA companies such as Electronic Arts (e.g. Zammitto, 2018)
and Sony (e.g. Sangin, 2018). This reflects a close collaboration between
academia and industry in the GUX field, something missing in most other
areas related to game development. GUX practice at AAA companies is
communicated quite openly (by the practitioners themselves) in research
forums.

A deep insight into industrial GUX practice at a large AAA company is

presented by Pagulayan et al. (2018a). They report experiences from their
GUX practice at Microsoft Studios. Here, they served as a centralised
unit that was not directly involved in design. They summarise their role
as follows:
At a very general level, the role of a games researcher should be to

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provide an unbiased feedback loop to game designers. (Pagulayan

et al., 2018a, p. 306.)
Pagulayan et al. (2018a) highlight how important it is for the GUX
team to keep a balance between independence and integration with the
development team. The authors stress the value of being located in a
centralised unit that supports many development teams. This is said to:
. . . help researchers resist the groupthink that often happens when
all the game development team members are completely immersed
in game development on a single title. (Pagulayan et al., 2018a, p.
307.)
Such separation may not be possible in small organisations, but the need
for GUX professionals to stay emotionally detached from development
may still be important. GUX practices at small studios are addressed
in several studies (e.g. Moosajee and Mirza-Babaei, 2016; Dorell and
Berg Marklund, 2018). Moosajee and Mirza-Babaei (2016) present a
study focusing on first time user experience in three different independent
games. One of their conclusions is that “The [GUX] approach needs to
fit within an indie timeline, budget, resources, and tools” (Moosajee and
Mirza-Babaei, 2016, p. 3164).
Despite the tight integration between game development and GUX
research, there is still a lot of research that has little or no industrial
connection. This gap is acknowledged in a study by McAllister and
White (2015):
One reason for the lack of tailored techniques which could be
applicable to all stages of game development is that the game
development process itself is not known in detail to the HCI
community. (McAllister and White, 2015, p. 14.)
As mentioned above, the user experience community has a dual tradition
of both designing interaction and evaluating existing solutions. GUX
research is heavily dominated by the latter. Very few studies report on
how, for example, the interaction design is created in game production.
Most studies focus on user tests and analyses of gameplay. A separation
between developers and GUX personnel is common in the industry.

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2.3 User experience

Zammitto (2018) presents three organisational models for GUX in

companies, namely, decentralised, centralised and hybrid. In a centralised
model, GUX personnel form a unit of their own (similar to a consultancy)
and serve several development teams. In a decentralised model, the GUX
personnel are typically part of a development team. Each model has its
strengths and weaknesses, but the decentralised model has the strongest
potential for involving GUX in development and design. It is interesting
to note that the UX summit at the Game Developers Conference (see
section 7.1) includes both UX design and evaluation as topics of interest.
The GUX research community does not appear to have the same dual
focus.
One aspect of GUX testing is the need to identify and reach a target
group. Traditionally, with developers creating games for themselves, this
has not been a major concern in the game industry. However, as the
market and types of games have expanded, this has changed:
Now with a broader market and games that are particularly
intended to be played by less experienced players, the distance
between the developers and market means that fewer assumptions
can be made and more attention has to be paid to testing.
(McAllister and White, 2015, p. 25.)

This touches on: diversity and representation in the development team;

and, game accessibility. Even if GUX testing can support an
understanding of different target groups, representation in the
development team would enhance inclusion. Game accessibility is an
area that has close links to GUX and interaction design (Westin, Brusk
and Engström, 2020).
The use of analytics in GUX is reported in several studies. There
are studies (e.g. Makarovych et al., 2018; Hullett et al., 2012) where
analytics is used to analyse player behaviour in specific games. Hullett
et al. (2012) show how analyses of player data revealed that many game
features in Project Gotham Racing 4 were often not used. This had
repercussions for future projects:
From the patterns in the data we made recommendations for future

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development. Many rarely utilized options could be removed with

no negative impact on players. (Hullett et al., 2012, p. 96.)

Different genres (e.g. single player vs. multiplayer) pose different

challenges. Drachen, Canossa and Sørensen (2013) note that persistent
massive multiplayer games are different in that:
A substantial focus is on the application of gameplay metrics
analysis and synthesis to tune game design on a running basis. . .
(Drachen, Canossa and Sørensen, 2013, p. 316.)

The continuous development of many games makes analytics an

important part of the feedback loop from players to both designers and
GUX researchers. The quantitative metrics from analytics complement
other, qualitative methods used in GUX.
A few articles in the GUX field focus not on players and games, but
on developers and the tools they use to design games and to collaborate
(e.g. Freeman et al., 2020; Nelson and Mateas, 2009). In general, there is
comparatively little research involving studies of tools in game production
(Toftedahl and Engström, 2019). User experience and usability aspects
of such tools are no exceptions here.

Case studies dominate the methods used in GUX research. Without

adopting any explicit method, many articles detail researchers’ practice.
To some extent, these could be regarded as autoethnographic. The
analytics studies are dominated by quantitative single-case studies.
Western game development is well represented in GUX research. North
American companies preponderate.

2.3.2 Recommended reading

This is a must-read for anyone interested in GUX research:
- Pagulayan, R. J. et al. (2018a). “Applied user research in games”.
In: The Wiley Handbook of Human Computer Interaction, Volume
1. Ed. by K. L. Norman and J. Kirakowski. John Wiley & Sons,
pp. 299–346. DOI: 10.1002/9781118976005.ch16.

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2.3 User experience

For those who wish to continue reading about game development from a
user experience perspective, I recommend the following articles:
- Zammitto, V. (2018). “Games user research as part of the
development process in the game industry: Challenges and best
practices”. In: Games User Research. Ed. by A. Drachen et al.
Oxford University Press, pp. 15–30. DOI :
10.1093/oso/9780198794844.003.0002.
- McAllister, G. and G. R. White (2015). “Video game development
and user experience”. In: Game User Experience Evaluation.
Ed. by R. Bernhaupt. Springer, pp. 11–35. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-
319-15985-0_2.
- Drachen, A. et al. (2013). “Gameplay metrics in game user
research: Examples from the trenches”. In: Game Analytics.
Ed. by M. S. El-Nasr et al. Springer, pp. 285–319. DOI:
10.1007/978-1-4471-4769-5_14.
- Dorell, J. and B. Berg Marklund (2018). “Starting from scratch:
Pragmatic and scalable guidelines to impactful games user
research”. In: Games User Research. Ed. by A. Drachen et al.
Oxford University Press, pp. 431–452. DOI :
10.1093/oso/9780198794844.003.0025.
- Hullett, K. et al. (2012). “Empirical analysis of user data in game
software development: The story of Project Gotham Racing 4”. In:
ESEM Conference Proceedings. ACM, pp. 89–98. DOI: 10.1145/
2372251.2372265.
- Drachen, A. (2015). “Behavioral telemetry in games user research”.
In: Game User Experience Evaluation. Ed. by R. Bernhaupt.
Springer, pp. 135–165. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-15985-0_7.

The anthology presented by Drachen, Mirza-Babaei and Nacke (2018)

contains many contributions from researchers associated with large game
companies. This is a good starting point for studies of GUX:
- Drachen, A. et al. (2018). Games User Research. Oxford
University Press. ISBN : 978-0-19-879484-4. DOI :
10.1093/oso/9780198794844.001.0001.

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2.4 Other software areas related to games

In addition to the areas highlighted in previous sections, there are many
more computer science and informatics specialisations relevant to game
development. Said specialisations cover game aspects such as artificial
intelligence, computer architecture, databases, networking, programming
languages, open-source software and computer graphics. These fields
rarely acknowledge the particular game development focus prevalent in
industry.

2.4.1 Artificial intelligence

The game industry is highly interested in artificial intelligence (AI) and
the AI community has a strong interest in games. Thus, it is surprising
that there is so little research looking at AI from a game development
perspective. Initially focused on gameplay elements, game AI has grown
to play a role in many aspects of game production. Riedl and Zook (2013)
identify three roles for Game AI:
- AI as actor. This can, for example, be to create non-player character
(NPC) behaviour.
- AI as designer. This can, for example, be to generate game levels
procedurally.
- AI as producer. This can, for example, be to support community
management and to detect abusive behaviour.

For a long time, game AI was considered to be of little interest to AI

research:
AI academics and game engineers once found themselves
separated by a sophistication gap: high-potential academic
techniques on one side, and scripting (and other scalable, practical
engineering techniques) on the other. (Kolen et al., 2018, p.
7680.)

This statement was made in a recent article by representatives from the

central AI team at Electronic Arts. Arguing that the gap is shrinking, they
highlight procedural content generation, player prediction and decision

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 2.4 Other software areas related to games

support for development planning. Hence, AI in game companies is

not limited to AI as actor aspects and it is also not only a concern for
programmers: “Consequently artists, engineers, marketers, scientists, and
management deal with a wide range of AI problems” (Kolen et al., 2018,
p. 7681).
The relevance of AI to games is undoubtedly high. There is a clear
lack of studies that approach applications of AI in a development context.

2.4.2 Computer graphics

Computer graphics is another software area that has been strongly
associated with games. It was also one of the first academic communities
to show an interest in applied game development (Rhyne, 2000). As with
AI research, there are very few articles studying computer graphics in a
game development context. Most often, the only requirement extracted
from game production is the need to render graphics in real time (e.g. at
60 frames per second). Based on my literature searches, a recent article
by Statham (2020) is one of the few exceptions to this. Statham’s study
presents how a specific modelling technique has been adopted in game
production. Production time is highlighted as an important aspect that
has to be borne in mind.

2.4.3 Hardware
As stated in the introduction, hardware has played a central role in digital
game development. For most game studios, hardware development is
outside their control. The big console developers Sony, Nintendo and
Microsoft are exceptions in that they control both software and hardware
for their consoles. There is surprisingly little literature studying the
processes behind the development of console hardware and the very
many accessories that have been produced in the past. The latter are
particularly interesting because they are often tightly linked to game
design. Examples of such accessories are the: NES Duck hunt Zapper;
Donkey Konga controller; Guitar Hero controllers; Wii Balance Board;
GameTrak; Eye Toy camera; Buzz! buzzers; and, Xbox Kinect. The
lifetime of most of these accessories is notably short (peripherals come

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and go). It is hard to say if this is as per the companies’ business plans
or if there is a fundamental challenge in trying to create sustainable
variations in game controllers. There are also no studies on how game
developers are involved in the planning and development of peripherals.
The possibility of creating unique interfaces for a game must have major
implications in the game design processes.
Another dimension of hardware is the technical characteristics of
the computers used to execute games. Developers have always spent a
lot of energy optimising games to deliver as much as possible from the
limited physical capacity of the hardware. To do this, they need to have a
detailed understanding of all technical components. Although there are
studies addressing this aspect of game development (e.g. Russel et al.,
2011), these technical characteristics are mostly studied in abstract terms
without specific application areas in focus.

2.4.4 Internationalisation and localisation

Internationalisation and localisation is the process of making a product
accessible outside a domestic market. Localisation is making a product
linguistically and culturally appropriate for a specific market and
internationalisation is preparing a product so that localisation support
can be provided. Both these activities are relevant for most software.
However, games are very often rich with culturally dependent content
that requires extensive adaptation. Graphical representation, game
design, regulations and available technical infrastructure may all have to
be addressed.

Internationalisation and localisation has received some interest in a

gaming context. Based on a case study and previously suggested
methods, Weerd, Weerd and Brinkkemper (2007) highlight localisation
as an important step in their proposed “super-method” for game
development. They note that:
There exist quite some differences in elements of the game
production domain between the various sources. For example, the

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 2.4 Other software areas related to games

importance of localization of a game was stressed in some

theories, while the localization process was completely omitted in
others. (Weerd, Weerd and Brinkkemper, 2007, p. 324.)

Using a number of case studies, Toftedahl, Backlund and Engström (2018)

analyse game localisation from an indie game developer perspective.
Recent developments have made self-publishing on a global market
possible. Although this enables small independent studios to reach a
large audience, it also presents them with the challenge of handling the
localisation process.

2.4.5 Recommended reading

Amongst the articles highlighted in this section, this is a must-read:
- Kolen, J. F. et al. (2018). “Horizontal scaling with a framework
for providing AI solutions within a game company”. In: IAAI
Conference Proceedings. AAAI.

The following articles are also recommended:

- Russel, G. et al. (2011). “The impact of diverse memory
architectures on multicore consumer software: An industrial
perspective from the video games domain”. In: MSPC Conference
Proceedings, pp. 37–42. DOI: 10.1145/1988915.1988925.
- Statham, N. (2020). “Use of photogrammetry in video games: A
historical overview”. In: Games and Culture, 15 (3), pp. 289–307.
DOI : 10.1177/1555412018786415.

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2.5 Forums for game research in software areas

A number of journals and conferences in the software field publish
research on game development. This section highlights those that have
featured most frequently in the reviews carried out for this book.
Software development communities have a strong tradition of
publishing research in conference proceedings. In most other disciplines
in this book, journals have a much stronger position. Of the journals that
have a software development focus, only a few target games. In my
materials, Computers in Entertainment (ACM, 2020) is the most
frequently cited of these journals. However, it came to an end in 2018.
The similarly named Entertainment Computing is still published. It
targets:
. . . innovative research ideas, emerging technologies, empirical
investigations, state-of-the-art methods and tools in all aspects of
digital entertainment, new media, entertainment computing,
gaming, robotics, toys and applications among researchers,
engineers, social scientists, artists and practitioners. (Elsevier,
2020.)

This reflects the broad scope of the journal, something it shares with many
journals and conferences focused on games. Consequently, assigning
them to a single discipline is hard. Nonetheless, the use of the word
computing in the name is an indication of a software focus. Similarly, a
focus on game technology would seem explicit in International Journal
of Computer Games Technology (Hindawi, 2020). However, the articles
published in this journal seem to have a somewhat broader scope and
include studies with little or no focus on technology. The final journal
highlighted in this section is The Computer Games Journal (Springer,
2020), which: “aims to encourage and promote research into games
development and the games industry as a whole.” (Springer, 2020) This
journal is unique in its explicit focus on game development and the
ambition that its research should be relevant to practitioners.

There are numerous conferences in the software field that include papers

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2.5 Forums for game research in software areas

with content related to game development. However, most of these do

not have an explicit focus on games. In the IS field, for example, there
have been many papers published in the Hawaii International
Conference on System Sciences. The International Conference on
Software Engineering and the International Requirements Engineering
Conference are other examples of forums that have received many papers
focused on games. Finland’s MindTrek Academic Conference is an
interesting regional conference that has showcased much game-oriented
research.
There are also some explicit game conferences that have a strong
software development focus. The broadest of these is Foundations of
Digital Games (FDG). This has its roots in Microsoft but, since 2009,
it has been managed by a non-profit organisation. FDG proceedings
are published by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). The
IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) is another broad conference with a
clear technical focus. This has its origins in an AI community, but has
widened its scope over the past few years. In addition to these broad game
conferences, there are also those that focus on specific aspects. Examples
include Computer-Human Interaction Play (CHI Play), ACM SIGGRAPH
Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D) and Artificial
Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE).

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 3. Game studies

The game studies community was established in the early ’00s and is
strongly influenced by media studies. The main focus has been on studies
of games, players and playing as a social activity. Although some scholars
argue that game studies should embrace all aspects of digital games, this
was not taken as law when the field was established. In the first issue
of the Game Studies journal, Espen Aarseth stated: “We all enter this
field from somewhere else, from anthropology, sociology, narratology,
semiotics, film studies, etc.” (Aarseth, 2001). The examples he gave do
not include any fields related to mathematics, engineering or computer
science. It is clear that, at that time, game studies did not embrace the full
KCC (figure 1.1). This is perfectly acceptable. Academic discussions can
be very shallow if participants from all disciplines follow them. However,
it must not be believed that game studies is the only academic community
relevant to games.
Most research in the game studies community is devoted to analyses
of games, players and the surrounding culture (figure 3.1). Analysing
the motivations of, and social interactions between, players in massive
multiplayer online games is an example. The mission statement of the
Game Studies journal reveals one of the community’s central focuses:
“Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects
 Chapter 3. Game studies

Game Culture

Designer Player

Figure 3.1: The focus points in the game studies community.

Development is mainly studied as design. The emphasis is on studies of
games, players and the surrounding culture.

of computer games” (gamestudies.org, 2020). Clearly, this does not

emphasise game development. The development process behind studied
games has received very little attention in the wider context of game
research (Martin, 2018). There has been some interest in game design as
an elevated activity, but very few studies include the full complexity of
game production. In the early years of game studies, Mateas and Stern
(2005) argued the importance of applied game design, but this has not
greatly influenced the community.
The reason for the game studies community’s lack of interest in game
development may possibly be found in the traditions of the neighbouring
fields of literature studies and film studies. In literature, there has been a
strong trend of ignoring author ambitions and focusing on the text and
readers’ interpretations. Following a text by Barthes (1977), this school
of thought has been referred to as “the death of the author”. It is argued
that a focus on the author (who is not part of the narrated universe) clouds
analysis of the experience and understanding of characters and story:
To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish
it with a final signified, to close the writing. (Barthes, 1977, p.
147.)

This perspective of the relationship between the creator and the created

74
piece can easily be applied to all creative work. It is easy to see why it
has been applied to games. However, for this book’s purposes, it is a very
fruitless perspective. Fortunately, there are game studies that go against
Barthes’ view:
Bourdieu’s reference to field, by which he meant the conditions
under which an individual produces a text, is particularly important
to digital games. These conditions inform and influence how
attitudes are incorporated in texts. Solely studying the moral
gameplay without including the social and historical forces that
inform the design (context of design) and the perceptions of those
who create the texts (designers’ perceptions) misses the cruciality
of why moral gameplay contains those choices. (Smale, Kors and
Sandovar, 2019, pp. 391-392.)

It is interesting to note that, in this case too, argument is based on text

theories. This perspective greatly influences the game studies community.
The strong focus on the designer may very well be rooted in this strong
author-text perspective.
Although mainstream game studies have not concerned themselves
with game development, there are some interesting sideline exceptions.
In the remainder of this chapter, areas where scholars have studied game
development practice are highlighted. The first section presents studies
that address the development process as a unified activity. “Production
studies” or “studio studies” are terms used in many of these works. The
second section highlights studies that focus specifically on game design
and ideation. Largely because these studies isolate ideation from the other
parts of development, they are not included under production studies.
The final section presents studies focusing on other specific dimensions
of game development.

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 Chapter 3. Game studies

3.1 Game production studies

Game production studies have their roots in production studies in other
media formats such as television and film. One focus of such studies is
understanding how culture is created under the constraints imposed by
the system in which it is produced (Mayer, Banks and Caldwell, 2009).
In gaining this understanding, a social science and humanities tradition
(which highlights collection of data from practice) is adopted:
Production studies gather empirical data about production: the
complexity of routines and rituals, the routines of seemingly
complex processes, the economic and political forces that shape
roles, technologies, and the distribution of resources according to
cultural and demographic differences. (Mayer, Banks and
Caldwell, 2009, p. 4.)

Creativity has traditionally been studied as an individual cognitive

process or, focused on creative regions (e.g. Silicon Valley), as a societal
phenomenon. As the name intimates, studio studies focuses on the
creative studio. This field is in its making and there are very few studies
that use the term. A search in Scopus gave 17 hits, most of them from
the last decade. Farias and Wilkie (2016b) present an anthology focusing
on studio studies and, in their introduction, present something which
could be seen as a programme statement for this new field:
With Studio Studies, our purpose, then, is to change the very
register through which creativity is understood by bringing into
focus creation processes understood as processes of both inventing
and making cultural artefacts. (Farias and Wilkie, 2016a, p. 4.)

The emphasis on the production process is something that is traditionally

missing in the game studies community. In research focused on games
as software, the invention process is traditionally missing. This book
advocates a philosophy that can be said to have a multifocus which
includes production and invention. I hope that such an approach will
attract more interest in the years to come.

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 3.1 Game production studies

3.1.1 Research overview

In the early 2000s, at an Australian PC game developer, John A.L. Banks
conducted one of the first ethnographic game production studies (Banks,
2005). This focused on player cocreation and how player participation in
development impacted on the development process.
Game studies scholar Casey O’Donnell has made several important
contributions to production studies. His research is based on
ethnographic studies of game development in the USA and India.
Besides publishing several articles, he also authored the book
Developer’s Dilemma (O’Donnell, 2014). O’Donnell has a deep
understanding of game production and highlights the importance of the
tools used to create games. This is done with a level of detail and insight
rarely seen in other studies:
The 3D models, created with 3D Studio Max (or just ‘Max’), were
exported using the proprietary set of software tools, often called a
‘tool-chain’ by game developers. These tools, known as Alchemy,
performed customizations and assorted automations to each model
being exported. (O’Donnell, 2011, p. 279.)

The role of tools in game production has been highlighted in a few other
studies (e.g. Consalvo and Paul, 2018; Whitson, 2018; Toftedahl and
Engström, 2019).
A few game focused articles (e.g. Smale, Kors and Sandovar, 2019;
Tyni, 2020; Roessel and Katzenbach, 2020 are explicitly framed as
production studies. For example, via an interview with 20 German
developers, Roessel and Katzenbach (2020) analyse how game
developers handle the balance between creating original ideas and
copying existing games. The authors included designers, artists,
programmers and producers in the interviews. Their study shows that
there is strong acceptance of using existing games as an inspiration, but
that slight adjustments are needed before use is possible. Developers are
generally not in favour of stricter copyright protection rules for games.

In the game studies community, Jennifer R Whitson is the scholar who

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 Chapter 3. Game studies

has most clearly highlighted the importance of studio studies (Whitson,

2020; Whitson, 2019; Whitson, 2018). Collaterally, she analyses the role
tools play in the collaboration between different disciplines (Whitson,
2018). This is done in a case study where ten student interns at a large
game company set out to build a game in ten weeks. Whitson concludes
that:
Rather than a mutely obedient tool, software exerts agency of its
own and is seen to exhibit magical, even agential properties during
game development. (Whitson, 2018, p. 2328.)

Based on this case study Whitson analyses the role studio studies plays
for game scholars (Whitson, 2020). She explicitly acknowledges the
challenges that scholars who have not developed games themselves face
when having to act in a context where students are educated to become
developers:
We enter the field by writing about games and gamers, but as a
condition of employment, we are increasingly asked to become
‘theorist-practitioners’ and teach others to make games. (Whitson,
2020, p. 268.)

Given the large number of game development programmes offered by

universities (mainly in the west), this is an important observation. Many
game scholars have a background in game analysis, but this does not
automatically transfer to an understanding of how to create games.
In another study, Whitson, Simon and Parker (2018) present the
results of a large interview study with indie developers. The authors
highlight that these developers’ motivations differ from those of other
software start-ups. Predominantly, indies do not have the goal of growing
in size and profitability, but of continuing to develop games. However, to
do this they need to spend time on activities related to planning, finance,
publishing and community support. The authors refer to this as not
development work. Whitson, Simon and Parker (2018) argue that indie
publishers need to include the producer role in their teams and that it is
not sufficient to simply expect developers to turn into entrepreneurs:

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3.1 Game production studies

The issue with replacing the ‘missing producer’ with the ‘indie
entrepreneur’ is that entrepreneurship frameworks are too narrowly
equated to marketing and biz dev, and often exist in tension with
developers’ own goals and conceptions of ‘good work’. In other
words, in embracing cultural entrepreneurship, developers must
become the very things they rejected in the mainstream industry.
(Whitson, Simon and Parker, 2018, p. 9.)

Another recent studio study is Jørgensen (2019), which studies the

operation of a Norwegian start-up. This studio had little experience of
game development and was funded via public funds. It was concluded
that production partly failed because: “Challenges were related to lack of
experience, and difficulties managing time and resources” (Jørgensen,
2019, p. 675).
A final example of an explicit studio study is Ash (2016), which
presents an ethnographic study of a British console and PC game
developer. The study uses the theoretical concepts of spheres and
atmospheres. It identifies servers, headphones and screens as objects that
constitute spheres:
Objects that appear on screens or sounds pumped through
headphones can contribute to broader atmospheres in ways that
cut across distinctions between the digital space of the game or
software or screen and the physical space of the studio in which
these objects are located. (Ash, 2016, p. 102.)

These observations may appear philosophical and hard to relate to from

a development perspective. However, the study is not oriented towards
applied development. It is more likely targeted at the basic research
community.

In total, there are very few game production studies. The majority of
these studies have been conducted in northern America and northern
Europe. Methods applied in production studies are mainly ethnographic
with interviews and observations of case companies. Both AAA and
smaller companies are represented in these studies.

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 Chapter 3. Game studies

3.1.2 Recommended reading

This is a must-read for anyone interested in research addressing game
production studies:
- Whitson, J. R. (2020). “What can we learn from studio studies
ethnographies?: A ‘messy’ account of game development
materiality, learning, and expertise”. In: Games and Culture, 15
(3), pp. 266–288. DOI: 10.1177/1555412018783320.

For those who wish to continue reading about game production studies, I
recommend the following articles:
- O’Donnell, C. (2009). “The everyday lives of video game
developers: Experimentally understanding underlying
systems/structures”. In: Transformative Works and Cultures, 2 (1),
pp. 1–11. DOI: 10.3983/twc.2009.073.
- Whitson, J. R. et al. (2018). “The missing producer: Rethinking
indie cultural production in terms of entrepreneurship, relational
labour, and sustainability”. In: European Journal of Cultural
Studies, pp. 1–22. DOI: 10.1177/1367549418810082.
- Roessel, L. van and C. Katzenbach (2020). “Navigating the grey
area: Game production between inspiration and imitation”. In:
Convergence, 26 (2), pp. 402–420. DOI :
10.1177/1354856518786593.
- Smale, S. de et al. (2019). “The case of This War of Mine: A
production studies perspective on moral game design”. In: Games
and Culture, 14 (4), pp. 387–409. DOI :
10.1177/1555412017725996.
- Jørgensen, K. (2019). “Newcomers in a global industry:
Challenges of a Norwegian game company”. In: Games and
Culture, 14 (6), pp. 660–679. DOI :
10.1177/1555412017723265.
- Banks, J. (2005). “Opening the Production Pipeline: Unruly
Creators”. In: DiGRA Conference Proceedings. DiGRA.

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 3.2 Game design

3.2 Game design

This section addresses studies that view game design as an elevated
activity. Said view differs from that of studio studies where:
The notion of distributed creation emphasizes creativity as a
socio-material and collective process, in which no single actor
holds all the cards. (Farias and Wilkie, 2016a, p. 5.)

The studies highlighted in this section focus more specifically on game

design and the role of the game designer. Before continuing, the concept
of game design needs to be examined more closely. The term design is
overloaded with connotations and different meanings are used in different
contexts and regions.
The original Latin source of design means to designate (to give
shape). Design has long been studied in architecture and engineering.
There are many similarities between game design and design of other
artefacts. The types of challenge faced in designing, for example, a public
space resemble those in designing a virtual space in a multiplayer game
(Álvarez and Duarte, 2018). Certain design methods (e.g. participatory)
used by design scholars can also be used in game design. However,
there is the difference that, outside games, most design is associated
with utilitarian requirements. Even though the aesthetics properties
of, for example, a building, are important, there are expectations (and
regulations) regarding how it can be used and accessed. Games are far
freer from such restrictions.

In the most inclusive interpretation, everyone involved in game

development can be considered a designer. Some game scholars from a
design tradition also apply this view to games. In some articles game
designer refers to all professionals involved in development. To
complicate things further, some associate design with graphical design.
In Japan, a game designer is most often assumed to be a graphical
designer or artist. However, in a western context, a game designer is
responsible for gameplay (i.e. creating the theme, rules, goals and
interaction models that players will experience and interact with). This is

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 Chapter 3. Game studies

the way the term is used in this book.

The game studies community has shown relatively high interest in
game design (compared to other activities involved in game production).
In all disciplines, the most referenced game development sources are
books on game design. Technically, these do not fall within this book’s
definition of game development research. However, based on their merits
as sources in research that does fall within said definition, they are
included here. An overview of these books is presented below along with
a short synopsis of studies of game design patterns. Real game
development research is then presented in an overview section (as
throughout this book).

3.2.1 Game design books

To a large extent, academic publishing related to game design has been
books authored by experienced practitioners. The first such book was The
art of computer game design by Crawford (1984). One of the most cited
books is Rules of play (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004). Other frequently
cited books include The game design workshop (Fullerton, 2014), A
theory of fun for game design (Koster, 2013), The art of game design: A
book of lenses (Schell, 2008) and Fundamentals of game design (Adams,
2014). Another, less cited, but not less important, book is Characteristics
of games (Elias, Garfield and Gutschera, 2012).
Common to all these books is that they focus on game characteristics,
game design and the creative processes behind a game concept. They
are mainly based on the authors’ personal experience as game designers
in projects of different sizes. The books thus contain deep insights
into the nature of game development and are highly relevant sources of
information. However, it should be noted that the material in these books
is not the result of research studies and has not been peer reviewed. These
books are either monographs or textbooks and are primarily targeted at
readers who want to understand how to design games. This has the effect
of presenting game development more as a solitary activity than as a
collaborative production process.

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 3.2 Game design

3.2.2 Game design patterns

Initiated in the game studies community, an approach that has received
much attention is presented in Game design patterns (Björk, Lundgren
and Holopainen, 2003). The inspiration for this originates from
architecture and the idea is to identify design patterns that appear in
many games. This latter involves creating a shared terminology for use
when discussing design elements in games. Another motivator is that
identified patterns should be useful as templates for designing new
games.
Although a large number of extensions to the game design pattern
concept have been reported in the academic community, reports of pattern
use in game production are absent. It appears that the main value of game
design patterns is as a descriptive tool for discussing games. There is a
clear difference between the above-mentioned work behind game design
patterns and that behind design books. The latter are based on experience
of applied game design, the former on analyses of existing games.

3.2.3 Research overview

As regards game design and ideation focused studies that include
empirical data from industrial practice, Annakaisa Kultima is an
outstanding scholar. Kultima focuses strongly on design and has
discussed its role in the game studies community (Kultima, 2015)1 . She
has also been involved in several empirical studies (Kultima, 2010;
Kultima and Alha, 2010; Kultima and Karvinen, 2016) that address the
game design process and to what extent it involves systematic methods
and tools. One study (Kultima, 2010) presents the results of interviews
with 23 game designers in Finnish game companies. Kultima shows that
ideas for games can be initiated by individual designers, but they are
shaped in a process that involves the other developers:
A ‘good’ idea may not be the one that is fully described from the
beginning, but is more inspirational and open-ended in terms of

1 This article gives a good perspective of game design as a part of a greater design
tradition.

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 Chapter 3. Game studies

allowing the whole production team to modify it. (Kultima, 2010,

p. 37.)

This observation corresponds well with the philosophy of production

studies (discussed in section 3.1). Kultima shows that game ideation is
an organic process. However, she also argues that systematic approaches
should be introduced and used. While attributing the lack of systematic
approaches mainly to participants’ lack of relevant education, she also
acknowledges the room for new approaches:
Misunderstanding of systematic approaches towards idea
generation and inadequate brainstorming skills distract from the
potential of group idea sessions. However, the successful
approaches developed by the professionals themselves also
indicated the great potential for emergent, novel tools and
methods that are especially suitable for game production.
(Kultima, 2010, p. 38.)

Ulf Hagen (Hagen, 2009; Hagen, 2011) is another scholar who has
studied game design in an industrial context. Basing his observations on
interviews with several major Swedish game developers, he highlights
aspects related to inspiration for game ideas (Hagen, 2009) and how the
design vision is communicated in the team (Hagen, 2011). One of his
observations is that, in the studied companies, the player experience
vision was not guided by GUX studies but by the designers’ own
experience:
This approach, however, is not guided by studies of player’s
experience while playing games; instead, it is primarily based on
the designer’s own experiences, autobiographical design. (Hagen,
2011, p. 273.)

In addition to the studies above, there are a very few studies of game
design in the wild. It is noteworthy that there is a strong
overrepresentation of game companies from the Nordic region. The
study methods used are a mix of interviews and questionnaires.

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 3.2 Game design

3.2.4 Recommended reading

This is a must-read for anyone interested in game design research:
- Kultima, A. (2010). “The organic nature of game ideation: Game
ideas arise from solitude and mature by bouncing”. In: Futureplay
Conference Proceedings. ACM, pp. 33–39. DOI: 10 . 1145 /
1920778.1920784.

For those who wish to continue reading about game development from a
design perspective, I recommend the following articles:
- Hagen, U. (2011). “Designing for player experience: How
professional game developers communicate design visions”. In:
Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 3 (3), pp. 259–275. DOI:
10.1386/jgvw.3.3.259_1.
- Kultima, A. (2015). “Game design research”. In: MindTrek
Conference Proceedings. ACM, pp. 18–25. DOI :
10.1145/2818187.2818300.
- Hagen, U. (2009). “Where do game design ideas come from?
Invention and recycling in games developed in Sweden”. In:
DiGRA Conference Proceedings. DiGRA.

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 Chapter 3. Game studies

3.3 Other game studies topics related to

development
In addition to studies that have a clear focus on the actual development
process or the design process, there is a large number of game studies
articles that, while they involve empirical data from game production,
focus on some aspect other than development. Although the methods
used in game studies are mainly qualitative, there are several quantitative
studies. The case studies offer a mix of big AAA companies and smaller
developers. However, the community is strongly geared towards
independent game development. This is the explicit focus of several
studies (e.g. Parker, Whitson and Simon, 2018; Consalvo and Paul,
2018; Guevara-Villalobos, 2011).
There is quite a diversity in the type of problems addressed in the
game studies community. This section highlights some themes identified
in the material that includes empirical data from game developers.

3.3.1 Gameworkers
Working conditions in game companies are one aspect of game
development highlighted in several studies (e.g. Dyer-Witheford and
De Peuter, 2006; Deuze, Bowen Martin and Allen, 2007; Wimmer and
Sitnikova, 2012; Legault and Ouellet, 2012; Cote and Harris, 2020). Via
interviews with nine German professionals in different positions,
Wimmer and Sitnikova (2012) analyse the professional identity of game
developers (called gameworkers in this context). One of this study’s
conclusions is that teamwork has a central role for all developers:
Teamwork is also the reason why a gameworker should be familiar
with every aspect of the game production process as it implies a lot
of collaboration between various members of game development
team (programmers, designers, artists, testers, etc.). They also
must have a clear understanding of their roles and tasks in the team,
as well as of the roles and tasks of their colleagues. (Wimmer and
Sitnikova, 2012, p. 166.)

Several studies highlight the role of gender in game development (e.g.

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 3.3 Other game studies topics related to development

Harvey and Shepherd, 2017; Ahmadi et al., 2019; Bailey, Miyata and
Yoshida, 2019). Ahmadi et al. (2019) present a workplace field study at a
major German developer with 16% female employees. They make the
following observations:
Our findings suggest that the women of our study enjoy working
in the company and yet they are confronted with subtle notions of
masculinity. The latter are not the result of malicious intent but
rather of unreflective, established taken-for granted structures,
which affect women throughout their chronological progress
within the company. (Ahmadi et al., 2019, p. 416.)

There are several similar studies in which game developers are studied or
interviewed, but where the focus is on something other than development
practice.

3.3.2 Game jams and cocreation

Conducted outside the game development studio, game jams are an
activity that receives attention from the game studies community (e.g.
De Salas, Lewis and Bindoff, 2016; Kultima and Karvinen, 2016).
De Salas, Lewis and Bindoff (2016) highlight game jams as an
opportunity for game companies. The authors present results from
surveys distributed to participants at two Tasmanian game jams where
20% of the participants were professional developers. This study
concludes that game jams can contribute to the building of a game
developer community.
Another aspect of game development that partly lies outside the studio
is player cocreation of, for example, game mods. This is an important
part of the ecosystem of many games and it has been addressed in a
number of studies (e.g. Sotamaa, 2007; Banks and Potts, 2010; Prax,
2015; Joseph, 2018). Many game studies researchers approach this with
a critical perspective of the way the industry uses free labour to produce
business value. Prax (2015) highlights the perspective that cocreation is
a central element in some games (e.g. massive multiplayer online role
playing games – MMORPGs) where many types of player actions have

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 Chapter 3. Game studies

an impact on the game experience. Prax argues that the act of playing a
game can be seen as an act of cocreation and concludes that:
There is no clear-cut divide between player creators and
institutional game designers in terms of how they are influencing
play for others. Instead player creators can have a real impact on
how the game is designed in a number of ways that warrant
stronger claims for recognition and partial authorship of the game
they participated in designing. (Prax, 2015, p. 14.)

Based on two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork at a mid-sized

game studio in the USA, Bulut (2015) highlights the role of QA game
testers. He problematises how testers’ hobbies and passions can be
distilled into labour by game companies under unfavourable conditions:
The precarity testers experience converges with degradation of fun.
Lack of prospects regarding permanent employment is combined
with the instrumental logic toward play, which kills the joy at work
and during leisure time. It is not that testers do not like their jobs.
Rather, when one’s passion becomes their job, the meaning of play
is radically transformed. (Bulut, 2015, p. 253.)

3.3.3 History, culture, and regional aspects

One theme in game studies research relates to history and culture. There
are several studies (e.g. Jørgensen, Sandqvist and Sotamaa, 2017; Eyles,
2016) of the historical roots of the industry in certain regions. There are
also studies (e.g. Pijnaker and Spronk, 2017; Copplestone, 2017) that
address how cultural expressions are represented and created in games.
Regional representation in game studies is generally highly skewed
towards Europe, northern America and, to some extent, Asia.
Representation of southern America, Africa and Oceania is very low.
This book identifies only one study (Pijnaker and Spronk, 2017) that,
irrespective of discipline, reflects game development practice on the
African continent2 . The study analyses the app Africa’s Legends
developed by a small team of IT entrepreneurs. It concludes:
2 There are some additional examples in the serious games area.

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 3.3 Other game studies topics related to development

The production of the aesthetics of the African superheroes in

Africa’s Legends was informed by their social position and taste.
The Leti Arts team combined elements of African history and
folklore with elements from DC and Marvel Comics. They used
digital technologies like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator
to create the quality they needed to express a new Africanness.
(Pijnaker and Spronk, 2017, p. 347.)

3.3.4 Recommended reading

Amongst the articles highlighted in this section, this is a must-read:
- Wimmer, J. and T. Sitnikova (2012). “The professional identity
of gameworkers revisited. A qualitative inquiry on the case study
of German professionals”. In: Eludamos - Journal for Computer
Game Culture, 6 (1), pp. 153–169.

The following articles are also recommended:

- Deuze, M. et al. (2007). “The Professional Identity of
Gameworkers”. In: Convergence, 13 (4), pp. 335–353. DOI:
10.1177/1354856507081947.
- Ahmadi, M. et al. (2019). “Hacking masculine cultures-career
ambitions of female young professionals in a video game
company”. In: CHI Play Symposium Proceedings. ACM,
pp. 413–426. DOI: 10.1145/3311350.3347186.
- Jørgensen, K. et al. (2017). “From hobbyists to entrepreneurs: On
the formation of the Nordic game industry”. In: Convergence, 23
(5), pp. 457–476. DOI: 10.1177/1354856515617853.
- Bulut, E. (2015). “Playboring in the tester pit: The convergence
of precarity and the degradation of fun in video game testing”. In:
Television & New Media, 16 (3), pp. 240–258. DOI: 10.1177/
1527476414525241.
- Prax, P. (2015). “Co-Creative game design in MMORPGs”. In:
DiGRA Conference Proceedings. DiGRA.
- Legault, M.-J. and K. Ouellet (2012). “So into it they forget what
time it is? Video game designers and unpaid overtime”. In:
Managing Dynamic Technology-Oriented Businesses: High-Tech

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 Chapter 3. Game studies

Organizations and Workplaces. IGI Global, pp. 82–102. DOI:

10.4018/978-1-4666-1836-7.ch006.
- Copplestone, T. J. (2017). “But that’s not accurate: the differing
perceptions of accuracy in cultural-heritage videogames between
creators, consumers and critics”. In: Rethinking History, 21 (3),
pp. 415–438. DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2017.1256615.

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 3.4 Forums for game studies research

3.4 Forums for game studies research

There are a number of main forums that publish game studies research. In
terms of number of papers, the DiGRA conference is the primary forum
for dissemination of results. It is the most cited forum in this book. In
addition to DiGRA, there are some other conferences that attract game
studies publications. The FDG Conference mentioned in section 2.5 is,
perhaps, the most important. Its audience is similar to that of DiGRA and
the two conferences were even co-organised one year.
There are several journals that publish game studies research. The
most prominent of these is Game Studies (gamestudies.org, 2020).
However, it should be noted that none of the articles related to game
development highlighted in this book has been published in this journal.
The most cited journal is Games and Culture (Sage, 2020b), which states
that it:
serves as a premiere outlet for ground-breaking work in the field
of game studies and its scope includes the socio-cultural, political,
and economic dimensions of gaming from a wide variety of
perspectives. (Sage, 2020b.)
One explicit goal of this journal is to bridge the gap between game
studies scholars in United States and Europe. It lists “issues of game
development” as one of its arenas. Another is “issues of gaming culture
related to race, class, gender, and sexuality”. Thus, the focus appears to
be on critical studies of game development culture.
In addition to Games and Culture, there are a few other journals that
appear in the game studies material related to game development. Journal
of Gaming & Virtual Worlds explores:
the cultural effects of gaming and virtual worlds across platforms
and genres, as their increasing popularity begins to affect culture
as a whole. (Intellect, 2020.)
This journal is not explicitly focused on game studies but can be seen as
a broader media study journal.
Eludamos - Journal for Computer Game Culture (PKP, 2020) is a
small independent journal that has been published since 2007. Its focus is

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similar to that of the Game Studies journal. In this book, only one article
that addresses game development is published in the Eludamos journal.
In summary, the main forums for game studies research that address
game development are the DiGRA and FDG conferences along with the
Games and Culture journal.

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As discussed in the previous chapter, games share many characteristics

with other media products. A studio environment is the birthplace of
many different such objects:
Studios play an essential role in bringing into being all manner of
aesthetic, affective and reflexive objects including, but not limited
to, artworks, brands, buildings, crafted artefacts, concepts,
designed products and services, live action and animated films,
information technologies, music, software and video games.
(Farias and Wilkie, 2016a, p. 1.)
The flow of ideas and stories between formats has become a central part
of our media landscape. There are researchers committed to studies
of transmedia, cross-media and media convergence. Thus, it is natural
that games have been studied in these contexts and that such study has
been undertaken by scholars approaching game production from the
perspective of neighbouring media (e.g. movies, literature, art, theatre
and music).
This book focuses specifically on studies that include empirical data
from game production. The present chapter is no exception. However,
results from the areas here are rather thin. Very few studies with a media
production perspective focus on game production. In those that do, there
 Chapter 4. Media production

is an overlap with the studies presented in the game studies chapter.

Perhaps this is not surprising; game studies has media studies as one of
its origins (Aarseth, 2001).

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 4.1 Games and narratives

4.1 Games and narratives

The relationship between games and narratives has been the target of an
intense debate (Koenitz, 2015). Games’ interactive nature makes them
different from most other story expressions. It can be argued that the
traditional relationship between the author, story and narrative is altered
by player input (Koenitz, 2015). Interactive Fiction, for example, can
be described as: “A potential narrative, that is, a system that produces
narrative during interaction” (Jackson-Mead and Wheeler, 2011, p. 26.).
The terminology used differs, but multiple scholars have highlighted
the distinction between the system of potential narratives and the
resulting narrative that evolves for a specific player. Koenitz (2015)
suggests the use of the term protostory to describe “a space of potential
narratives” (Koenitz, 2015, p. 30). The resulting narrative is referred to
as a product. Other authors use discourse (Cabioch et al., 2019), or
simply an instantiated narrative (Kybartas and Bidarra, 2016). From
simple branching structures to highly dynamic systems where narratives
emerge freely within boundaries set by the creator, the dynamics of a
story can vary significantly. The former type can be characterised as an
impositional form and the latter as an expressive form (Meadows, 2002).
Interactivity makes game writing different from, for example, movie
writing. The role of the game writer also differs from that of the traditional
writer in that it involves the use of hardware and software. There has
been a lot of focus on using AI and other forms of advanced technology
to create expressive forms of interactive narratives (Klimmt et al., 2012;
Cabioch et al., 2019). An example of this is provided by the game
Façade (Mateas and Stern, 2003). Although it has received a lot of
research community attention, it is not clear to what extent the approach
it embodies has been adopted by game developers or been successful in
attracting player attention.
The research focused on interactive digital narratives has clear
connections to games, but there has been very little integration with the
game industry and few studies of how to combine a narrative with other
elements of game production. Popular narrative-rich game titles have
primarily been analysed by game scholars and the production processes

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behind them have not received much focus. Some scholars openly
express that they expect the game industry to “take on” (Koenitz, 2015, p.
29.) challenges identified by research.

4.1.1 Research overview

Considering the huge interest in interactive narratives and the role of
narratives in games, there is a shocking lack of studies of how game
companies work with narratives. The most focused description in this area
is actually found in one of the user experience studies presented in section
2.3. This is a book chapter written by GUX researchers at Microsoft
Studios. In one section, they focus on testing game narratives (Pagulayan
et al., 2018b). This text also give insights into the development process.
The goal of GUX is to validate that designers’ intentions are actually
realised. Regarding narratives, the authors state:
Designers want players to fall in love with the world, to love
and mourn characters who are lost, to feel a sense of risk and
challenge that motivates gameplay, and to come away feeling as
though they have accomplished something grand. Unfortunately,
game narratives don’t always deliver on these goals for players.
(Pagulayan et al., 2018b, p. 310.)

They observe that many players who could retell narratives from movies
and other linear formats failed to retell narratives from games they had
played. For the authors, the solution was to:
Stop trying to test the gameplay build and instead to look at the
tools the writers were using to ensure that they ended up with a
good story. (Pagulayan et al., 2018b, p. 312.)

Their article presents how simple tools and techniques have been
developed and used to analyse game narratives and how players perceive
the latter:
The feedback we are able to collect from players – by having
them read through, explain what’s going on, what doesn’t make
sense, and what they think will happen next – identifies issues

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with genre knowledge interactions, franchise knowledge (or lack

of knowledge), character motivations and inconsistencies, not
to mention the basics of plot holes, red herrings, and reversals.
(Pagulayan et al., 2018b, p. 314.)

They report a process that starts with a focus on what the story should be,
but switches to one on how it should be told. They observe that players
tend to evaluate narrative on a more dynamic scale than that they use for
gameplay:
They are much more likely to max out on Likert scales, making
it important to benchmark your measures before defining success.
Gameplay is great at the excitement, tension, and reward cycle;
but narrative can build love. (Pagulayan et al., 2018b, p. 315.)

The experiences reported by Pagulayan et al. (2018b) reflect my own

experience of working with narrative-driven games (Engström, 2019a;
Engström, Brusk and Erlandsson, 2018; Engström, Brusk and Östblad,
2015; Wilhelmsson et al., 2017). As they were mainly conducted in a
university context, these games faced exclusion from this book. However,
they included professional game developers and one game was developed
with professional authors in collaboration with a national public service
company (for details, see Brusk and Engström, 2020). Two games were
released for public download and received positive reviews. Engström
(2019a) includes an interview with three authors who participated in the
development of a mobile game. One of them had prior experience of
game development, but expressed strong reluctance to using Excel to
edit dialogue text. Excel is frequently used for this purpose in game
production (Despain, 2008), but game writers assert that alternatives are
needed (Francis, 2015).
In a study of the adaptation of the Spider-Man movie to two games
for five different platforms, O’Donnell (2011) touches upon the role of
narrative. He describes the struggle for developers to develop the game’s
story in relation to that of the film. This included differences in duration
and the film’s lack of content on which player challenges could be based:

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Time and again during the production of [Spider-Man 3], it was

apparent that making a game based on the Spider-Man character
was a very different undertaking than the production of a movie.
(O’Donnell, 2011, p. 274.)

The adaptation of existing intellectual property introduced additional

complexities because new content had to be negotiated with the franchise
owners. O’Donnell (2011) concludes:
This multiplicity of complexity and interactivity thus leads to a
much different storytelling platform, that in many cases tears open
the thin veil of formulaity surrounding the stories being offered.
(O’Donnell, 2011, pp. 277-278.)

Over and above the already mentioned studies, I am aware of only one
article highlighting the process of narrative development in a game
industry context. Linderoth (2015) presents results from an interview
study with 16 developers from a range of different studios. Linderoth
argues that games should be seen as a composite form of both gameplay
and story. One of his findings is that:
Informants treat storytelling as a natural part of game development;
however, storytelling is not seen as being at the core of the product.
(Linderoth, 2015, p. 285.)

4.1.2 Recommended reading

This is a must-read for anyone interested in game development and
narratives:
- Pagulayan, R. J. et al. (2018b). “Testing narrative in games”. In:
The Wiley Handbook of Human Computer Interaction, Volume 1.
Ed. by K. L. Norman and J. Kirakowski. John Wiley & Sons,
pp. 310–318. ISBN: 978-1-118-97727-9.

For those who wish to continue reading about game development and
narratives, I somewhat self-promotingly recommend these articles:
- Linderoth, J. (2015). “Creating stories for a composite form: Video
game design as Frame Orchestration”. In: Journal of Gaming &

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Virtual Worlds, 7 (3), pp. 279–298. DOI: 10.1386/jgvw.7.3.

279_1.
- Engström, H. (2019a). “‘I have a different kind of brain’ - a
script-centric approach to interactive narratives in games”. In:
Digital Creativity, 30 (1), pp. 1–22. DOI: 10.1080/14626268.
2019.1570942.

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Figure 4.1: Screen capture of the E.T. game on Atari 2600.

4.2 Various media types and their relation to game

development
As will be apparent from the presentation below, there are very few
studies of game development that focus on aspects related to film, art,
music, etc. For this reason, all such media types are here addressed in
four subsections.

4.2.1 Film, television and games

Games are maybe most frequently compared to live-action and animated
films. This has often been manifested by adaptations between formats.
In the early days of digital games, movies were often used as themes
for games. This was an efficient way of attracting interest and creating
an imaginary sphere around the graphically primitive representations
possible on the hardware of that time. One such game, E.T., for Atari
2600 (figure 4.1), is said to have caused the big game industry crash in
the early ’80s (Guins, 2009).
In recent years, game franchises have started to be adapted to movies.
This includes not only cinematic action games such as Tomb Raider,
Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia but also movies featuring older
2D-characters such as Pac Man, Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu.
Despite the close connections between film and game production,
there are very few studies that approach game development from a film

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production perspective. There are several studies that discuss the

development of the game industry in different regions and relate it to the
film industry (e.g. Chung and Fung, 2013; Izushi and Aoyama, 2006).
Hollywood did, for example, play an important role in the development
of the North American AAA game industry. Trip Hawkins, founder of
Electronic Arts, claims (Ramsay, 2012b) that, taking inspiration from
Hollywood media production, he was the one to introduce the terms
director and producer in a software development context. The role of the
manga and anime traditions in the development of the Japanese game
industry is highlighted by Izushi and Aoyama (2006).
O’Donnell (2011) is unique in his close analysis of game production
and how it relates to movie production. He highlights the large differences
between the formats and how this affects their development:
Games are quite different from film, music, television, or the
myriad other media industries interested in ‘flowing’ content to
videogame players. What gamers and game developers have long
been aware of, and many executives and decision makers in other
creative industries have not yet come to understand, is that games
are complex information systems. (O’Donnell, 2011, p. 280.)

This is somewhat contradicted by a study (Nelson and Palumbo, 2014)

in which a company introduces a Hollywood film studio model that is
claimed to be successful. However, the studied company was not a regular
game company but an “interactive new media design firm”. This makes
these results more applicable to serious game development (chapter 6).

Television production is closely related to the film industry. In this

format, the introduction of audience interactivity is not rare. Black Mirror
Bandersnatch is a recent example of an interactive television movie. This
Netflix film is set in an ’80s game developer context, the viewer having
to make choices related to the development of a game. McSweeney and
Joy (2019) present an analysis of Bandersnatch where they relate the
film to prior interactive films and to more recent narrative-driven games.
They cite interviews with the creators who appear to be ambivalent about

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whether or not they created a game. Interestingly, script development

used Twine, a tool that has received much attention in an alternative,
independent game community (Harvey, 2014). Apart from Twine and
the use of game development in the storyline, there is no indication that
there was collaboration with game developers in producing the movie.

4.2.2 Theatre and games

Interactive and immersive theatre, as well as live action role playing
(LARP), are areas that have strong similarities with games and have
influenced game scholars (e.g. Shyba, 2007; Stenros and Montola, 2011).
Game design scholars have also influenced the creation of immersive
theatre (Harper, 2019). The Punchdrunk theatre company has produced
several immersive plays, one of the most successful being Sleep no More.
This has run in New York for many years and encourages audience
members to move more or less freely around in a large environment
where actors play scenes loosely based on Macbeth. There is no dialogue
in this play. The drama is created using physical acting and dance. For
the audience, the experience is very much like playing a game1 . Sleep
no More was listed as Game of the Year 2011 by one publication (see
Harper, 2019, p. 360). This shows that there is potential in approaching
games from a theatre perspective. However, to the best of my knowledge,
there is no reported study of game development with a focus on theatre
aspects.

Role playing games (LARPs or table-top) are strongly related to digital

games. They have been the subject of many game study articles (e.g.
Tychsen et al., 2006; Drachen et al., 2009). Tychsen et al. (2006) argue
that there is potential to use LARPs as foundations when developing
MMORPGs:
LARPs are closely related to MMORPGs and provide both a
source of ideas to be applied to MMORPGs and an arena to try

1 I did attend this in 2014 and was blown away by the interactive experience.

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ideas in large participant interactive narratives without the need for

extensive software implementation. (Tychsen et al., 2006, p. 271.)

However, I am aware of no study showing that digital game developers

have used the suggested approach.

Actors are commonly involved in game productions. Voice-acting is an

important part of many games and, in most cases, the interactivity of
games makes the dialogue very different from the linear scripts used in
theatre and film. This requires actors to understand non-linear script and
to act accordingly. Despite the frequent use of actors in game production,
I have not found a single study that addresses how actors approach this
task or how game companies direct actors in interactive contexts.
In game development projects I have participated in, own tools and
procedures had to be designed when working with writers and voice
actors (see Engström, 2019a; Engström and Östblad, 2018). However,
the process actors used to work with the script and to decide how to act
with respect to the context of a scene was not studied.

4.2.3 Art and games

When talking about game and art, there are two fundamentally different
aspects that need to be distinguished. The first relates to discussion of
whether a game can be regarded as a piece of art. See, for example, Myers
(2019). The second relates to the visual dimension of games and how to
produce it. All sections of this chapter impinge on the former. This is
because artists can use all modalities of a game to express themselves.
Two interesting studies of games as art are well worth mentioning. The
first of these is Sapsed and Tschang (2014). Focusing on the role of
technology, this compares the histories of creative processes behind
games and creative processes in the Renaissance. The authors highlight
that the introduction of new materials and affordable sketching tools
in the Renaissance led to new possibilities for the artistic process (e.g.
working iteratively and experimenting). They argue that digital tools
have had a similar effect on work processes. They conclude that the two

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studied creative epochs:

. . . were in many ways only separated by the types of technologies,
and to some extent, by the manner of technological mediation,
but not by the types and needs of human creativity. (Sapsed and
Tschang, 2014, p. 140.)

The second study (Devine, 2017) presents a method for art criticism and
uses the work of Jason Rohrer as a case study. This study provides a good
introduction to how games can be understood as art. In the selection of
an artist to study, Devine excluded potential candidates if they lacked
acknowledgement from the game world. Devine uses “noticed by the
game world” as a selection criterion, but does not specify exactly what
this requirement includes. The reasons for selecting Rohrer provide an
interesting insight into the art world perspective. Setting out two points
stating that Rohrer has “self-identified as an artist” and has “written and
verbal artifacts” that can be used to “examine” or “compare” Rohrer’s
position, Devine continues:
Third, he is not trained as artist per se but instead has an educational
and professional background rooted in computer science and game
design. This third point is important because his work has never
undergone the rigor of art critique such as is found in art schools.
This inexperience, invariably, has created gaps in his work. These
gaps allow for discussions that, in turn, add to the dialogue as to
how to approach games as art. Fourth, his work has crossed the
boundaries of the game and art worlds and has written artifacts to
examine on that point. (Devine, 2017, p. 679.)

When it comes to the second aspect of game and art, the production of
game visuals, there are very few studies. O’Donnell (2011) is again one of
very few to discuss the processes and tools behind game creation. Another
example is Canheti, Andalo and Vieira (2018) who, at a Brazilian game
studio, followed the process behind the creation of a game character.
In addition to these studies, art is only briefly mentioned in a few
other articles (e.g. Stacey, Brown and Nandhakumar, 2007; Hodgson and

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Briand, 2013; Hicks et al., 2018). Lê, Massé and Paris (2013) highlight
that art management scholars mainly consider the role of technology at
a macro level and rarely focus on the creative process at a micro level:
“Technology is rarely perceived as having an impact on the art product
itself” (Lê, Massé and Paris, 2013, p. 46).

4.2.4 Music, audio and games

There are surprisingly few works on game audio from a development
perspective. Respected scholar Sander Huiberts has published several
studies on game audio in both an academic context (e.g. Huiberts, 2010;
Huiberts, 2011) and an industry context (e.g. Tol and Huiberts, 2008).
However, these latter do not include empirical data. The Audio
Engineering Society (AES) has hosted conferences targeting audio for
games. This society largely focuses on technology aspects, but the
aesthetic dimension is not ignored. In 2020, the University of California
Press launched the quarterly Journal of Sound and Music in Games (UC
Press, 2020). This appears to target exactly what has been missing in this
field. As early as issue two, its Industry perspective section featured a
study by Krishnaswami (2020). This uses an autoethnographic method
to analyse his work as the lead composer for two games, Dishonored 2
and Wolfenstein: The New Order.

The existing academic studies of game audio appear to focus on analyses

of existing games, technology and various theoretical aspects, but not on
how audio professionals in the industry work collaboratively with other
game development professionals. One reason for this may be that many
companies use external contractors and do not include music and audio
professionals in their core team. This “detachment” is illustrated clearly
in the work of Krishnaswami (2020):
I have never experienced my own songs in-world as a player. I
experience them, instead, through the eyes and ears of YouTube
uploaders and through the words of YouTube commenters and
Twitter users. (Krishnaswami, 2020, p. 81.)

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It is also illustrated in an article by Mitchell (2014) who interviews: two

game composers on their work with horror titles; and, two audio directors
on their work with audio and music in games. The interviews give a
picture that composing is largely a solitary task. For example:
Most game composers like me, it’s just me - I am the team. I may
hire a copyist if I have a recording session, but I’m pretty much
doing everything else by myself. (Mitchell, 2014, p. 17.)

This interview study has a clear focus on AAA game productions and
the discussions with the composers are, to a large extent, focused on
comparisons with feature film scores and classical composers. They
discuss the choice between classical concert music, aleatory music2 ,
texture and the role of silence. In general, the composers are positive
towards game composing and comment on the high degree of freedom.
The interviews touch on the role of interactivity and how music can be
used to highlight actions in games. Disabling the music is one particular
user action that concerns composers:
You don’t want to be told how to feel by the music and remember
[that] in games, almost always, the player has the option of turning
off the music, so you don’t want that - that’s a bad outcome.
(Mitchell, 2014, p. 15.)

When asked what they would like to improve in the way they worked
with game music, one of the composers responded:
I could be more involved in integrating music, [or] at least make
suggestions on how music can be used. To some extent, if you’re
hired to write sixty or even one hundred minutes of music in a
game that lasts sixteen or twenty hours, they are going to reuse
your music. (Mitchell, 2014, p. 16.)

Interestingly, this composer did not think any tools were missing. On the
contrary, he stated:

2 Music composed using random elements and/or elements that are triggered by the
performer.

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4.2 Various media types and their relation to game development

But as far as any specific technical tools [go] - we certainly have a

lot of them now. If anything I’d like to slow down this technical
barrage. If anything say stop, we’re done, no more! (Mitchell,
2014, p. 16.)

The composers even expressed the fear that, in the future, they may be
replaced by automated systems. For example:
You don’t have to know how music techniques are generated, how
avant-garde or aleatoric techniques work, you just need to buy a
sample library and mix it together. So if anything I worry about
music becoming indistinguishable from sound effects and losing
something in the process. (Mitchell, 2014, p. 14.)

The audio directors interviewed in Mitchell (2014) were mainly asked

about their processes for using temporary tracks in the prototyping
phases before a composer delivers the original music. They said that
selecting music helped the team to set the mood of different sections of
the game. One director explained how he used collections of audio cues
to communicate the musical vision of a game to a composer:
Each level had a collection of ‘Ambiance’ cues for establishing
the mood, ‘Reveal’ cues for story moments and ‘Fight’ cues that
would be used for combat situations. The direction for each cue
came from the overall direction of the game level (at that time).
(Mitchell, 2014, p. 24.)

The studies presented here are the only ones I found that examine how
composers and audio specialists work professionally. However, Mitchell
(2014) is a good example of the potential of such studies. It is clear that
game development differs from the standard work of these professionals
and poses different challenges.

An interesting example of the similarities between game development

and music production is presented by Baba and Tschang (2001). This
study is presented in a management context and highlights the use of
prototyping in a creative process. They claim that the highly innovative

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Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album was the result of a
prototyping process where composing and recording were no longer
approached as sequentially separated processes. They also highlight the
importance of the tight collaboration between people with different
competencies. This included composers and performers (e.g. Lennon
and McCartney), studio engineers (e.g. Geoff Emerick) and a producer
(George Martin). Besides a remarkable album, this new way of working
also resulted in a new way of creating music:
The emergence of the ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ model was regarded as
phenomenal as it introduced prototyping in record production, and
contributed to a new record category of the concept album. The
nature of production process helped the ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band’ album achieve a very high artistic standard
with remarkable product integrity. (Baba and Tschang, 2001, p.
496.)

The tight collaboration in Sgt. Pepper’s . . . cannot be observed in the

process described by Mitchell (2014). There, composers said that they
felt they worked on their own, with limited control of how the music was
used. However, they did express hopes for improvements and believed
that music in games could develop its own unique identity:
The Bach of game music may yet write intricate music that
perfectly weaves together. I see the opportunity for good game
music to evolve and do something unique that a score for a film
cannot do. (Mitchell, 2014, p. 19.)

4.2.5 Summary
It is clear that there is very little research that addresses game development
from a media production perspective, irrespective of whether it is from a
narrative, film, art or music angle. However, it should be noted that each
of these fields has some examples of such research. This gives some hope
that things may evolve in the future. It is possible that this community has
a very high inertia and, consequently, orientation towards the relatively
new field of games is slow.

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4.2.6 Recommended reading

This is a must-read for anyone interested in games and media production:
- O’Donnell, C. (2011). “Games are not convergence: The lost
promise of digital production and convergence”. In: Convergence,
17 (3), pp. 271–286. DOI: 10.1177/1354856511405766.

For those who wish to continue reading about game development from a
media production perspective, I recommend the following articles:
- Mitchell, H. R. (2014). “Fear and the musical avant-garde in games:
Interviews with Jason Graves, Garry Schyman, Paul Gorman and
Michael Kamper”. In: Horror Studies, 5 (1), pp. 127–144. DOI:
10.1386/host.5.1.127_1.
- Nelson, W. A. and D. B. Palumbo (2014). “When design meets
Hollywood: Instructional design in a production studio
environment”. In: Design in Educational Technology. Ed. by
B. Hokanson and A. Gibbons. Springer, pp. 75–88. DOI:
10.1007/978-3-319-00927-8_5.
- Devine, T. C. (2017). “Integrating games into the artworld: A
methodology and case study exploring the work of Jason Rohrer”.
In: Games and Culture, 12 (7-8), pp. 671–695. DOI: 10.1177/
1555412015596105.

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4.3 Forums for media production game research

As is apparent from the discussions in this chapter, media production
research that highlights games is very sparse. This makes it difficult to
identify forums that might publish such research (if it were not as rare).
The few examples found and highlighted here may not be representative
of the field. There is a clear overlap between the forums for game studies
and those for media production. As pointed out in section 3.4, Journal of
Gaming & Virtual Worlds is also a relevant forum for media production
research.
Another journal that is on the border between the fields is
Convergence. Its main aim is to:
encourage and advance interdisciplinary modes of enquiry into the
study of the histories, trajectories, impacts, practices, pleasures and
creative potential of contemporary convergent media and allied
innovative technologies. (Sage, 2020a.)

The journal does not have an explicit focus on games, but several articles
highlighted in this book have been published there.
In addition to these journals, there are some that make single
appearances, e.g. Horror Studies (Ingenta, 2020) and Digital Creativity
cited above. The latter could be highly relevant given its stated
publication scope of:
articles of interest to those involved in the practical task and
theoretical aspects of making or using digital media in creative
disciplines. These include but are not limited to visual arts,
interaction design, physical computing and making,
computational materials, textile and fashion design, filmmaking
and animation, game design, music, dance, drama, architecture
and urban design.. (Taylor & Francis, 2020a.)

However, very few of the articles that the journal publishes within this
scope address applied game development.
As mentioned above, there is a newly started journal that targets
audio and music in games. This is the The Journal of Sound and Music

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4.3 Forums for media production game research

in Games and it has the potential to present research that is relevant to

this book’s purposes. The journal claims it is:
the only journal exclusively dedicated to this subject and provides
a meeting point for professionals and academics from any
tradition to advance knowledge of music and sound in this
important medium. (UC Press, 2020.)

Conferences appear to be of low importance in the media production

field, particularly in comparison to their position in software development.
The only conference papers cited in this chapter are published at the
DiGRA conference. This does not necessarily imply that the specific
communities (e.g. music and sound) do not have relevant, focused forums
that address games. In many communities, there are conferences that
accept presentations based on short abstracts. Other communities (e.g.
interactive digital narratives) have conferences that publish proceedings
with full papers, but lack a focus on game development in the wild.

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Identifying rational ways to operate businesses is one focus of classical

management research. It involves identifying how resources (human
resources included therein) should be utilised. Although the roots of
management run deep into the history of civilisation, the industrial
revolution can be seen as the starting point of the field (Pindur, Rogers
and Kim, 1995). Today, management is a wide field that has some clear
overlaps with research in software engineering (section 2.1) and
information systems (section 2.2). Management research (just like
research in the two previously mentioned fields) employs several
different research paradigms. Management research can also employ
behavioural or quantitative approaches (e.g. using game theory1 ) or, for
example, be more in the nature of anthropological studies of workplace
cultures.
This chapter focuses on studies addressing game development
management from a perspective that is wider than software development.
In the totality of research addressing game development, a substantial
subset comes from the disciplines presented in this chapter. It includes

1 Game theory is a mathematical model that can be used to analyse decision making. It
is applicable in game design but it is mainly used in economics.
 Chapter 5. Management and business

traditional team management aspects that are highly relevant in the daily
operations of development teams. Aspects related to finance, analytics
and publishing can be considered as outside core development tasks.
Nonetheless, they are crucial in creating a sustainable game business and
thus strongly influence core development.

As discussed in section 2.3, analytics can be used to support both design

and business intelligence. This chapter focuses on analytics applications
to support business elements. However, because design and business
affect each other, it is not possible to completely separate them.

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5.1 Creativity management

Creativity is a topic that has been studied from many perspectives ranging
from psychology to business.
Advertising was one of the first business areas where creativity was
highlighted (Bevolo, 2010)2 . Employee creativity is an important
resource in many modern businesses. Accordingly, management scholars
have started to study how this resource should be managed:
Creativity management is a system of principles, methods,
techniques, practices, and instruments for managing employee
creativity in order to get the maximum effect for the organization
according to its goals, objectives, employee contingent, and
available resources. (Dubina, 2013.)

As game companies have an apparent need for creative individuals, the

latter have attracted attention from management scholars.
This section focuses on research that has studied game development
management. The majority of such studies has some focus on the creative
aspects of game development and how managers should make space for
it.

5.1.1 Research overview

There are several studies that focus on game project management (e.g.
Walfisz, Zackariasson and Wilson, 2006; Cohendet and Simon, 2007;
Cullmann, 2013; Hodgson and Briand, 2013). Some of the first and most
ambitious studies of game management were presented by Ted Tschang
and his colleagues (Baba and Tschang, 2001; Tschang, 2005; Tschang
and Szczypula, 2006; Tschang, 2007; Tschang, 2009). The foregoing
research mainly focuses on aspects one step above project management.
In an early study, Baba and Tschang (2001) analyse Japanese console
game (referred to as TV game software) development and identify how it
differs from traditional software development:
2 One text promoted by Bevolo (2010) is “A Technique for Producing Ideas” by
Webb Young (1965). In my opinion, this very short book captures the nature of
creative processes extremely well.

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Software has traditionally been seen as an efficiency-driven

process. But in innovative software, there are other important
issues, such as the need to allow for radical redesign in
development cycles, and the need to resolve tensions between
creative and controlling processes. (Baba and Tschang, 2001, p.
487.)

A subsequent study (Tschang, 2005) highlights the unique characteristics

of game development in comparison to the characteristics of other
entertainment products. Amusement park rides are an example. These
should give users a few minutes of (non-interactive) amusement and, to a
large extent, their characteristics can be based on existing attractions.
Thus, they can use normal development processes:
On the other hand, the designing of a videogame that a consumer
has to enjoy and desire to persist playing on a dynamic (i.e.,
constantly changing) basis over many hours of game play can be
said to be an extreme requirement. (Tschang, 2005, p. 113.)

Said study analyses postmortems to identify game development

characteristics. Tschang’s most cited work (Tschang, 2007)3 studies
North American game development using a combination of ethnographic
methods, interviews and post-mortems. It focuses on creativity
management in game development and how to balance rational forces
and the need for games to provide creative elements. Tschang defines
rationalisation as: “The predominant focus on business interests or
productivity-oriented production processes, usually at the expense of
creativity” (Tschang, 2007, p. 989).
In combination with specific characteristics of entertainment
products4 , rationalisation can easily lead to incremental innovation. This
means that such products see only minor changes to their components.
The study gives a good characterisation of the AAA industry and the
3 This is one of the most cited (irrespective of discipline) works on applied game
development.
4 Entertainment products are characterised by: being hit-oriented; having short product
lifecycles; and, the unpredictability of their acceptance by customers.

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5.1 Creativity management

relationships between studios, publishers and audiences. Tschang (2007)

shows how creativity can be supported in a game studio despite the
rationalising forces exerted by publishers and commercial interests.
Two other early articles (Walfisz, Zackariasson and Wilson, 2006;
Zackariasson, Walfisz and Wilson, 2006) are based on an ethnographic
study at a major Swedish game studio. The first article (Walfisz,
Zackariasson and Wilson, 2006) presents the project structure used at the
studio. It gives a rich description of the management philosophy used
there. The article’s first author is the company’s CEO (which may have
impacted on the critical analysis). Jointly, the authors highlight the
balance between structure and creative freedom:
Impose a loose—tight discipline throughout the project. At the
heart of the process was the 10 day cycle, a tight constraint. At the
same time, the creative excursions of individuals were encouraged.
(Walfisz, Zackariasson and Wilson, 2006, p. 498.)

The second article (Zackariasson, Walfisz and Wilson, 2006) analyses

the creative process in game development and the role of management
in this process. It concludes that the studied game company shows
many similarities with companies in other businesses and that many
observations made in the case company could be associated with classical
management concepts.
It should be noted that, since the above studies were presented, the
nature of the game industry has changed substantially. In the past fifteen
years, the industry has seen the indie revolution, the growth of mobile
games and the opportunity to self-publish games. This is reflected in a
recent study by Granados (2018), who interviewed 38 developers at high
profile European mobile game developers. This study’s results echo those
presented by Tschang, but one important difference is highlighted, i.e.
the free-to-play business model has turned development into an ongoing
process, even after game launch. Granados (2018) identifies this as a
servitisation of the game business. The data collected from gameplay
serves an important role in the refined development of the game. This
brings a strong rationalisation force into game development.

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Focused on creative business realities, another recent study (Wikhamn

et al., 2016) interviews 36 Swedish game developers. They identify three
ambidextrous capabilities that companies need to handle. These relate to:
creative work vs. efficiency; inward vs outward ideation influences; and,
the diversity in the team vs. the shared love of games.
A common theme in the research on game development management
is the constant balancing between contradicting goals and complex
structures. In Simon (2006), four case studies (game industry,
multimedia, advertising and circus) are used to analyse project
management. Simon suggests that, here, a project manager needs to take
on the roles of a sense-maker, a web-weaver, a game-master and a
flow-balancer. The role of successful project manager embodies a
complex mix of skills directed towards bringing different people together
to produce a creative result. A need for the project manager to connect
the different cultures of different disciplines (web-weaver) is
highlighted:
The [project manager] has to learn the culture, ethos and even
jargon of each profession involved in the project. This let us think
that curiosity and a strong interest for discovery lies at the heart of
the [project manager] job, in parallel with strong skills in listening
and learning. (Simon, 2006, p. 121.)

In this connection, sociology researchers Vaan, Stark and Vedres

(2015) studied how, as a function of cognitive distance between groups,
creative success depends on the structural composition of the creative
team. Their assumption is that:
where the groups comprising a team are cognitively (stylistically)
distant, members might confront a babel of dissonant languages,
where even the same term might not have the same meaning.
Cognitive diversity has potential to shake up existing codes and
categories, leading to the development of innovative products.
(Vaan, Stark and Vedres, 2015, p. 1150.)

They use an extensive set of data, primarily derived from Moby

Games (Blue Flame Labs, 2020). This set includes 8,987 games

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published between 1979 and 2009 created by 139,727 developers. The

results indicate that the combination of cognitive distance and
overlapping groupings promotes innovation.
A different study, (Cohendet and Simon, 2007), examines a large
Canadian game company and the role of the communities of specialists
therein:
As a result, most of the communities of specialists at [the game
company] have a dual dimension in the way they process
knowledge, aiming both at exploration and exploitation. As the
balance varies from one community to the other, the community
of game designers probably has the most weight on exploration.
However, the coexistence of many diverse communities having
both dimensions is one of the distinctive characteristics of cultural
industries and explains why these types of organizations finally
succeed in matching creativity and efficiency. (Cohendet and
Simon, 2007, p. 591.)
The authors discuss the role of these communities in relation to the formal
structures of the company and conclude that they all serve an important
role and that the system is complex:
There is no fixed recipe, no standard platform or permanent
procedure. There is a large diversity of platforms and bundles of
strong and weak ties that connect communities together, link
projects to communities and also bind the diverse sources of
creativity to the global culture of the company. (Cohendet and
Simon, 2007, p. 602.)
Cohendet and Simon have been studying game development management
for more than a decade and have published several studies of a major
AAA studio in Montreal (e.g. Cohendet and Simon, 2016; Cohendet,
Llerena and Simon, 2014). One article (Cohendet and Simon, 2016) gives
a very interesting insight into the inner operation of the largest game
studio in the world. The stage-gate process, traditionally used in game
production, resulted in a lot of frustration when the creative team and the
team of editors did not manage to make progress in the ideation stage of
a new game:

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Given the infrequent contact between the creative team and

editorial, these evaluation meetings often turn into a “dragon’s
den” where the producer has to explain, justify, and fight for his
and the team’s ideas. (Cohendet and Simon, 2016, p. 621.)

When the producer finally mooted leaving the job, the company did not
want to lose one of its big talents and gave him free rein to organise the
work. This gave rise to the always playable project that is analysed in the
article. The producer introduced two development principles: “fail fast”
and “follow the fun”. Team focus was on creating playable prototypes
that they playtested via weekly tournaments. This attracted interest from
large parts of the organisation, eventually also including the studio’s
president:
The good thing with the playable prototype is that it gives us a real
sense of direction. It’s easier for the team to feel what works and
what doesn’t. (Cohendet and Simon, 2016, p. 622.)

Thus, the always playable project was successful in redesigning the core
process used in the development of a potential blockbuster game.
In a related study, Hodgson and Briand (2013) examine the use of an
agile development method, Scrum, at another Canadian studio. This
method is a permanent procedure that has become established in a
software development context. Hodgson and Briand (2013) found that
this approach was not successfully implemented throughout the team.
While programmers embraced the methodology, artists found it to be too
rigid to support their process. To handle this, project management had to
circumvent Scrum and implement other procedures to support the artists.
The authors conclude:
Given the current vogue for the adoption of Agile and similar
methodologies, there is a pressing need for more extensive,
cross-sectoral and critical research into its implementation and the
consequences for control. (Hodgson and Briand, 2013, p. 322.)

The studies presented above illustrate that even established AAA

companies struggle with game development processes. Both the creative

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nature of the product and the diversity of the team generate challenges.
This management problem has not been solved.

In the development structure, with all its complexities, technology is an

important component that concerns not only people with a technological
background. Lê, Massé and Paris (2013) present an interesting study of
how technological change affects the creative process. The study is of a
major French game company and analyses how technology interacts with
the creative process.
Our findings also serve to reaffirm, with respect to the literature
on technology, that the artistic process is specific. Compared to
traditional industries, where the objectives are set and predefined
by rational targets or other activities such as fundamental
scientific research, the cultural and creative industries present a
more open-ended setting. Indeed, artistic products do not fit the
traditional product-development model. (Lê, Massé and Paris,
2013, p. 57.)

Several studies in the management field (e.g. Lysova and Khapova, 2019;
Musial, Kauppinen and Puhakka, 2016) highlight how important game
developers’ personal motivation is for the result. Lysova and Khapova
(2019) present an interview study of 24 Dutch game company founders
and conclude that a common theme for these individuals is that they have
a creative calling to perform creative work and develop games. Said
individuals started their companies as a way of following this calling.
The authors observe an emerging entrepreneurship:
The majority of the interviewed founders did not start their
company because they wanted to be an entrepreneur but rather
because it was the only way for them to do what they love.
(Lysova and Khapova, 2019, p. 38.)

The article shows that the founders experienced challenges in combining

their calling with their work identity. This suggests that:
Career counselors and career development professionals could
help these individuals to craft their idealized work identity into the

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one that better fits reality and to be more adaptable in the way they
enact their calling. (Lysova and Khapova, 2019, p. 42.)

Highlighting the same conflict between artistic creativity and business

practicalities, a study by Musial, Kauppinen and Puhakka (2016) draws a
different conclusion:
Creative work is a distinct way of living. Therefore, it is not an
industrially manageable process but, rather, a culturally embedded
phenomenon. (Musial, Kauppinen and Puhakka, 2016, p. 1277.)

One striking observation regarding the literature on creativity

management is that it contains many studies that have rich empirical data
from major developers in the AAA sector. North American and north
European studies strongly dominate creativity management research.
Canadian and Swedish studios are also notably well represented. The
majority of all these studies uses qualitative methods (interviews being
dominant).

5.1.2 Recommended reading

This is a must-read for anyone interested in management research
addressing game development:
- Tschang, T. (2007). “Balancing the tensions between
rationalization and creativity in the video games industry”. In:
Organization Science, 18 (6), pp. 989–1005. DOI :
10.1287/orsc.1070.0299.

For those who wish to continue reading about management research, I

recommend the following articles:
- Cohendet, P. and L. Simon (2016). “Always playable:
Recombining routines for creative efficiency at Ubisoft Montreal’s
video game studio”. In: Organization Science, 27 (3),
pp. 614–632. DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2016.1062.
- Lê, P. L. et al. (2013). “Technological change at the heart of
the creative process: Insights from the videogame industry”. In:

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International Journal of Arts Management, 15 (2), pp. 45–59. URL:

https://www.jstor.com/stable/24587112.
- Hodgson, D. and L. Briand (2013). “Controlling the uncontrollable:
‘Agile’ teams and illusions of autonomy in creative work”. In: Work,
Employment and Society, 27 (2), pp. 308–325. DOI: 10.1177/
0950017012460315.
- Cohendet, P. and L. Simon (2007). “Playing across the
playground: Paradoxes of knowledge creation in the videogame
firm”. In: Journal of Organizational Behavior, 28 (5),
pp. 587–605. DOI: 10.1002/job.460.
- Simon, L. (2006). “Managing creative projects: An empirical
synthesis of activities”. In: International Journal of Project
Management, 24 (2), pp. 116–126. DOI :
10.1016/j.ijproman.2005.09.002.
- Walfisz, M. et al. (2006). “Real-time strategy: Evolutionary game
development”. In: Business Horizons, 49 (6), pp. 487–498. DOI:
10.1016/j.bushor.2006.04.001.
- Tschang, F. T. and J. Szczypula (2006). “Idea creation,
constructivism and evolution as key characteristics in the
videogame artifact design process”. In: European Management
Journal, 24 (4), pp. 270–287. DOI :
10.1016/j.emj.2006.05.003.
- Tschang, T. (2005). “Videogames as interactive experiential
products and their manner of development”. In: International
Journal of Innovation Management, 9 (1), pp. 103–131. DOI:
10.1142/S1363919605001198.

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5.2 Business
Business is an applied part of the vast field of economics (which ranges all
the way from micro to macro). The focus in this book is limited to studies
that have empirical data from game development and address aspects
affecting such operations. This excludes not only all macroeconomic
aspects, but also many of the microeconomic studies that focus on the
digital games market without considering actual development. The focus
here is mainly on business studies. Business involves aspects related
to marketing, finance, information intelligence and entrepreneurship.
As for any company, business aspects tightly control the operation and
survival of a game studio. With the new value chain and its possibility of
self-publishing, developers also have to manage publishing aspects.
The community of academics studying business has shown major
interest in the game industry. As game revenues are substantial, this is not
surprising. However, research focusing on development aspects is quite
limited. Most business studies focus on higher level industrial aspects
and are thus not included in this book. One such area that has received
a lot of attention is the concept of creative cities and the mechanisms
behind successful clusters of companies. Although studies at a higher
level (e.g. Corts and Lederman, 2009; Marchand and Hennig-Thurau,
2013; Ernkvist and Ström, 2018) may help developers in their decision
making, they do not really link to the development process and are thus
excluded from this book. The enforcement of this imperfect boundary
resembles the article exclusions in previous chapters. However, this
book aims only to give a very broad overview. Anyone interested in a
specific area will have to go beyond the material highlighted here. The
recommended reading in section 5.4 is a good starting point.

5.2.1 Research overview

Excluding all high-level studies of creative cities still leaves a number
of studies (e.g. Pottie-Sherman and Lynch, 2019; Chaminade, Martin
and McKeever, 2020; Lehtonen, Ainamo and Harviainen, 2019) with a
regional focus on the game development business. These studies have

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a studio-close perspective and include empirical data from individual

developers. One such study is Chaminade, Martin and McKeever (2020).
This analyses the role of local and global networks for developers in
southern Sweden. The authors conclude:
The findings provide a more nuanced view on the
complementarities between regional and global innovation
networks. Indeed, firms draw upon various regional and global
networks in order to develop more efficient, cost effective, and
innovative products and services. Conversely, localized
interactions and knowledge exchange can also act as a catalyst
and enabler for [global innovation network] engagement.
(Chaminade, Martin and McKeever, 2020, p. 12.)

In other words, the study questions the one-sided focus on the local
network in creative industries. This conclusion is supported in studies
of other game clusters in Canada, Finland and Japan. In one interesting
study Lehtonen, Ainamo and Harviainen (2019), industry professionals
were asked to each draw a picture of their local game ecosystem. These
drawings showed a great variation in style. They also revealed that
developers have a perception of closeness that does not necessarily relate
to geography:
Although the respondents were asked to focus on their physical
location, several drawings transcended their setting spatially, thus
highlighting the importance of global networks at a local level.
(Lehtonen, Ainamo and Harviainen, 2019, p. 12.)

There are several business research studies that focus on crowdfunding

(e.g. Cha, 2017; Steigenberger, 2017). Steigenberger (2017) surveys
supporters of reward-based crowdfunding to discover their motives for
supporting specific projects. The results show that most supporters are
driven by a desire to acquire the product. These investors focus on
supporting specific persons or firms to develop the product they envision.
These results have implications for how developers should approach
crowdfunding campaigns:

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The insights obtained in this study imply that the entrepreneurs

will need to focus on a market niche and also address the altruistic
and information motives to some degree in order to be successful,
where finding the appropriate market niche is of much higher
importance. In addition, the entrepreneurs might benefit from
sending signals of professionalism. (Steigenberger, 2017, p. 350.)

Styhre and Remneland-Wikhamn (2019) is a study focusing on

independent game developers and their attitudes towards money. It is
based on interviews. These were mainly with developers, but people in
peripheral roles (educators, journalists, incubator managers, etc.) were
also included. The study shows that indie developers have a complex
relationship with money and business logic. In general, they are sceptical
of game development’s commercial side:
In many cases, the business side of video game development was
treated as a necessary evil that needs to be contained within broader
professional commitments to video game development. (Styhre
and Remneland-Wikhamn, 2019, p. 12.)

This attitude differs from that of other entrepreneurs in the IT sector.

Despite this attitude, there is still an acceptance that, provided they do
not focus on monetary aspects during development, successful
independent games generate large profits for their developers. There is a
gaming ethos that regulates how, for example, in-game purchases can
affect progress in the game. The different relationship to money is also
noticeable in salary levels compared to those of other businesses. Styhre
and Remneland-Wikhamn (2019) conclude:
Both management studies and entrepreneurship research
scholarship should therefore pay closer attention to how
professional and social norms and values shape business practices
and industries more widely. (Styhre and Remneland-Wikhamn,
2019, p. 20.)

One interesting study (Dezso, Grohsjean and Kretschmer, 2010) uses the
credit listing of MobyGames (Blue Flame Labs, 2020) in combination

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with US revenue data to analyse how commercial success is determined

by team members’ experience (managerial experience included therein).
This approach differs drastically from management studies in that it uses
a quantitative instrument and is only concerned with commercial success.
One of this study’s findings is that the task experience (e.g. 3D modelling)
of people in leading roles is not an indicator of likely success. However,
their managerial experience is. The study also looks at the impact of team
familiarity (team members having worked together in previous projects)
and firm familiarity (team members having worked on projects in the
same firm). Game companies are given the following recommendations
by the authors:
If a firm has effective coordination routines, teams can be put
together based on criteria other than team familiarity, as shared
firm experience is sufficient to achieve effective coordination.
Absent such established routines, fluid teams might decrease
performance, at least in the short term. In the long run, fluid teams
may increase teaming experience and thus compensate for
short-term performance deficits. (Dezso, Grohsjean and
Kretschmer, 2010, p. 5.)

The research in the business area includes both qualitative and quantitative
studies (the latter slightly dominating). Sweden and North America are
strongly represented in this research. The studies mainly involve smaller,
independent developers but, AAA game companies are also present.

5.2.2 Recommended reading

This is a must-read for anyone interested in business research that
addresses game development:
- Styhre, A. and B. Remneland-Wikhamn (2019). “The ambiguities
of money-making: Indie video game developers and the norm of
creative integrity”. In: Qualitative Research in Organizations and
Management, 15 (3), DOI: 10.1108/QROM-02-2019-1733.

For those who wish to continue reading about business research, I

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recommend the following articles:

- Chaminade, C. et al. (2020). “When regional meets global:
exploring the nature of global innovation networks in the video
game industry in Southern Sweden”. In: Entrepreneurship &
Regional Development, pp. 1–16. DOI :
10.1080/08985626.2020.1736184.
- Lehtonen, M. J. et al. (2019). “The four faces of creative industries:
Visualising the game industry ecosystem in Helsinki and Tokyo”.
In: Industry and Innovation, pp. 1–26. DOI: 10.1080/13662716.
2019.1676704.
- Dezso, C. L. et al. (2010). “The what, the who, and the how:
Coordination experience and team performance in the electronic
game industry”. In: Academy of Management Proceedings, 2010
(1), pp. 1–6. DOI: 10.5465/ambpp.2010.54493896.

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 5.3 Publishing and analytics

5.3 Publishing and analytics

The business models used for games have shifted over the years. They link
to game design in several ways. Arcade games were the first commercial
games. Here, players paid a small amount to play for a limited amount of
time. Thus, it was important for game designers to balance play duration
and profitability. Players must not end up feeling robbed but, at the same
time, their single payment must not give them hours of play.
For console and PC games, the traditional business model was
pay-to-play, i.e. customers payed a fixed one-time amount for the game.
Games were sold in relatively standardised price ranges. A baseline price
for a AAA game was around EUR 60. With this model, a culture evolved
whereby it was important to provide long playtimes.
Online gaming introduced the subscription-based business model (or
game-as-a-service). Here, players pay a monthly fee that gives access to
game servers and services. An important component of these games is
the social dimension of playing.
Finally, social-network and mobile games popularised the
free-to-play5 business model. Here, revenue can come from
micro-transactions such as players paying to buy virtual items. Another
possible source of income is the inclusion of advertisements that
interrupt gameplay (e.g. see Burns, Roseboom and Ross, 2016).

In the game industry’s traditional value chain (figure 5.1), the developer
focused on producing a game that was delivered to a publisher who
duplicated physical copies for distribution to retailers. Customers bought
and played the game on hardware that was not network connected. The
amount of time spent on games, the actions player took or other details
from game sessions were not available for analysis by developers. This
meant that the only hard fact propagated back from players was the
number of sold units. Players were simply customers. Publishers were
responsible for marketing, sales and negotiations with developers. In

5 The terms free-to-play and freemium are typically used interchangeably. See Alha
(2019) for a review of free-to-play research.

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€ € €

Developer Publisher Retailer Customer

Figure 5.1: The traditional value chain for games where money is the
only thing flowing from players to developers.

turn, these latter were mainly concerned with game development.

This value chain has undergone a notable change over the past 25
years. Through game telemetry, the introduction of online gaming has
provided new ways of monitoring player activity. It has also provided
developers with new distribution models (figure 5.2) that enable
self-publishing. Distribution platforms such as Google Play, App Store
and Steam charge developers relatively small sums for their service.
Consequently, a larger part of the upfront payment reaches the
developer6 .
However, digital distribution platforms provide very limited
publishing support. Although, in practice, anybody can publish games
on these platforms, very few will be selected for promotion by the
platform. This has led to a situation where increasing numbers of
developers need to carry out tasks that have traditionally been carried out
by publishers. Developers can also trace player activity at a very detailed
level. This enables the use of a rich set of analytical tools that aid
business and design decisions. According to Drachen, El-Nasr and
Canossa (2013), three types of metrics are used in game analytics:
- User metrics – these relate to user activity from the perspective
that they are either customers or players.

6 Note that the models presented here are highly schematic. Important elements such
as hardware manufacturers, middleware providers, outsourcing companies, etc. have
been omitted.

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 5.3 Publishing and analytics

€ €

Digital Distribution
Platform

Developer Customer/Player

Figure 5.2: The new value chain for games where players provide
developers with both data and money. The publisher and retailer have
been replaced by a digital distribution platform.

- Performance metrics – these relate to the technical performance of

games when they are run on different platforms, potentially with
networks and servers.
- Process metrics – these relate to the performance of the
development team.

This section focuses on an intersection of these metrics that illuminate

management and business aspects, many of which have traditionally been
handled by a publisher.

5.3.1 Research overview

The majority of the research on game analytics focuses on free-to-play
games. In this business model, developers depend on active players
providing revenue through in-app purchasing or accepting exposure to
advertising.
Player retention is the key metric studied in the vast majority of
articles. It is the percentage of players returning to a game after the
initial session. Many studies (e.g. Weber et al., 2011; Burns, Roseboom
and Ross, 2016; Mäntymäki, Hyrynsalmi and Koskenvoima, 2019;
Lassila, Moilanen and Järvinen, 2019) highlight the importance of

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retention. Lassila, Moilanen and Järvinen (2019) conducted interviews at

four Finnish game companies that develop free-to-play games. They
interviewed people at different levels, from operational to executive. The
results show that most respondents identified retention as the key metric.
One business manager stated:
Retention has to be good. And to achieve that good retention, the
game itself has to be good for real, . . . (Lassila, Moilanen and
Järvinen, 2019, p. 2154.)

This quote illustrates the company making a straight connection between

retention and game quality. Companies also consider monetisation
aspects to be easier to fix once retention is good. Retention is also
highlighted as an important factor in pay-to-play games. Weber et al.
(2011) present a study focusing on retention in the AAA game Madden
NFL. The reasons they give for focusing on retention resemble those for
free-to-play games, but with a longer timescale:
The intended impact of answering these questions is to improve
player retention, which will increase potential for year-to-year
purchases and secondary revenue sources, such as in-game
purchases. (Weber et al., 2011, p. 1701.)

Many articles analyse retention for specific games (e.g. Demediuk et al.,
2018; Debeauvais et al., 2011; Park et al., 2017). Some of these focus on
retention in massive multiplayer games. Park et al. (2017) analyse player
logs from a long-running Taiwanese MMORPG and use a regression
model to identify factors that predict retention. In this analysis, they
consider players’ “virtual life phases” (which more or less correspond to
the level players have reached in the game). The results show that while
the social activities of high-level players have a strong predictive
strength, achievements do not. However, low level players’ achievements
have a major impact. The authors give developers the following
recommendations:
Game designers may offer fast achievement-oriented scenarios
at the beginning, while motivate players to form strong social

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relationships long before they reach any advanced level. (Park

et al., 2017, p. 452.)

This study illustrates the dual role of analytics. They support business
goals while also addressing game design aspects. Lassila, Moilanen and
Järvinen (2019) report that, when weak retention was detected,
management trusted developers to improve the game. Analytics were
then used by developers to create a more detailed understanding of the
game and its weaknesses. The authors summarise this dual role:
These metrics, as inscriptions, concretised the enjoyment from
the creativity perspective and money spending from the economic
perspective, and thus worked through analytics as a mediating
instrument [. . . ] linking the domains of creativity and financial
reasoning together. (Lassila, Moilanen and Järvinen, 2019, p.
2155.)

Not surprisingly (considering the nature of the field), there is a strong

focus on quantitative methods in the research. However, there are some
qualitative studies (e.g. Mäntymäki, Hyrynsalmi and Koskenvoima, 2019;
Su, Backlund and Engström, 2020; Lassila, Moilanen and Järvinen, 2019)
where developers are interviewed about their opinions of analytics and
self-publishing. These studies give insights into the motivations for
companies to use analytics:
We don’t do analytics because they are cheaper, but because they
are better. I never trust people who say, ’If you would develop
this, I would use it all the time.’ Only when I can measure that
they really use it, will I believe it. (Mäntymäki, Hyrynsalmi and
Koskenvoima, 2019, p. 8.)

They also reveal that small and medium-sized companies have very
limited resources for carrying out analytics. They use standard tools and
struggle to interpret the results. A CEO at a small Chinese independent
studio explains:
We do not have dedicated analysts so we cannot do deep analysis
of these data. All we do is simply collect the data using third-party

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game analytics tools and compared with the benchmark if we meet

the requirement. (Su, Backlund and Engström, 2020, p. 5.)

In a different study, Mäntymäki, Hyrynsalmi and Koskenvoima (2019)

draw the following conclusion from their interviews with small and
medium-sized companies:
Overall, our study portrays a different picture of game analytics
than the prior research that has listed numerous opportunities
and introduced sophisticated technological solutions for analyzing
gameplay data. (Mäntymäki, Hyrynsalmi and Koskenvoima, 2019,
p. 11.)

It is notable that most research on analytics does not address

development activities or the importance of different aspects of
gameplay. This community’s very strong focus on free-to-play games is
not visible in other communities, something highlighted by Alha (2019).
Alha was also involved in one of the few studies of free-to-play games
that, conducted outside the business area, interviewed developers (Alha
et al., 2014).
Although the vast majority of studies focuses on retention analytics,
there are some (e.g. Su, Backlund and Engström, 2020; Lin, Bezemer
and Hassan, 2018; Dheandhanoo, Theppaitoon and Setthawong, 2016)
that involve aspects that have traditionally been handled by publishers
(e.g. marketing, community management and release strategies). Via
analysing data from the Steam distribution platform, Lin, Bezemer and
Hassan (2018) study the early access release strategy. They find that 15%
of the games on Steam use this model and that the vast majority of said
games are from independent developers. Via analyses of release notes,
reviews and community discussions, they show that this release strategy
can be useful for small studios, but should not be used as a main funding
source. In the early access phase, community feedback is geared more
towards qualitative rather than quantitative ratings. There is also no need
to rush into releasing a game:
It appears that the tolerance of players is not correlated with the
length of the early access, though other factors might be at play,

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 5.3 Publishing and analytics

such as the budget and funding of their games. (Lin, Bezemer and
Hassan, 2018, p. 791.)

There is a relatively broad geographical representation in the publishing

and analytics research. North America, Europe and Asia are all strongly
represented. There is also quite a wide mix of studies from small
independent studios to major AAA companies.

5.3.2 Recommended reading

This is a must-read for anyone interested in game publishing and analytics
research:
- Mäntymäki, M. et al. (2019). “How do small and medium-sized
game companies use analytics? An attention-based view of game
analytics”. In: Information Systems Frontiers, 22, pp. 1–16. DOI:
10.1007/s10796-019-09913-1.

For those who wish to continue reading about game publishing and
analytics research, I recommend the following articles:
- Hullett, K. et al. (2011). “Data analytics for game development
(NIER track)”. In: ICSE Conference Proceedings. IEEE,
pp. 940–943. DOI: 10.1145/1985793.1985952.
- Lassila, E. M. et al. (2019). “Visualising a ‘good game’: Analytics
as a calculative engine in a digital environment”. In: Accounting,
Auditing & Accountability Journal, DOI: 10 . 1108 / AAAJ - 11 -
2017-3252.
- Lin, D. et al. (2018). “An empirical study of early access games on
the Steam platform”. In: Empirical Software Engineering, 23 (2),
pp. 771–799. DOI: 10.1007/s10664-017-9531-3.
- Su, Y. et al. (2020). “Business intelligence challenges for
independent game publishing”. In: International Journal of
Computer Games Technology, 2020, DOI :
10.1155/2020/5395187.
- Park, K. et al. (2017). “Achievement and friends: Key factors
of player retention vary across player levels in online multiplayer

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games”. In: WWW Conference Proceedings, pp. 445–453. DOI :

10.1145/3041021.3054176.

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 5.4 Other aspects

5.4 Other aspects

Here, this book focuses on the development team and how it approaches
development. Said approach may be “reductionistic” (Ruffino, 2013),
i.e. it may not consider the larger, surrounding system. This latter
may include the wider economic structures that strongly influence all
developers. It is common for games to be studied at higher levels than
the studio. For example, a lot of attention has been paid to: studies of the
game industry in different regions; studies of creative cities; and, business
studies that look at not only the entire value chain from hardware to retail,
but also supporting industries (game journals, etc.). Political economy,
is distinct from traditional economics in that it focuses on power and
inequality aspects (Kerr, 2006). Although politico-economic factors and
power structures obviously have a great impact on studio operation, these
aspects of game development are not covered here. This is not to say that
they are not relevant to game research, simply that they are outside the
scope of this book.

5.4.1 Recommended reading

For readers interested in exploring the bigger development picture, I
recommend the following sources:
- Zackariasson, P. and T. L. Wilson (2012). The Video Game
Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future. Routledge. ISBN:
9781138803831.
- Keogh, B. (2019). “From aggressively formalised to intensely
in/formalised: Accounting for a wider range of videogame
development practices”. In: Creative Industries Journal, 12 (1),
pp. 14–33. DOI: 10.1080/17510694.2018.1532760.
- Kerr, A. (2017). Global Games: Production, Circulation and
Policy in the Networked Era. Routledge. ISBN: 9780415858878.
- Kerr, A. (2006). The Business and Culture of Digital Games:
Gamework and Gameplay. Sage. ISBN: 9781412900478.
- Dyer-Witheford, N. and G. De Peuter (2009). Games of Empire:
Global Capitalism and Video Games. University of Minnesota

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Press. ISBN: 978-0-8166-6611-9.

- Izushi, H. and Y. Aoyama (2006). “Industry evolution and
cross-sectoral skill transfers: A comparative analysis of the video
game industry in Japan, the United States, and the United
Kingdom”. In: Environment and Planning A, 38 (10),
pp. 1843–1861. DOI: 10.1068/a37205.
- Ernkvist, M. and P. Ström (2018). “Differentiation in digital
creative industry cluster dynamics: the growth and decline of the
Japanese video game software industry”. In: Geografiska Annaler:
Series B, Human Geography, 100 (3), pp. 263–286. DOI:
10.1080/04353684.2017.1423506.
- Chung, P. and A. Fung (2013). “Internet development and the
commercialization of online gaming in China”. In: Gaming
Globally: Production, Play, and Place. Ed. by N. B. Huntemann
and B. Aslinger. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 233–250. DOI:
10.1057/9781137006332_17.
- Siemiatycki, E. et al. (2016). “Trouble in paradise: Resilience
and Vancouver’s second life in the ‘new economy’”. In: Urban
Geography, 37 (2), pp. 183–201. DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2015.
1068526.

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 5.5 Forums for management and business game research

5.5 Forums for management and business game

research
Game development research in the management and business
communities appears to be published almost exclusively in journals that
have a clear focus on organisations and management. Consequently,
titles such as International Journal of Innovation Management,
International Journal on Media Management, Industry and Innovation
and Organization Science are represented in the references identified in
this chapter.
Industry and Innovation states the following in its aims and scope
section:
Interdisciplinary in nature, Industry and Innovation is informed by,
and contributes in turn to, advancing the theoretical frontier within
economics, management, sociology, and economic geography.
(Taylor & Francis, 2020b.)
Games are not mentioned explicitly anywhere in the said section. The
same applies to the Organization Science journal which:
publishes fundamental research about organizations, including
their processes, structures, technologies, identities, capabilities,
forms, and performance. Research from different disciplines, such
as organizational behavior and theory, strategic management,
psychology, sociology, economics, political science, information
systems, technology management, communication, and cognitive
science, is represented in the journal. (Informs, 2020.)
In general, games are not highlighted in the journals focusing on
management and business. The closest we get is a focus on innovation
and creativity.
The lack of focus on games in these fields makes it difficult to identify
forums for publication of game development research. In the literature
reviews I have conducted, no management or business journal stands
out as the primary forum for game-related research. It appears that
management and business research on game development is scattered
over a large number of journals.

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 6. Serious game development

As pointed out in the introduction, this book uses serious games as a

collective term. It includes all approaches that use games or game design
for functional purposes. Serious games, educational games, gamification
and similar concepts have received a lot of research attention since the
’70s. Despite this great interest, such games have not had a huge impact
on society. Few serious game companies have been successful1 . Even if a
serious game company is successful, it does not automatically mean that
their developed games provide an interesting experience. The commercial
success of a serious game company may not necessarily be attributable
to the developed games attracting player interest. It may simply be that
the company was able to attract and satisfy clients. Attracting the interest
of those who pay is more important than pleasing those who play. When
browsing Google Play, it is sometimes painful to read the download count
for serious games that companies have developed with funding from
other organisations.
Although the reasons for this lack of success can be discussed, the

1 One of the many unsuccessful serious game companies was Sevenatus (2007 – 2012),
which I co-founded with three colleagues. Despite successful results both clinically
(Slijper et al., 2014) and as a gaming experience (Taylor et al., 2009) our attempts to
commercialise a stroke rehabilitation console were unsuccessful.
 Chapter 6. Serious game development

Serious games developer organisation

Technology
User organisation

IS Dev. Process IS application

Organisational

IS developer
Domain

User
Organisational
Producer
Experience

Audio Writing

Design Art Player

Figure 6.1: A typical serious game development scenario.

failure is, in itself, a clear warning. Research results based on serious

projects where the games have excited very little player interest should
not be applied to game development in general. This is particularly true
if a game was never made available outside its research context.
Evaluating the qualities of such games is very difficult. The term serious
games is, perhaps, an oxymoron. It is indeed hard to combine a serious
goal and maintain the nature of games. I argue that serious game
development should be regarded as a combination of game development
(figure 2.2) and development of information systems (figure 2.1). The
result is a highly complex scenario (figure 6.1) in which developers need
to incorporate an organisational aspect and where the target audience has
a dual role as both a user (from an organisational perspective) and a
player (from a game perspective).
This chapter highlights research projects that study the development
of games that have had some success combining the two. The current
section mainly presents studies of educational games. While the serious
game area contains other types of applications, there is a lack of research
on the development of such applications in the wild.

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 6.1 Research overview

6.1 Research overview

Quite a number of studies propose methods or strategies for serious game
development. Most of these studies are based on a single case or use a
single case to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methods. Said
cases vary from relationship and sex education (Arnab and Clarke, 2017),
literacy (Guardiola and Czauderna, 2018), Euclidean division (Alaoui
et al., 2020) to the training of levee patrollers (Harteveld et al., 2010). To
this list, I might as well add my own study of the development of a game
teaching confirmands about the Old Testament (Engström et al., 2011).
Based on these single case studies, the usefulness of the
above-mentioned proposals is hard to evaluate. However, compared to
the number of serious games that are developed and actually used, the
number of these methods/strategies is striking. One of the most extensive
of the aforementioned proposals comes from Arnab and Clarke (2017).
Combining frameworks and methodologies from four different
application areas, they create a transdisciplinary hybrid. One component
in said hybrid is the Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics (MDA) framework
(Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek, 2004). This comes from the game design
area. Yet another is the four-dimensional framework (De Freitas et al.,
2010) for evaluating serious games and analysing their design. Finally,
there are two frameworks that were incorporated for those development
processes that comprise pre-production, production and post-production
phases. In one case study, this complex method was used to develop a
learning game. However, this latter was only evaluated with respect to
the serious goals and the results did not show any clear advantage of
using a game rather than traditional teaching. This led the authors to
conclude:
The findings based on the evaluation emphasise on the complexity
of the subject matter and that there should be more iteration to
be done to the game to take into account the pre- and post-game
knowledge and attitude of the learners. (Arnab and Clarke, 2017,
p. 297.)

There was no evaluation of the actual development process or the user

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gaming experience. Use of the MDA framework was considered to

guarantee a good gaming experience:
Consulting the MDA provided user experiences that matched the
intended delivery methods, allowing for a game to be compatibly
designed alongside the pedagogic objectives set out. (Arnab and
Clarke, 2017, p. 302.)

It should be noted that MDA is a game design conceptualisation that

aims to: “Bridge the gap between game design and development, game
criticism, and technical game research” (Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek,
2004, p. 1). However, it does not provide any mechanisms for evaluating
gaming experience (or guaranteeing the success of this latter).
There is a general lack of studies that, without strong intervention by
researchers, evaluate the usage of serious games in a naturalistic
organisational context (Backlund et al., 2017). As highlighted by
Passarelli et al. (2020) in an interview study of social science researchers
and developers, there is also a general gap between researchers and
applied game development. To a large extent, researchers focus on
serious games and this is also their only contact with the game industry:
Experiences of joint collaborations between research and game
industry reported by participants were exclusively related to serious
games, and had either started out as pure research projects, or,
alternatively, as European/regional projects explicitly conceived
to develop a serious game through cross-collaborations between
academic and industrial entities. (Passarelli et al., 2020, p. 6.)

The developers, however, reported that they found this work to be hard to
transform into something useful:
The interviews with developers, meanwhile, demonstrated that
developers found it difficult to identify the practical applications
of much social sciences research, especially from a market
perspective. (Passarelli et al., 2020, p. 7.)

This illustrates that there is a significant distance between the serious

game research community and applied game development.

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6.1 Research overview

Holvikivi, Juurola and Nuorteva (2018) present an interesting

approach to bridging the gap between developers and researchers.
Examining the Edudigi project (a platform for collaborative development
of educational games with stakeholders from universities, primary
schools, game companies and science centres), they identify a number of
challenges for collaboration such as: “Different timespan and periods of
activity in educational institutions and private companies” (Holvikivi,
Juurola and Nuorteva, 2018, p. 9.); privacy and intellectual property
rights; and, different stakeholder views of the roles of games in
education. Different views are maybe the most fundamental gap where:
Game developers seek to create games that are addictive and fun
whereas educators want tools that support curriculum goals and
enhance learning. (Holvikivi, Juurola and Nuorteva, 2018, p. 9.)

This mirrors the observations made above.

Most research on serious game development is conducted within the
context of (publicly funded) research projects. This entails conditions that
are fundamentally different from those in projects that follow commercial
principles. Holvikivi, Juurola and Nuorteva (2018) highlight this:
Most of the above-mentioned free games had been developed in
some project with public funding. Unfortunately, the development
and maintenance of the game usually stops when project funding
ends, and the products soon disappear from the market. (Holvikivi,
Juurola and Nuorteva, 2018, p. 5.)

Along with Ruggiero and Watson (2014) and Tran and Biddle (2008),
the cited study is one of the few to include empirical data from
commercial serious game development. Ruggiero and Watson (2014)
asked 22 game designers their views of educational game design. Here,
with the background argument that: “Research has demonstrated that the
carrot and stick approach of educational game design is not effective”
(Ruggiero and Watson, 2014, p. 473.), one focus was how designers got
players to reflect on their experience. This article interestingly observes
that asking designers to present their processes is problematic: “It’s all
tied together, the algorithms dictate the content, but we decide the

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process” (Ruggiero and Watson, 2014, p. 478). Despite this, the authors
find strong indications that a common theme in the responses is the
plasticity of the process and that development is an ongoing, upward
spiralling process.

There is a strong European domination in studies of serious game

development. Case-study is the dominant method. Most often, it relates
to proof-of-concept studies conducted by the researchers themselves.
This risks a self-confirmatory bias, i.e. researchers having personal
interests in showing the benefits of their game or method. Very few
studies analyse games or game development in which researchers are not
personally invested.
A lot of the research of serious games does not give clear evidence
that it involves games that would be popularly regarded as such. There is
rarely evidence that the developed game attracts the interest of players.

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 6.2 Recommended reading

6.2 Recommended reading

This is a must-read for anyone interested in serious game development
research:
- Ruggiero, D. and W. R. Watson (2014). “Engagement through
praxis in educational game design: Common threads”. In:
Simulation & Gaming, 45, pp. 471–490. DOI :
10.1177/1046878114553570.

For those who wish to continue reading about serious game development
research, I recommend the following articles:
- Holvikivi, J. et al. (2018). “Collaboration platform for public and
private actors in educational games development”. In: OCCE
Conference Proceedings. Springer, pp. 141–150. DOI: 10.1007/
978-3-030-23513-0_14.
- Passarelli, M. et al. (2020). “The distant horizon: Investigating the
relationship between social sciences academic research and game
development”. In: Entertainment Computing, 34, pp. 1–8. DOI:
10.1016/j.entcom.2020.100339.
- Harteveld, C. et al. (2010). “Balancing play, meaning and reality:
The design philosophy of LEVEE PATROLLER”. in: Simulation
& Gaming, 41 (3), pp. 316–340. DOI :
10.1177/1046878108331237.
- Arnab, S. and S. Clarke (2017). “Towards a trans-disciplinary
methodology for a game-based intervention development process”.
In: British Journal of Educational Technology, 48 (2), pp. 279–312.
DOI : 10.1111/bjet.12377.
- Tran, M. Q. and R. Biddle (2008). “Collaboration in serious game
development: A case study”. In: Future Play Conference
Proceedings. ACM, pp. 49–56. DOI :
10.1145/1496984.1496993.

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 Chapter 6. Serious game development

6.3 Forums for serious games development research

There is major interest in research into serious games (gamification
included therein). This implies that there is room for many forums
(journals, conferences, etc.) publishing such research. Most of the
conferences and journals listed in previous chapters accept research that
includes serious aspects of gaming. In addition, there are forums that
have an explicit focus on serious applications. These latter are sometimes
narrowed to specific fields such as games for health or educational games.
As this book focuses on game development in the wild, the number
of relevant forums is limited. The oldest and most prestigious journal
publishing serious games research is Simulation & Gaming (Sage, 2020c).
Although it has published articles centred on regular games, its focus is:
“. . . exploration and development of simulation/gaming methodologies
used in education, training, consultation, and research” (Sage, 2020c.).
Another journal that has published articles highlighted in this chapter
is the British Journal of Educational Technology (Wiley, 2020). As
the name suggests, this journal focuses on technology that supports
education and, for example, how the introduction of digital tools leads
to improvements of formal and informal education programmes. Hence,
this is not a journal that is specifically focused on games.
The International Journal of Serious Games publishes articles that
address: “theoretical, experimental and operational aspects in the areas
related to design, development, engineering, deployment and assessment
of digital Serious Games.” (Society, 2020.) However, despite the
journal’s explicit focus on development, there are very few articles
presenting empirical data from applied serious games development in the
wild. EAI Endorsed Transactions on Serious Games (EAI, 2020) is
another journal focusing on serious games. It highlights technology and
tools for serious games, but does not have an explicit focus on
development.

The papers identified in this chapter were published at several different

conferences. Open Conference on Computers in Education (OCCE),

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6.3 Forums for serious games development research

Future Play and Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious
Applications (VS-GAMES) were three of these. There are probably many
more examples of such conferences, but there is no clear candidate for a
forum that focuses on serious games development.

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 7. The game industry perspective

As should be clear from previous chapters, game development in the

wild has not been studied intensively by researchers and there are many
areas where there are clear gaps. This chapter aims to provide pointers to
resources that lie outside strictly academic research. To fill the gaps in
research and better understand game development, there is great incentive
for students and academics to investigate these industry-oriented forums.

Hugely successful in creating games that have attracted millions of users,

the game industry has grown to be an important part of the entertainment
industry. Variations in hardware, genres and content are huge and,
perhaps, symptomatic of the expansion over the past 50 years or so. It is
clear that said expansion has involved a large amount of development
and research in game companies. Makarovych et al. (2018) pointed out
the foregoing at an artificial intelligence conference:
The vast majority of the research being conducted takes place in
the industry, and only limited portions of this is publicly available
[. . . ] While this is arguably exciting, it also means that situating
research within the state-of-the-art of previous work is challenging
at best, notably for industry based research. . . (Makarovych et al.,
2018, p. 1.)
 Chapter 7. The game industry perspective

This situation is not unique to the game industry. Major companies in

the IT sector have access to resources and data that far exceed what is
available to academic institutions.
It is important to note that industry research is not conducted with the
same principles as academic research. First of all, companies develop
new knowledge and solutions primarily to develop their own business.
The majority of results produced in a company are not disclosed to the
public. Secondly, the quality standards (e.g. validity and reliability) of
such research are as high as the company decides. In particular, there is
no need to show that results can be useful to any entity other than the
company in question. Finally, this research is funded and controlled by
the management of the company. There are no, or very few, opportunities
for researchers to question existing norms or to challenge owner interests.
There is nothing comparable to academia’s principle of academic freedom.
Yet, it is important to protect this latter. It has the potential to generate
research for the greater good rather than for greater quarterly earnings.
Nonetheless, game companies do release and disseminate flows of
results via various channels. Individual developers and companies share
some of their results and experiences with colleagues and the general
public. This type of information is an important resource for industry
professionals who want to develop their skills. In the interview study
conducted by Passarelli et al. (2020) developers stated that they did not
primarily go to academic sources when they wanted updating on social
science and innovation. Instead, they went to industry sources such as
GDC Vault and Gamasutra.
Industry sources cannot be used directly as academic results.
However, they serve as important sources of information on the game
industry’s perspective. Researchers can aggregate and analyse data from
such sources. This processed information gives a more comprehensive
picture and there are many examples of articles that present results from
such studies (e.g. Lu, Peltonen and Nummenmaa, 2019; Consalvo and
Paul, 2018; Petrillo et al., 2009).
This chapter presents some well-known channels in which game
developers share their findings. The list it uses is by no means

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comprehensive. It simply reflects the types of sources cited and used in
the game development research articles presented in previous chapters1 .

1 The PhD dissertation of Whitson (2013) is not included in this book’s material.
However, said dissertation contains a good example of how industry sources have
been used extensively in research. For a list of materials used in doctoral research,
see appendix C of the dissertation.

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 Chapter 7. The game industry perspective

7.1 Game Developers Conference

The Game Developers Conference2 (GDC) is an industry-oriented forum
founded in 1988 by Chris Crawford, author of the first book on game
design (Crawford, 1984). Since then, GDC has grown to be the dominant
digital game industry forum. Its annual conference attracts a large number
of attendees from the game industry and the 2019 programme had almost
20 different so-called tracks with over 700 sessions.
With a clear North American/UK industry perspective, the conference
is based in San Francisco and its presentations are exclusively in English.
There are GDC events in other continents, but on a smaller scale. GDC is
organised by Informa, a multinational business intelligence, publishing
and event corporation. In this context, it is interesting to note that the
academic publishing division of Informa operates under the name Taylor
& Francis Group and is one of the major players in academic publishing.
Presenters at GDC are mainly professional game developers
representing successful game companies. Although the format can be
seen to support a community of practice (Lave, Wenger, et al., 1991)
amongst game developers, the GDC resembles an academic conference
in that speakers submit proposals that are reviewed by an advisory board
composed primarily of industry experts. Reviewing is not double-blind
and the “track record” from previous GDC conferences (i.e. the grades
given by the attendees) is included in the application. The GDC also has
commercial motives that could give rise to conflicts of interest.
GDC is geared towards attendee takeaways. Its presentations focus
on sharing experience and presenting novel solutions. In addition to the
conference presentations, GDC also has a strong focus on
business-oriented activities (e.g. an expo and sponsored events). The
core of the GDC is the main tracks held on the last three days. These are
preceded by two days of summits and tutorials. There is also a game
career program targeted at students.
Figure 7.1 shows the ten biggest tracks and summits in terms of
events. The figure shows that the GDC’s focus differs from that in

2 The analysis presented in this section is mainly based on Engström (2019b).

154
7.1 Game Developers Conference

Programming track 196

Design track 126
Visual arts track 97
Game business & marketing track 95
Production and team management track 65
Advocacy track 62
Audio track 60
Independent games summit 32
Narrative summit 19
Mobile summit 17

Figure 7.1: The biggest tracks and summits in terms of number of events
at the GDC 2019

academic studies of games. For example, the audio track, has three times
as many events as the narrative summit. The GDC does not focus solely
on content production. It also addresses issues related to management
and business. Some of the tracks and summits cover aspects that are
applicable across the conference’s other areas. Involving (amongst other
things) diversity, censorship and quality of life, advocacy is an example
here. Figure 7.2 shows a categorisation of the topics covered at GDC-19
(see Engström, 2019b for details).
A presentation at a GDC track or summit is not accompanied by an
article or paper. Instead, the slides and recorded presentation are made
available in the GDC Vault (Informa, 2020b). Some of these presentations
are free, but a membership is required for full access. There are both
individual (USD 550 per year) and studio memberships. The charge
and the subscriptions are evidence that the industry finds the materials
valuable.

The academic world shows little interest in GDC. Scopus returns 152
articles that reference material from GDC Vault. A
title-abstract-keyword search for “Game Developers Conference” yields

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 Chapter 7. The game industry perspective

Game Developer Perspective

Management & Business Crosswise Areas

Community Management Advocacy

Game Business & Marketing Independent Games

Production & Team Management Mobile

Content Production

Programming
Audio Design Narrative Visual Arts UX
including AI

Figure 7.2: A categorisation of the topics covered in the tracks and

summits of GDC 2019 (from Engström, 2019b).

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7.1 Game Developers Conference

10 hits. These are mostly technical (e.g. SIGGRAPH and Dr. Dobb’s
Journal). A notable exception is the frequently cited article by Hunicke,
LeBlanc and Zubek (2004) on the MDA framework (which was
developed at GDC Workshops). In GDC, the focus on academic research
is also limited. Here, the UX Summit is an exception. It mentions
“application of research findings” in its description. A search for “game
studies” in the GDC Vault returns 10 talks. These are mainly in the
Educator Summit, exceptions being four design panels (2006, 2007,
2008, and 2010) with Ian Bogost, Mia Consalvo, Jane McGonigal and
Michael Mateas (only 2010). To some extent, the GDC Vault has been
used in game development research, but there is great unused potential
for more systematic analyses of these presentations.

GDC is not the only industry-oriented conference worth noting. There

are many more such conferences and fairs all over the world. Their
focuses vary from purely business-to-business to a stronger orientation
towards players and other parts of the ecosystem. The following are a
few examples: GameDaily Connect, previously CasualConnect (held in
various parts of the world); Gamescon (Germany); IndieCade (mainly
USA); PAX (USA and Australia); Nordic Game Conference (Malmö,
Sweden); and, Swedish Game Conference (Skövde, Sweden).

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 Chapter 7. The game industry perspective

7.2 Gamasutra, 80 Level, Gamer Network and more

In addition to organising GDC, Informa is also in charge of Gamasutra
(Informa, 2020a), a leading online channel for game industry
communication. The site started as the online companion to the printed
Game Developer Magazine (published between 1994 and 2013). After
the magazine was closed down, Gamasutra continued to serve as the
prime developer-targeted publication. With both GDC and Gamasutra, it
is clear that Informa has a leading role as a provider of game production
information.
Gamasutra is frequently used and cited in academic research, but a
title-abstract-keyword search in Scopus returns only three articles. One
is a 2008 book chapter on game usability and the other two (Politowski
et al., 2016; Washburn et al., 2016) are analyses of postmortems.
Gamasutra features hundreds of postmortems where developers
summarise their experiences of game title development. This data has
been used in many studies. In addition to the three articles returned by a
title-abstract-keyword search, there is a large number of articles that
reference articles published in Gamasutra, often written by professionals
with experience of a particular topic. Gamasutra focuses on providing
useful results for professionals3 . In addition to the actual article, the
associated comment section often has reflections and discussions linked
to the topic. This is also a potential source of information for research.
80 Level is a web platform similar to Gamasutra. It promotes itself
as: “. . . an industry-leading platform for game developers, digital artists,
animators, video game enthusiasts, CGI and VFX specialists” (80 Level,
2020). Despite a clear focus on visual artist areas, it also covers technical
and development aspects. The only article I have come across that uses
information from 80 Level is Statham (2020). However, this could reflect
80 Level’s focus on graphical artists and the general dearth of research
focusing on applied game art.
Gamer Network (Reed Exhibitions, 2020) is a UK-based news
company that runs news sites such as Eurogamer and Gamesindustry.biz.

3 An excellent example is the Game Outcomes Project, presented by Tozour (2020).

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7.2 Gamasutra, 80 Level, Gamer Network and more

The latter focuses on the game industry and has the tagline “The
resource for people who make and sell games”. Eurogamer features
articles related to games and has the tagline “Bad puns and video games
since 1999”. It is oriented towards consumers. Both Eurogamer and
Gamesindustry.biz are sometimes cited in research articles. For example,
in their discussion of early access publishing, Lin, Bezemer and Hassan
(2018) reference the Eurogamer article “Valve tightens Steam Early
Access rules for developers”.
Another frequently cited source is the gaming news and opinion site
Kotaku (Gawker Media, 2020). The frequent citing is mainly due to the
role Kotaku played in the Gamergate controversy (Perreault and Vos,
2018).
Polygon (Vox Media, 2020) is a North American based game site
that publishes blogs, news and reviews of digital games and other forms
of popular culture. Polygon is frequently cited in the texts mentioned
in previous chapters (e.g. Drachen, 2015; Parker, Whitson and Simon,
2018).
As mentioned in the introduction to this section, there are many more
examples of industry-related sources that have been used in research. In
my material, I have come across MCV/Develop and Gamereactor a few
times. It is most likely that there are many similar sources that may be of
relevance.

As a research resource, all the examples highlighted in this section have

similar characteristics. They feature material that can give valuable
insights into the game industry and into game development. However,
they are published within commercial structures that often have tight
links to the industry they are reviewing. This might lead to a situation
where certain businesses may never be critically scrutinised. In some
research (e.g. Jørgensen, Sandqvist and Sotamaa, 2017) there is a clear
separation in the list of references between research literature, newspaper
articles, industry reports and online documents. This is not the case
in most research articles, all used material being presented in a single
reference list.

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 Chapter 7. The game industry perspective

7.3 Wikipedia, MobyGames, Twitch and more

Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation, 2020) is an excellent resource for
information on games, developers and technologies that are not properly
documented elsewhere. Several research projects (e.g. Politowski et al.,
2018; Kolen et al., 2018; Toftedahl and Engström, 2019) have used it
for such data. In some educational contexts, the use of Wikipedia as a
reference is questioned. Yet, as pointed out by Kultima (2015, p. 23), the
banning of Wikipedia in student essays could make it very hard to cite
game-related information.
MobyGames (Blue Flame Labs, 2020) is a credits database for games
(similar to IMDB for movies). It presents the names and roles of the
people that have been involved in the production of game titles. The data
in MobyGames has been used in some research studies (e.g. Dezso,
Grohsjean and Kretschmer, 2010; Pottie-Sherman and Lynch, 2019;
Bailey, Miyata and Yoshida, 2019). To determine the gender distribution
in different roles and how it has developed over time, one study (Bailey,
Miyata and Yoshida, 2019) interestingly analyses credit lists in
MobyGames in combination with the site genderize.io. They conclude:
Although the gender gap in game development has improved over
time, it is still far from representing the gamer population, and
the wage gap is likely to be even more difficult to close given the
disparities present in high-paying roles and leadership. (Bailey,
Miyata and Yoshida, 2019, p. 21.)

This is an example of how game development can be creatively studied

without leaving the desk.
YouTube (Google, 2020) and other streaming platforms contain huge
amounts of information about games and gameplay. Material on
developers’ processes and intentions can also possibly be found. Besides
interviews and presentations, this may be material provided by
developers themselves. Ellmann et al. (2017) highlight the presence of
software development screencast and how it can be used to analyse
developer practice. Although not specifically targeted at games, this
study illustrates the potential of YouTube as a source of developer

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7.3 Wikipedia, MobyGames, Twitch and more

information. While primarily used to stream gameplay, Twitch (Amazon,

2020) is also used to stream game development. One example of this is
the Dutch developer Vlambeer. It attracted 12,000 paying subscriptions
to its development channel (Wikipedia contributors, 2020).
One very specific source relevant to the video and streaming sources
above is the documentary Indie Game: The Movie (Swirsky and Pajot,
2012). This 2012 film gives a close insight into the creative processes
behind the indie games Super Meat Boy, FEZ and Braid.
Reddit (Advance Publications, 2020) is a forum that contains
discussions about more or less everything. Game development is
represented via a number of subreddits. There is also a huge community
devoted to games and gaming. This provides researchers with a source of
relatively uncensored opinions on various aspects of games and game
development. It has been used in several studies (e.g. Consalvo and Paul,
2018; Joseph, 2018; Lu, Peltonen and Nummenmaa, 2019). An analysis
of indie developer practice and mod makers’ attitudes towards
commercialisation of their creations is an example of one such study.
The amount of data on Reddit allows for quantitative text-mining studies.
Several qualitative approaches have also been used.
In addition to Reddit, there are discussion forums focused on games
and game development. The Independent Gaming Source (TIGSource) is
a “community of independent game developers and players” (TIGSource,
2020.) This also hosts TIGForum.

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7.4 International Game Developers Association

In 1994, Ernest Adams, co-author of one of the most popular game design
books, founded the International Game Developers Association (IGDA).
The organisation states that: “Our mission is to support and empower
game developers around the world in achieving fulfilling and sustainable
careers” (IGDA, 2020).
IGDA aims to serve as a professional organisation for game workers.
It is organised in chapters for different regions and interest groups
oriented towards special areas in game development. As regards local
chapters, there is a strong representation in North America (50 chapters).
There are some chapters in Europe4 and South America (10 – 20 each),
but relatively few in Asia and Oceania (10 chapters altogether) and very
few in Africa and the Middle East (5 chapters in total).
The interest groups are clustered in three main topics, namely,
Advocacy, Discipline and Affinity. These have the following groups:
- Advocacy Interest Groups: Allies; Anti-Censorship and Social
Issues; Climate; Developer Credit; Game Accessibility; LGBTQ+;
and, Mental Health.
- Discipline Interest Groups: Analog Games; Audio; Business
and Legal; Community Management; Free and Open Source
Software; Game Art; Game Design; Game Education; Game
Writing; Games Research and User Experience; Human
Resources; Learning, Education, and Games; Localization; Quality
Assurance; Real Money Gaming; Romance and Sexuality; Serious
Games; and, Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Realities
- Affinity Interest Groups: Blacks in Games; Devs with Kids;
Games for Health; Indie; Jewish Game Developers; Latinx in
Games; Student; Unity; and, Women in Games.

Not all of these interest groups appear to have an active community (at
least, not based on the activity in their social media accounts). However,
the channels used for the main IGDA organisation are active with a lot of

4 The Finnish IGDA chapter has been analysed by Komulainen and Sotamaa (2020).

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7.4 International Game Developers Association

events, livestreams and other activities.

IGDA publishes reports addressing various issues of the gaming
industry. This includes a biannual Developer Satisfaction Survey and a
Diversity in the Game Industry Report.

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 Chapter 7. The game industry perspective

7.5 Books with industry sources

Regard for books varies significantly between different disciplines. In
humanities and social science, books can be the main dissemination
channel for academic work. In other communities, books rarely replace
journal articles or even conference papers. It can be very hard to
determine the academic merit of a book by simply looking at the cover.
To some extent, the publisher can be an indication. However, publishing
is largely a commercial business. This introduces forces other than the
need for quality. It is possible to publish a book that has not passed the
eyes of any peer expert and, in some cases, not even the eyes of an editor.
Books are predominantly reviewed after release. Many journals publish
book reviews, in addition to original research. If a book gets many
citations, it can be seen as a retrospective acknowledgement of its
importance.
This book5 references book chapters that are indexed in the Scopus
database (which gives some level of quality assurance). With the
exception of the game design books presented in section 3.2.1, all other
books have been excluded. As discussed in that section, these books do
not qualify as research in most contexts, but have been cited and used so
frequently by game researchers that they can be considered part of a
canon (Kultima, 2015). This is why they are included in the chapter
presenting game design research.
There are several other books that include industry sources or present
experiences from game production in some way. As for the game design
books, some may qualify for inclusion in the canon of game research
while others may not. These latter may still be useful as data sources
(comparable to the sources discussed previously in this chapter). Many
such books focus on specific crafts in game development (e.g. AI, 3D
modelling or game writing). When cited in research, such books may
constitute a source of information comparable to the other sources
discussed in this chapter.
Below, there is a list of books containing useful empirical data and

5 I am fully aware that the present book would not, in itself, qualify for inclusion.

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7.5 Books with industry sources

insights from game development on a more general level. In some cases,

the books have been authored by researchers whose work is cited in the
previous chapters.
- Ramsay, M. (2012a). Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games
People Play. Apress. ISBN: 978-1-4302-3352-7.
- Ruggill, J. et al. (2016). Inside the Video Game Industry: Game
Developers Talk about the Business of Play. Routledge. ISBN:
978-0-415-82828-4.
- O’Donnell, C. (2014). Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of
Videogame Creators. MIT press. ISBN: 9780262028196.
- Taylor, T. L. (2012). Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the
Professionalization of Computer Gaming. MIT Press. ISBN:
978-0-262-01737-4.
- Arsenault, D. (2017). Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware:
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System. MIT Press. ISBN:
9780262341493.
In addition to these specific examples, MIT Press has a platform
studies series6 that includes several books, each of which highlights
specific gaming hardware.

6 The books in this series can be found through this web page:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/platform-studies.

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 8. Discussion

As pointed out in the introduction, game development covers all the

KCC’s four modalities of human creativity, i.e. science, engineering,
design and art (see figure 1.1). Hence, it is not surprising that there is
great variation in the type of research addressing said development. This
chapter returns to the “big picture” and highlights some themes running
through the previous chapters.
The first two subsections of this chapter address fundamental
differences between researchers and types of research. These differences
are hard, if not impossible, to bridge. They are represented by the
highlighted elements of the KCC in figure 8.1.
The first aspect addressed in this chapter is the gap created by
differences in scientific paradigms. To a large extent, this gap runs along
the vertical line between culture and nature in figure 8.1. Section 8.1
discusses the implications of this paradigm gap.
The second aspect addressed in this chapter is the combination of the
gaps between, on the one hand, production and perception and, on the
other, applied and non-applied research (see figure 8.1). Non-applied
research (basic or fundamental) is typically oriented towards a single
discipline and addresses fundamental questions within this discipline.
Applied research focuses on concrete problems and typically involves
 Chapter 8. Discussion

Perception &
Culture
Culture < > Nature Perception &
Nature

Information

e
nc
ie
Ar
Production < > Perception

Sc
t NA NA

Philosophy

A A

Behaviour Knowledge

NA NA

Economy

A A

En
gn

gi
si

ne
Utility
De

er
Key
in
Applied g
A
NA Non-Applied
Production & Production &
Culture Nature

Figure 8.1: The KKC (see figure 1.1 for details) with components
highlighted for the purpose of the discussions in this chapter.

aspects from several disciplines. The production-perception gap in figure

8.1 can be seen as the distinction between creating new solutions and
observing and interpreting existing phenomena. Section 8.2 combines
the aforementioned two gaps and analyses how all four different
combinations of production, perception, applied and non-applied can be
observed in game research.
In section 8.3, I address some other themes touched on in the material
in previous chapters. These are themes that run across disciplinary
boundaries.
Finally, in section 8.4, I draw some conclusions with respect to the
main goal of this book.

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 8.1 The paradigm gap

8.1 The paradigm gap

As pointed out in the introduction, interdisciplinarity is probably not
the path to pick if the goal is a successful academic career. Careerists
should focus on one discipline with a well-defined community. The
majority of game researchers are not evil careerists but, being strongly
interested in their own tradition and discipline, simply want to explore
a specific path. Gaining deep understanding of a specific aspect may
require the overlooking of most other paths. To create a photo-realistic
model for a game, a scientist may devote a great deal of time to analysing
the reflection of light in coffee. This does not necessarily require an
understanding of how the music score affects the emotional experience
of the game. If the focus is on understanding and recreating reflections
of light, it makes sense to lean towards the right side of the KCC.
Similarly, a media study scholar may analyse to what extent places
are perceived as meaningful to players of Everquest. This does not
necessarily require an understanding of the network communication
protocols used. When the focus is on human experience and
representations of culture, it makes sense to lean towards the left side of
the KCC.
It is not a problem that some research focuses on a specific aspect of
games and game development. However, it becomes a problem when
this single perspective is extrapolated to make claims for situations
where other aspects are equally important. The law of the instrument, or
Maslow’s hammer, is a good metaphor for what this attitude can lead to:
if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The challenge is
for the hammer holder to acknowledge other tools.

Game studies was established as an attempt to gather all scholars

interested in games under one umbrella. As pointed out by Deterding
(2017), this has not been possible. Deterding presents a critical reflection
of the game research landscape and makes several observations that give
perspective to, and understanding of, the challenges of interdisciplinary
research. At the most fundamental level, some differences between

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 Chapter 8. Discussion

groups of researchers are hard to bridge. The paradigm gap is one such
example. Collaborating with someone who has the goal of finding the
truth is a major challenge if it is believed that everything is in the eye of
the beholder. Of course, this applies in both directions.
A positivistic approach will be met with scepticism in some
conferences, while critical theory will not be appreciated in others.
Academic communities are formed through social mechanisms and many
academics stick to a community with a shared ontological view. This
makes research and the associated social interaction much more
frictionless. These differences go beyond academic aspects and includes
political and philosophical dimensions. This is apparent when studying
articles from different disciplines. The language and focus are notably
different in, for example, software engineering compared to game
studies. The political and societal dimensions are typically not addressed
in the former while terms like “Marx” and “capitalism”, are relatively
frequent in the latter.
Differences such as these make collaboration between disciplines
challenging and full of friction. The easy solution is to avoid tight
collaboration and work solely within the “home discipline”. This luxury
is not available to game developers. Game developers with different
backgrounds have to collaborate and resolve conflicts rooted in
differences like the one discussed above. In contrast to academics, they
do not have the choice of working individually. They have to create one
game together. The value of an understanding between groups is
highlighted in many studies of game development:
Without engineers who interface well with designers and artists,
the result is technologies that do not bridge these ways of
understanding the world; they merely reinforce the old ways.
(O’Donnell, 2009, p. 17.)
The paradigm gap runs deep into our culture and society. In many
countries, students more or less have to choose between humanities or
technology (culture or nature) at an early stage in their educational
programmes. For example, it may be difficult for an upper-secondary
student to specialise in both art and programming. I have come across

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8.1 The paradigm gap

many humanities-focused people who almost brag about their lack of

skills in maths. I have also participated in lunch conversations with
engineers who seem not to care at all about theatre, literature or even
music1 . This dichotomy between humanities and technology is
problematic for studies of game development.

Digital games are born from the marriage between: technology and art;
rules and play; and, sense and sensibility. All these perspectives are
needed to understand the birth process. I would argue that the dichotomy
between technology and humanities is socially constructed. Most children
enjoy both rhyming and counting. They enjoy both crayons and Lego.
They both sing and knock down Kapla towers with equal enthusiasm.
Talents for different things are not evenly distributed, but there is no need
to force people to choose “sides”. I consider myself to be non-binary
when it comes to humanities and technology. I am definitely of the
opinion that game developers benefit from transcending the fictional
boundary between the two.

1 Possibly with the exception of heavy metal.

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 Chapter 8. Discussion

8.2 Types of research

I argue that there are two aspects of research that run orthogonally through
the disciplines and which, because they have important implications as
to the characteristics of the research, deserve highlighting. Figure 8.2
illustrates a proposed space for empirically grounded game development
research.
The first research characteristic relates to the focus of the study (the
horizontal axis in figure 8.2). Even if research includes empirical data
from game development or makes claims about game development, the
focus can still be dominated by disciplinary perspectives (left side). In
such studies games can, for example, be seen as one of many application
areas. There is little or no interest in the complete game development
situation. The main goal is to contribute to a specific discipline. This is
often basic research (or non-applied as shown in figure 8.1). At the other
end of this spectrum (right side), the focus is on game development.
Research is approached as an activity in its own right and acknowledges
its many dimensions and the contradictory goals. In this type of research,
game development is frequently characterised as a wicked problem
(Buchanan, 1992). The goal of such research is to contribute to game
development. This corresponds to applied research as shown in figure
8.1.
The second characteristic of research relates to if it is focused on
observing others (the lower half of Figure 8.2), or if the researchers are
included themselves in the development (the upper half). This divide
can be observed in most disciplines and relates to the tension between
theory and practice (or production vs. perception as shown in figure 8.1).
Different communities use different terms. Practitioner research is a
research model where practitioners are using their professional practice
as a basis for conducting research (Allwright, 2005). This is, for example,
used in teaching, nursing, and psychotherapy research. In design theory
there is a distinction between research about design and research through
design (Frankel and Racine, 2010). In ethnographic research there is a
debate on how active or passive the researcher should be (Hammersley,
2013). In software development and engineering, it is common that

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8.2 Types of research

Performing

Example: Example:
An interactive narrative scholar presents Game developers presents a novel user
a proof of concept implementation of a experience evaluation process and
character modelling approach. presents initial reflections from its use.

Disciplinary focus Game development focus

Example: Example:
A software engineer scholar interviews A social science researcher conducts
game programmers on how well their ethnographic field studies at a game
practice meets software development company and observes the role of tools.
standards.

Observing

Figure 8.2: A characterisation of empirically grounded game

development research. The horizontal axis is the research focus and the
vertical axis is the degree of participation in development. The resultant
mixes are exemplified with a hypothetical study.

theoretical results is expected to be accompanied with a proof-of-concept

implementation.
This book focuses predominantly on the right half of figure 8.2, i.e.
research concentrating on understanding game development as an activity
in its own right. The challenge for the left half is that, when the focus
is on something else, there is a risk that it will skew the results in that
direction. This is not to say that this type of research cannot be relevant
for game developers. In fact, there are examples of relevant studies in all
corners of 8.2:
- Disciplinary focus, performing development: This corner includes
a large part of technical game research. One illustration of this is
system development supporting an isolated element (e.g. design,
writing or technical aspects) and excluding others (and overall
development). One of many possible examples is a study by Deng
et al. (2017) proposing heuristics for server allocation in
multiplayer cloud gaming. This study may be highly relevant for

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 Chapter 8. Discussion

game developers, but has a strong focus on cloud computing.

Other aspects of game development (e.g. design and art) are not
addressed.
- Game development focus, performing development: This corner
includes studies conducted by researchers participating in game
development. There are several examples of studies where at least
one of the authors is a developer at a game studio. The study by
Walfisz, Zackariasson and Wilson (2006) is a good example of this.
- Disciplinary focus, observing development: This corner includes
studies where researchers interview or observe developers and
focus on a specific aspect of development. An example is the study
by Stacey, Brown and Nandhakumar (2007) examining mobile
game developers and how they used stories in a project. This
study’s contribution targets information system development and
how the storytelling approach can be used as a tool.
- Game development focus, observing development: This corner
represents the majority of the studies highlighted in this book.
These are mainly interviews with game developers and/or
ethnographic field studies at companies. Unlike in the previous
corner, research here is focused on game development as a
compound activity. These studies acknowledge that developers
with different backgrounds and priorities collaborate. Jørgensen
(2019), for example, reports a study where ethnographic
observations, interviews and review of documentation were used
to analyse the operation of a game company.

The above characterisation of development research highlights the fact

that there is great variation in the type of research conducted (in addition
to the disciplinary breadth shown in previous chapters). Each of the
corners has its strengths and benefits. It is hard to argue that some of
them are unnecessary. However, I would assert that there is a shortage of
studies in the right half, in particular, the upper part thereof. Too many
game scholars have not participated in any game development themselves
and are more focused on perception than production.

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 8.2 Types of research

8.2.1 Why should researchers create games?

It can be argued that, if literature scholars do not need to be authors,
then why should game scholars need to be developers? However, this
comparison does lack some understanding of the fundamental differences
between game development and writing. First of all, even non-authors
have some experience of the fundamental techniques in putting words on
paper. Most probably, everyone has tried writing poems or short stories
(e.g. in school). Many people have no experience of game development
at all. They have not even tried to design a very simple board game. This
means that they have not experienced the dynamics that emerge when
people interact with a game’s designed mechanics. This is an experience
that is important for understanding the nature of game development.
On top of this, development of digital games adds an additional level
of interdisciplinary collaboration that most people are not exposed to.
People with a background in programming may be frustrated by artistic
processes that are not captured in Gantt charts. People with a humanities
background may be surprised by how long it takes to implement features
that appear trivial:
When a game-designer asks a programmer to design an animated
‘rope’ as a decorative object in a virtual setting, he thinks it’s a
very simple task and does not understand the rebuttal from the
programmer, rather promoting a stick. (Simon, 2006, p. 120.)

This interdisciplinary collaboration and the challenges presented by

programming differentiate game development not only from writing, but
also from most other media production. For reasons such as these, I
argue that there must be no assumption that game development can be
understood as easily as other media production. Unfortunately, there are
many examples of research studies that do not acknowledge the complex
characteristics of game development.

I have met game scholars who are sceptical about colleagues who, not
playing any games, still write on the subject. Said scholars argue that
game experience is created in the interaction with the game and cannot

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 Chapter 8. Discussion

be replaced by game observation. While I understand and respect this

standpoint, I feel that observing others play is comparable to observing
others develop games. The activity can be understood through
observations and interviews. However, gaining deep, grounded
understanding without first-hand experience may be difficult. Mateas
and Stern (2005) make a good argument for the value of applied design
experience in game research. Their focus is on narratives in games, but
the same arguments also apply to the wider case of game development
(not least where financial aspects, e.g. return on investment, cannot be
ignored).
To conclude, I do not think all researchers need to participate in
development, but researchers observing development can really benefit
from having first-hand experience of applied game development (in
addition to also being game players).

8.2.2 Who is the author?

The game development process involves many elements of creative work.
Developers in all professions state that creativity is an important part of
their crafts. Despite the aforementioned collective creativity, it is
common to credit a game designer as the mastermind behind the creation.
In the studies presented in this book, this perspective is often seen as
problematic. Games can evolve organically, their content being shaped
by many different professionals. These include not only designers,
writers, artists and programmers, but also testers. Some really great
gameplay has been discovered through bugs (thus, said gameplay was
not an intentional goal). Despite the complexity of the creative processes,
it is common for research to study game creativity as an individual
process. Studies of collaborative creativity are rare. For example, it is
very common for games to include both game mechanics and narratives.
Hence, game designers and game writers usually need to merge their
creative visions. Despite this very frequent situation, I have found only
one article (Linderoth, 2015) that addresses this. One conclusion of this
work is:

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8.2 Types of research

. . . video game stories are not created in a vacuum; they always

have an integral relation to the game as a whole, gameplay and
story have to fit. (Linderoth, 2015, p. 294.)

Numerous studies examine interactive writing or game design in isolation,

focusing on each as an individual process. This imbalance is problematic
for the understanding of game development.

Many game studies scholars take theories from literature and apply them
to games. This makes the game the text and the designer the author. I
would argue that, in a game development context, the concept of a single
creative author is inappropriate. If the media theories had originated
from studies of improvisational jazz, they would probably be more fitting.
Band musicians have much more in common with game developers than
authors do. This relational view of culture creation is, for example,
reflected in the work of Vaan, Stark and Vedres (2015, p. 1146):
We build on this conception of culture, shifting attention from
individual deployment to skills that develop in an ongoing dynamic
of relations between people.

On this note, we can return to Barthes (1977) and his discussion of

the role of the author in relation to the reader. I too would like to see the
death of the author, but for a different reason – let us stop focusing on
the author and, instead, emphasise the importance of the team. Or, to
paraphrase the closing line in Barthes (1977): “The birth of the creative
team must be at the cost of the death of the Author”.

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 Chapter 8. Discussion

8.3 Themes in game development research

Despite the wide variations in perspectives and focuses in the
communities that have studied game development, it is possible to
identify some themes that cross disciplinary boundaries. This section
highlights several such themes.

8.3.1 Project management

Most of the disciplines in previous chapters highlight the challenge of
managing game development projects. Management literature mainly
addresses this as a problem of managing creativity. To a large extent,
the game studies field focuses on the consequences of the management
challenge. For example, many studies highlight “crunch-time culture”
as problematic, not least in combination with family life (Ahmadi et al.,
2019; Harvey and Shepherd, 2017). It is rarely problematised why it is so
common for game projects to reach crunch time. The explanation may be
more than a failure to appreciate the negative aspects of crunch. Indeed,
projects managers may know all the downsides but still be unable to avoid
them. A simple banning of overtime may be possible for developers with
no deadlines and with unlimited resources. In other cases, it may lead to
cancellation of projects (Jørgensen, 2019).
Planning and management of game projects can be extremely
challenging for a number of reasons. One is that it involves the
development of a software system. It is well known in regular software
development that planning and management is challenging. The solution
there has been to introduce engineering methodology with requirement
specifications, planning and structure. Despite this structure, there is still
an “estimate inaccuracy and time-to-market pressure” (Ferrucci et al.,
2013, p. 462). The solution proposed by Ferrucci et al. (2013) is to
transform unplanned overtime into planned overtime (eliminating
overtime is not considered an option). Game development inherits these
challenges, but adds the great uncertainty introduced by the
non-utilitarian, experience-oriented nature of games. This requires some
space for chaos. It is not obvious how to handle this situation.

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8.3 Themes in game development research

In the software-oriented literature on game development, there are

several examples where management is highlighted as being different
from what it might have been expected to be:
Interestingly, none of the producers had a background in computers
or technology: one had an MBA and the others were humanities
graduates. (Schmalz, Finn and Taylor, 2014, p. 4327.)

In traditional software companies, there is a clear focus on software

development. A majority of the personnel has a background in technology.
These companies focus on developing advanced technical systems, hence
the gearing towards technology. Thus, it is natural that management
is expected to have a similar background and to understand technical
problem solving.
Game companies also develop advanced technical systems, but they
additionally face challenges related to “soft” problems such as creating
an interesting player experience and conveying a cultural message. It
appears that, when recruiting managers, many companies do not prioritise
technological skills. Some engineers highlight the lack of technically
grounded managers as a problem:
Interviewees pointed out that a consequence of non-engineers
in management roles is that it is hard in games to communicate
engineering issues. (Murphy-Hill, Zimmermann and Nagappan,
2014, p. 6.)

There is also management research showing that artists find engineering

planning to be problematic:
It’s hard to get the artists on board with Agile. One of the Agile
ScrumMasters is an artist, but he isn’t Agile. That’s a problem.
There’s a dual system happening here. (Hodgson and Briand, 2013,
p. 320.)

It is clear that game development management requires an understanding

of many different perspectives. The literature has several examples (e.g.
Cohendet and Simon, 2007; Canheti, Andalo and Vieira, 2018; Whitson,

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 Chapter 8. Discussion

Simon and Parker, 2018) of the important role the producer plays in
bridging differences between groups and creating a shared understanding.
The producer not only bridges differences within the development
team, but also acts as a barrier between the team and the wider
organisation (where corporate and financial aspects have to be
considered): “Often, producers must simultaneously be context
managers, negotiators and disturbance handlers” (Cohendet and Simon,
2007, p. 596).
Canheti, Andalo and Vieira (2018) highlight communication skill
as one of the most important qualities for handling all the above roles.
Producers need to have strong people skills and a basic understanding
of all elements in game development. As illustrated in figure 8.3, one of
the key tasks of a producer is to get the motley crew of game developers
to share a common focus on the game they must jointly produce. How
producers manage to do this is not well understood: “Producers typically
have a broad and poorly defined skill set” (Schmalz, Finn and Taylor,
2014, p. 4326).
In many ways, the producer is more important than the game
designer, but has received much less attention in game development
studies. Whitson, Simon and Parker (2018) highlight that many small
indie game developers lack a producer, but that producer tasks still need
to be performed. Amongst other things, they highlight the importance of
having people who can build relationships:
This leads us to posit that the most successful developers are those
that master relational labour, that of building and maintaining
productive, intimate and seemingly authentic connections with
whomever is standing across from them. (Whitson, Simon and
Parker, 2018, p. 11.)

Whitson, Simon and Parker (2018) highlight the challenges small indie
studios face when, their main focus being to create an interesting game,
they are expected to adopt entrepreneurship principles focused on growth
and profit. The missing producer would play an important role in
addressing this conflict of interests.

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8.3 Themes in game development research

The Game

Producer

Programmer Audio Design Art Writing

Figure 8.3: In channelling the various focuses of different professions

towards a common game-creation goal, producers have an important role.

181
 Chapter 8. Discussion

8.3.2 Technology and tools

From studio studies, it is clear that tools play an important role in the
development of games. Though they continue to pose challenges, they
also play an important role in shaping the collaboration and the end result:
But, rather than a mutely obedient tool, software exerts agency
of its own and is seen to exhibit magical, even agential properties
during game development. (Whitson, 2018, p. 2328.)

There are several reports on how tool development is an important

activity in supporting production. In one study, a programmer expressed
his view:
There’s always conflicts between art and engineering. They want
tools to work this way. They want to do the minimum work
possible. And sometimes we can make that happen by spending a
lot of engineering time developing some nice neat tool for them. . . ;
it’s purely resource based, so we can save the art team time by
spending engineering time and vice versa. (McDaniel and Daer,
2016, p. 160.)

This quote shows a conflict between groups that, although it sounds

problematic, reveals an important prioritisation that developers need
to address. A studio may devote developer time to tool production
and tool customisation. While, this obviously removes resources from
game development, it may very well pay off in the total time needed
to produce the game. It may also unleash a new creative potential for
some developers. A well-designed user-facing tool can, for example,
encourage designers to test new ideas.
Although tool production may involve great engineering effort, it
certainly also needs contributions from other groups. This is particularly
true of user-facing tools. If a tool targets artists, these latter need to be
involved in identifying needs and ensuring the new tool interfaces well
with existing tools and procedures. The user experience dimension of
tools is also very important. Thus, additionally, UX team involvement
is probably needed in tool development. The development of tools for
game production is actually an example of typical information system

182
8.3 Themes in game development research

development. Large companies have separate teams for tool and game
development. In small companies, developers may have to handle both.
It is not clear how they separate these two, quite different development
tasks.

The nature of tools affects the nature of the craft. When the main interface
in engines was code, there more or less had to be a programmer to design
games. With the introduction of high-level tools, this is no longer a
necessity and, consequently, other groups can approach game design:
The combination of specialized level-design positions with the
availability of level-design tools has made the design process more
general and more accessible. This, in turn, has allowed more game
players who do not have formal programming training to become
designers after receiving on-the-job training. (Tschang, 2007, p.
995.)

This quote illustrates the effects the introduction of level design tools
can have on the creative process and how new groups of people can be
involved in the creative process. A level design tool is typically oriented
towards the geometrical properties of a level and, for example, positions
objects and characters in a map. There are several other aspects of games
that have not received as much attention and where there is potential
for development. In one of the few articles that highlights music in
games, Mitchell (2014) describes how music composers’ work is done
on the outskirts of the game studio. Interestingly, one of the interviewed
composers express strong feelings about tools:
But as far as any specific technical tools [go] - we certainly have a
lot of them now. If anything I’d like to slow down this technical
barrage. (Mitchell, 2014, p. 16.)

However, he is not referring to tools related to integration with the game

design. I feel that tools have great unused potential for bringing music
and audio production closer to design. Game writing is another area
where the processes of writers and the production environment appear to

183
 Chapter 8. Discussion

lack integration. Research on interactive writing has produced advanced

tools and systems for writing but, to the best of my knowledge, they are
not integrated with other game production systems. One of the very few
studies of applied game writing indicates that narratives are not given a
very elevated position in the studied companies:
The main results show that the developers do not see storytelling
as the defining trait of video games, but as a component in a whole
product. (Linderoth, 2015, p. 279.)

There is a need for tools that support writers in their creative processes
and also integrate with game mechanic elements (Engström, 2019a).

Technology and tools have played a central role in the evolution of digital
games. I see no reason why this will not continue. There is great potential
for research to pay closer attention to the creation and use of tools and
technology in the game development process. Such research should
consider their role from both production and creativity perspectives.

8.3.3 Size and motivations

From the articles presented in previous chapters, it is clear that,
compared to production in large AAA companies, game development is
different in small independent studios. The scaling from tens of
development people to thousands of such people obviously affects work
organisation. This has to be considered when discussing development
approaches. Different discipline’s levels of access to large studios have
been previously highlighted. In game studies, several researchers, while
focusing on indie development, have bemoaned the lack of access to
major game companies. In management and business research, on the
other hand, there are many studies that include AAA companies and
there is no discussion of the lack of company access.
A possible explanation of this skewness is that critical game studies
may have more in common with the alternative indie developers while
business researchers may be more positive towards capitalistic business
logic and have better links to the management level in companies.

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8.3 Themes in game development research

Irrespective of reason, this skewing is unfortunate. It results in an

imbalance in the sort of research available for the different company
types. Experience from AAA production may be useful in smaller indie
contexts. The opposite may also be the case. Indie development has
already generated many innovative games and it is possible that there are
also innovative development practices that can be identified. AAA
production is not perfect:
The default development process in the gaming industry has often
led to major player experience problems, a lack of time to address
these problems once they’re identified, and a lack of flexibility
because previous decisions limit options for how to address the
issues. (Pagulayan et al., 2018a, p. 308.)

O’Donnell (2009) highlights another problem at a major US company

that subcontracts Indian artists to produce game assets. These developers
were not getting access to the tools needed to view assets inside the game.
This made their work unnecessarily challenging:
I encountered artists struggling to work within the confines of
structures unknown and invisible to them because the experimental
tools, which would enable them to understand where, how, and
why aspects of their work were failing, were withheld by the
contracting organization. (O’Donnell, 2009, p. 15.)

As shown by Cohendet and Simon (2016), AAA studios struggle to

balance rational production aspects and the need to create new innovative
products. This study clearly shows that too rigid production structures
can have a severe negative impact on the creative processes:
A key point was that the stage-gate approach was conducive to
efficiently producing new games in the ‘more of the same’
manner, but not effective for generating and validating new ideas
for ‘disruptive’ games. (Cohendet and Simon, 2016, p. 622.)

Another thing that differs between different studios is the logic driving
the companies. While some development is strongly driven by market
logic, other development is driven more by the love of games. This divide

185
 Chapter 8. Discussion

largely matches that of company size. AAA companies are strongly

commercial while indie developers have other motivations. Many small
indie studios do not want to grow beyond a certain size. They want to
maintain the type of activity they have and enjoy:
For the developers we talked to, ‘success’ was not vested in the
game being produced, nor in individualized metrics of success
(critical acclaim, audience reception, sales numbers, average play
time and net profit), but in the ability to sustain ongoing creative
and collective processes – the social engagement related to both
making games together as a team and sharing them with others.
(Whitson, Simon and Parker, 2018, p. 6.)

8.3.4 Access and research funding

To be able to conduct industry-oriented research, researchers need access
to companies. This is a challenge that needs to be addressed. One part of
the problem is the working conditions at many companies (Legault and
Ouellet, 2012). These create an environment where any additional tasks
may be perceived as problematic. Another challenge for research is the
non-disclosure agreement culture that is strong in many companies and
which makes it hard to collect and disseminate empirical data: “However,
demands for secrecy seem to have taken precedence over the maturation
of game development practice” (O’Donnell, 2009, p. 13). Indie game
companies may be more open (Consalvo and Paul, 2018), but they may
also have differences in scale and maturity. New forms of collaboration
between industry and academia need to be established.
Many researchers highlight the problem that access to game
companies is poor. This impedes study of how said companies operate.
It is interesting to note that this concern is not evenly distributed over
disciplines. It appears that the game and media studies communities find
getting access more challenging than do the management and business
communities. This creates an imbalance between disciplines;
management studies are reporting results from AAA development while
game studies are focusing on small independent studios.

186
8.3 Themes in game development research

An additional challenge for industry-oriented research is the type of

research funding available. The research funding agencies are oriented
towards existing disciplines. Ito (2017) highlights this in relation to the
antidisciplinary movement at the MIT media lab (as discussed in the
introduction):
If you work in the white space, you often can’t get federal funding,
which, in turn, makes it difficult to generate the body of work
necessary for tenure in traditional academic departments. (Ito,
2017, p. 23.)

For traditional industries (e.g. manufacturing), there are established

research grants focusing on industrial development. Such grants are
not readily available for game industry research, at least not in Europe.
Funding related to games is almost exclusively focused on areas outside
the core industry. Studies of serious games or gamification can be funded,
but not studies on development of, for example, real-time strategy games.
This is like funding car-engine research only where said engines are used
to chop wood.
I argue that the research funding agencies (e.g. federal funding
such as the EU framework programmes and national funding such as the
Swedish Vinnova) need to support research that targets game development
in the wild. Access to game companies will be much easier if funding
supports research that is directly relevant to the game industry. The unique
characteristics of this industry should also be considered when funding
applications are reviewed. For example, the innovation, production and
sales processes in the game industry are handled very differently from
those in the car industry2 . The norms of the latter should not be used
to evaluate the former. Some understanding of the ideas behind the
antidisciplinary movement would also be useful.

2 For example, the birth of Minecraft differs greatly from that of Volvo.

187
 Chapter 8. Discussion

8.4 Conclusions
This book focuses on research that addresses game development “in
the wild”. This book’s studies focus on the development of “regular”
games, i.e. those that are popularly perceived as games. Most of these
are developed within a “business logic” that invests time and resources in
relation to expected player interest. Publicly funded game projects, as is
the case in most research, are developed under a very different logic.
One conclusion from the presented material is that there is generally
very little research that has studied game development in the wild. The
vast majority of game research focuses on the game itself, players, the
culture surrounding it or technical details. Research into “serious games”
(gamification included therein) dominates. Many such studies seem to
assume that the development of regular games is well understood and
that it is, in some ways, a “solved problem”. Another conclusion that
can be drawn from this book is that game development is definitely not a
solved problem. Studios are constantly struggling to create games that
attract player interest:
A recurring theme in the interviews was that the informants
considered players unpredictable and that they often behave
differently than the designers expected, often seemingly
irrationally. (Mäntymäki, Hyrynsalmi and Koskenvoima, 2019, p.
8.)

The wicked nature of game development implies that it will never be a

solved problem. Yet, it certainly can be better understood.

Another conclusion that can be drawn from said material is that all the
presented disciplines have research that is relevant for game
development. There are also blank spots in all disciplines, i.e. they lack a
perspective that is present in other disciplines. Thus, it is not possible to
say, “Game studies has it all, there is no need to look into other areas” or
“Information systems research has it all, look no further”. To give some
examples, the research in management and game studies does not
address challenges related to software design, software testing strategies,

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8.4 Conclusions

Art
Audio community
Software community

?
community Game studies Interactive writing
community community

Programming Audio Design Art Writing

student student student student student

Figure 8.4: There is a missing force in academic structures that gives

game students a common focus.

distributed computing, etc. Similarly, studies in software engineering do

not address cultural, psychological or societal elements of game
production. It is not likely that people from all these academic
communities will be able to unite under one single umbrella. The
important thing is to encourage tolerance and acceptance for the different
perspectives. If a research study aims to contribute to the understanding
of game development, it has to consider the complex, bigger picture.
Strictly orthodox approaches within a single discipline cannot be
assumed to be useful outside that specific research context.

Many academic institutions offer game development programmes. These

often focus on preparing students for one specific role in game
development. This can give deep understanding and knowledge in a
specialised field. However, it may not give insight into all other
perspectives of game development and how to create a shared meaning.
This is something that has to be handled in a game development
situation:

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 Chapter 8. Discussion

In multi-disciplinary, multi-background teams, the issue of shared

meaning is far from obvious. On many occasions, we observed
the [project manager] arbitrating issues between team-members.
Tensions or conflicts usually arise from misunderstandings rooted
in different world-views induced by academic and professional
backgrounds. (Simon, 2006, p. 120.)

I argue that this tension between worldviews should be addressed early in

the academic training of game developers of all sorts. It is an important
defining characteristic. Students should not be left to address this on
their own. As the number of universities providing game development
programmes increases, there is a risk that students will be fostered into a
single disciplinary perspective. Many programmes are geared towards
an academic career within a specific discipline. Here, introducing course
elements that focus on other aspects may be perceived as a distraction.
Similarly, interdisciplinarity can meet resistance from faculty boards and
deans who may not care very much about games. As a result, students
may enter the game development profession with skewed perspectives:
- A software engineer may struggle to get everyone in a team to
express a game design as a formal system specification so that
the corresponding test cases needed to ensure correct code can be
generated.
- A designer may be unaware of how the business model affects a
game’s dynamics.
- An animator may not understand how user interaction and engine
code handle some of the motion in the game3 .
- A writer may not be accustomed to balancing artistic ambitions
with the vision of other professions (or even not used to giving
control to the player).
- A business graduate may not understand why not everyone wants
to maximise profit.
- A GUX researcher may not be aware of the differences between
scientific methods and play-testing methods.

3 McDaniel (2015) presents an example of this.

190
8.4 Conclusions

- Everyone may lack experience of collaborating with people who

believe in a different research paradigm.

The tension between worldviews is a problem that is hard to solve on a

general level. Nonetheless, it can at least be acknowledged in various
academic boards involved in game development. To understand game
development, some flavour of an antidisciplinary attitude would be, or is,
a definite plus. The bottom line is that there needs to be: an understanding
of the consequences of a disciplinary focus; and, an acceptance of the
importance of other disciplines.

One of the aspects highlighted above is the important role producers have
in a game development team. Amongst other things, a producer can act
as a bridge between the different disciplines. They can help programmers
accept the perspectives of artists and vice versa. In academia, we do not
have any producers. Each discipline largely works to its own standards
and there are no obvious consequences of ignoring the perspectives of
others.
Figure 8.4 illustrates how different game development programmes
are geared towards different academic communities4 . The “luxury” of
only understanding one disciplinary perspective goes firmly against
students being well prepared for work in game development. There has
to be some kind of common ground and openness to the multitude of
perspectives in this profession. To achieve this, there has to be something
(the question mark in figure 8.4) that pulls students towards a shared
meaning. University administrations may need to have someone
fulfilling a “producer” role in programmes. This person’s task would be
to ensure that faculties involved in educating game students respect the
differences between disciplines. If this is not dealt with at a faculty level,
it will be left as an exercise for students to handle themselves. This is not
fair.

4 In this example, the management and business communities are not well represented.
This is probably a common situation in many development programmes.

191
 Chapter 8. Discussion

This book is an attempt to present the landscape of game development

research. More work is needed.

192
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 Appendix

Notes on the literature searches

The articles highlighted in this book were collected via a number of
searches and reviews. This appendix gives an overview of the search
processes used in the various stages. A more detailed description can
also be found in the following three articles:
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and creative product perspective: A quantitative literature review
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production research”. In: DiGRA Conference Proceedings.
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 Appendix

Literature search processes

The literature search processes aimed to capture game production
research from a broad perspective. Covering game research between
2006 and 2016, searches included studies that approached games from
either a software perspective and/or a creative industry perspective. The
five-phase search process set out below was devised.
- Phase 1: Organic identification of a reference set of relevant articles.
Identification used a large number of keywords in Google Scholar
and a forward and backward snowballing process. This initial,
organic search found 30 articles that were identified as highly
relevant.
- Phase 2: Identification of databases that indexed articles in the
reference set. Reliable research databases were queried for each
of the articles in the reference set. Databases were added until all
articles had been found in at least one database.
- Phase 3: Formulation of search queries that would return all articles
in the reference set. The final query was a conjunction of two blocks
of disjunctions (see figure A.1).
- Phase 4: The databases were queried to collect a list of potential
articles. The results from these searches were combined into a
single list of articles in which duplicates were eliminated.
- Phase 5: Based on title and abstract contents, the resulting list was
reduced by removing articles that met a set of exclusion criteria.
This served to eliminate papers that matched the search query but
were clearly unrelated to game development.
Analysing digital game research is challenging. This is because said
research involves disparate disciplines with very different traditions and
publication forums. Phase 2 resulted in the addition of databases from
Scopus, Springer, ACM and DiGRA. The query formulated in phase 3
returned (after duplicate removal in phase 4) 2,278 articles from the four
databases. After the title-abstract reduction in phase 5, 488 articles
remained. These were then reviewed and coded using a standardised
protocol. The protocol included, amongst other things, a rating of
research rigour and whether the research presented empirical data from

226
 [
videogame OR video game OR video-game OR
computer game OR game developer OR game development OR
creative industr OR cultural industr OR visual effect OR
new media
]
AND
[
development process OR development project OR
production practice OR production process OR
requirements engineering OR software engineering OR
innovation project OR innovation process OR
creative process OR business process OR
professional identity OR idea creation OR
project management OR management of production OR
management challenges OR creative production
]

Figure A.1: The search query used in the original literature review

industry. An article was classified as having empirical data from industry

only if it included some “first-hand contact” (e.g. through interviews,
observations, ethnographic studies, etc.) with the game industry.
The following inclusion criteria were used in the study:
- studies targeting the game development process (irrespective of
whether the games were conventional, educational or serious);
- studies containing empirical data from the game industry;
- studies focusing on other parts of the creative industry and
highlighting creative processes and/or production processes that
related to the creative content; and,
- studies highlighting creativity management.
The exclusion criteria used were:
- research published before 2006. This exclusion was mainly based
on game development’s “youth” and rapid development (i.e. studies
based on the conditions in the 1990s would not be highly relevant);
- research solely reporting conclusions and findings gained from
game development projects conducted in a school or university
context; and,

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 Appendix

- non-English articles. The vast majority of research on games is

published in English. Additionally, the reviewers could not easily
review in any other major language.

Qualitative analysis of highly relevant articles

From the larger set of 488 articles, the aforementioned method
classifications, quality evaluations and case descriptions enabled us to
filter out a subset of 48 papers that fulfilled the criteria establishing a
foundation for a qualitative review. These articles: contain empirical data
from industry practitioners; evidence high-quality of research (in terms
of clearly stated research question, method description and results); and,
are relevant to understanding practical game development.
Three reviewers subjected the selected papers to a thematic analysis
of the papers’ content.
This entire process was divided into three distinct phases, namely, a
preparation phase, a content processing phase and an analysis phase.

GDC vs. DiGRA

In one particular study presented at DiGRA Conference 2019, the data
from the preceding reviews was supplemented with data from the last
three years (2016 – 2018) of DiGRA conference papers. In total, 125
full papers were searched (title, abstract and method) to determine if they
contained industry empirics. This search resulted in the identification of
6 additional papers.
The study compared the focus in research articles with the focus of
the Game Developers Conference (GDC), presented in section 7.1.
One anonymous reviewer of this DiGRA paper provided a list of 22
highly relevant articles and books that had not been identified in previous
searches. The reason for this was either that they did not match the
title-abstract-keyword query or that they were published in forums that
are not indexed in the databases used.

228
Expansion of the review in this book
During the writing of this book, the material identified early on was
complemented with additional articles that were identified in a less
structured way. The primary source of these was the Scopus database. At
an early stage, Scopus was queried for articles that, published after 2016,
had a title-abstract-keyword match for “game development” but not for
terms related to serious games. This returned 676 articles. Based on title
and abstract, these were filtered to give a set of 71 articles that were then
more carefully reviewed.
In addition to this search, several articles were added through
snowballing in the existing material. Kind colleagues also recommended
further articles.

229
 Appendix

A note on the citation of games

In a few places, this book mentions specific games. However, there are
no full citations of said games. In studies with a strong focus on specific
characteristics of games, it is important to cite the games properly
(Gualeni, Fassone and Linderoth, 2019). If a game is analysed, it is
highly relevant to present the specific platform used and the version that
was played. However, this book does not focus on specific games. Nor
were the mentioned games played as part of the research. In most cases,
the book’s game mentions are linked to the citing of articles. If the
reader wants to find more detail about a mentioned game, I recommend
consulting the cited article or, perhaps, searching for the game in
Wikipedia.

230
About the Author
Henrik Engström is a professor at the University of Skövde. He
holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Exeter
and has conducted game-related research since 2001. His
research focuses on the game development process and, in
particular, its entangled, multidisciplinary nature. In a research
context, Henrik has served as project manager, producer and
developer in a number of game projects.

E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9972-4716
 Digital games have become a ubiquitous part of our society. In many countries,
game development is a substantial and important industry. Academic
institutions provide programmes aimed at preparing students for careers in
game development. Over the past 20 years, there has been great interest in
game research. However, very few studies address game development. Instead,
most studies have focused on: serious applications of games; analysis of games
and players; or, social aspects of playing.

This book provides an overview of the scattered academic landscape of game

development research. It highlights studies from a wide range of disciplines
9 789198

ISBN 9789198491876

and raises arguments for game development to be understood as a complex

activity that inherently includes elements of science, engineering, design and art.
The consequences of this complexity need to be taken into account by research
and/or academic programmes that have a disciplinary focus. There is otherwise
491876

the risk that the true nature of game development will not be understood.

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