what an RTD researcher needs to do

This note last modified September 1, 2024

I talked with Courtney Blamey at FDG, here is their approach:

Game analysis and think aloud play (2 or 3 games)
Player & Dev interviews (5 players per game, not too many)
Iterative prototyping
Iterative player interviewing and close play with others

Don’t wait to finish a step before starting the next one

From #Game Design Research-Lankoski:

Important bits

I have made minor edits to the wording in this section

The aim is to produce knowledge by analyzing and producing insights based on the designer’s own experience of the process and from the analysis of the designed artifacts.
The game design researcher must therefore clearly define both their motivations for doing the research and their own personal background as these will ultimately affect the decisions they make during the design process.
The game design researcher also needs to provide an in-depth description of their experience during the design process, how the process was performed, and how decisions within the process were made.
While some HCI conferences are experimenting with alternate formats such as annotated portfolios they are not yet widely used or accepted.
The subject and object of the design need to be situated within the wider world in different ways, for example, through player testing and interviews with other game designers or researchers.
The final designed artifacts themselves also have to be critically interrogated as, even though all their design and development has been documented, they are always likely to reveal something unexpected that provides more information, more insights, creates more questions, and indeed define new research problems that start the process again.
It is worth noting that this all can be performed without the need for quantitative analysis and indeed can be done with a small number of participants as long as the insights gained from the player sessions are described in depth.
Adopting a grounded approach will allow the game design researcher to analyze findings from the design process and compare it with other data gathered from the wider context of game design.
- Whilst this approach to design research implies a qualitative approach to research that to some disciplines is problematic, it has been shown such research can be further validated through triangulation (Swann, 2002). This means that knowledge produced through the act of designing may offer a stronger argument if it is backed up by other different methods to gain the same kind of knowledge.

Full text of the chapter’s conclusion

The aim of this chapter has been to draw from successful approaches used for practice-based research in other design disciplines and suggest how these can be utilized within game design research so that it may better reflect game design practice. With this in mind the first half of the chapter explored approaches to knowledge that are readily considered within practice-based design research and in particular RtD. Any forms of research in which the experience of the researcher is at work, such as design, can stray towards subjective evaluation, which can lead to criticism that it is not a valid form of knowledge creation. However, RtD has established a number of approaches that help ensure it is not performed

through a designer’s personal and privileged perspective, or that it does not reflect either design scholarship or design practice. One of the important facets of RtD is that it both includes, and is included, in the contextual world of design knowledge by being developed with influences from design scholarship and from an acknowledgement of everyday design practices. The knowledge created in design research is thus situated both historically and culturally within design. It is this relationship with the wider context of game design research that will allow practice-based game design researchers to avoid being subjective and to establish a balance between the object and subject of knowledge. Further, RtD can analytically consider design artifacts both in terms of how they reflect the particular research topic under consideration and how they address a particular research question.

To achieve this, practice-based game design researchers need to adopt a critical approach in order to avoid a personal and subjective construction of knowledge. At times during the research, the game design researcher is also a game designer who produces the designed artifacts under consideration. While at other times during the research they need to act as a critical researcher whose aim is to produce knowledge by analyzing and producing insights based on their own experience of the process and from the analysis of the designed artifacts. To allow this dual identity to occur fluidly within the course of the research process requires flexibility within the adopted research methodology to avoid becoming dogmatic about using particular method assemblages. In this chapter we have argued that a constructivist approach to research through game design can both provide this flexibility and produce valid knowledge as long as the research adopts certain practices that produce the transparency required through which the validity of the research can be externally considered by others scholars. The game design researcher must therefore clearly define both their motivations for doing the research and their own personal background as these will ultimately affect the decisions they make during the design process. The game design researcher also needs to provide an in-depth description of their experience during the design process, how the process was performed, and how decisions within the process were made. This also means that the format in which the research is presented must facilitate such presentation. As part of the chapter we suggested that the annotated portfolios provide a good vehicle for such a presentation although this format needs to be better accommodated in the venues for reporting game design research. While some HCI conferences are experimenting with alternate formats they are not yet widely used or accepted. The subject and object of the design need to be situated within the wider world in different ways, for example, through player testing and interviews with other game designers or researchers. The final designed artifacts themselves also have to be critically interrogated as, even though all their design and development has been documented, they are always likely to reveal something unexpected that provides more information, more insights, creates more questions, and indeed define new research problems that start the process again. It is worth noting that this all can be performed without the need for quantitative analysis and indeed can be done with a small number of participants as long as the insights gained from the player sessions are described in depth. We further highlighted that adopting a grounded approach will allow the game design researcher to analyze findings from the design process and compare it with other data gathered from the wider context of game design. Whilst this approach to design research implies a qualitative approach to research that to some disciplines is problematic, it has been shown such research can be further validated through triangulation (Swann, 2002). This means that knowledge produced through the act of designing may offer a stronger argument if it is backed up by other different methods to gain the same kind of knowledge. The second half of this chapter considered design approaches, such as speculative design, critical design, and design fiction, in relation to similar approaches with games design that broadly come under the banner critical play. Whilst all these approaches center on design that focuses on the creation of expressions of cultural understandings, critical play has tended to focus its criticism on either the games industry or games themselves. However, through the frame of rhetoric all these techniques can be united and potentially open up opportunities of extending critical practice in games. Further, Coulton, Burnett and Gradinar (2016) have argued that games offer an exciting medium for critical design, speculative design, and design fiction in that they can free these practices from the criticism that they are often only ever seen in art galleries and thus they can be used engage a wider audience by presenting complex issues in a way “that allow players to consider the societal impacts of alternative presents and plausible futures” in a variety of contexts. Overall we believe this chapter highlights alternate approaches to game design research by drawing significant parallels between game design and practice-based design research more generally, that valid research can indeed be achieved through game design practice, and has the potential to enrich the area of game design research.