This workshop proposes to bring together researchers who are interested in understanding and elucidating the game making process. We want to facilitate discussion on what current themes and topics are important, but also what are the most critical gaps in knowledge. It is hoped that by sharing our approaches we can start to develop larger and more ambitious collaborations as well as reach towards methodological strategies that embrace the diversity of approaches employed to study how games are made. The workshop may be of interest to anyone engaged in or interested in researching game making practices, in particular those from game design research, game production studies, games education and related fields.
Submit a case study to the workshop via EasyChair .
In recent years there has been significant growth in the volume of scholarly work investigating game making from a variety of perspectives [1, 3, 4, 5]. While the multidisciplinarity of this work showcases a breadth of approaches it can also become siloed into disciplinary dialogues [2, 6]. For those entering the field there is a lack of awareness of the breadth of approaches and emerging research trends in relation to game making research. Additionally, researching game design and development allows game makers to understand how others have approached similar and/or different design spaces. As part of an artistic practice, this represents an important factor in the development of the field and our role as educators and researchers.
We invite the submission of extended abstracts and short papers of up to 1-4 pages (not including references). We welcome submissions exploring game making from a range of perspectives including art and design studies, social sciences, humanities, computing, SCS, and other fields. Accepted papers will be incuded in the proceedings of FDG2026.
To submit a paper to the workshop create a new submission for the “Researching Game Making” track on EasyChair.
Please submit papers in PDF format using the ACM Masters template. You can find more info here if you are not familiar with the ACM Master template: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. Workshop papers will go through TAPS for inclusion in the proceedings.
This workshop is co-located with the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2026), held in Copenhagen. More details: http://fdg2026.org
The half-day workshop will be structured as follows:
Participation from a variety of backgrounds is encouraged. Ideally, participants will be interested in the study of how games are made and either have experience in or intentions to research within this area. Researchers, educators and practitioners are encouraged to attend.
John P. Healy is a Lecturer in game design across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the School of Media, TU Dublin. His research explores the creative processes of game designers and the signature pedagogies of game design education. It focuses on how the practice of digital game design unfolds at the interface between computers and culture. He is interested in the areas of game studies, specifically game design research and production studies, as well as how creativity and implementation interact in the construction of digital games.
Annakaisa Kultima is a University Lecturer at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. She has been publishing over 100 academic papers on game design and development since 2006 and led multiple successful research projects. Kultima’s (2018) PhD dissertation “Game Design Praxiology” examined the multitude of issues of understanding the creative work of game developers spanning a period of 2006-2016 with an ethnography of hundreds of game professionals. Kultima is a long-standing and trusted member of the game ecosystem in Finland and internationally reaching a wide spectrum of practitioners and ecosystem actors.
Rilla Khaled is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, where she teaches interaction design, design theory, programming, and more. She is the director of the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research Centre, Canada’s most well-established games research lab, in the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology. Dr. Khaled’s research is focused on the use of interactive technologies to improve the human condition, a career-long passion that has led to diverse outcomes, including designing award-winning serious games, developing a framework for game design specifically aimed at reflective outcomes, creating speculative prototypes of near-future technologies, working with Indigenous communities to use contemporary technologies to imagine new, inclusive futures, and establishing foundations for materials-based game design research.
Clara Fernández-Vara is a media scholar, and a game designer and writer. Her work focuses on narrative design, both as her professional practice and in her academic work, as well as videogame history. Clara’s videogame work is grounded in the humanities, informed by her background in literature, film and theatre, which she brings to digital technologies. Before joining the NYU Game Center, Clara spent six years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a researcher and game developer. She holds a Ph.D. in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. Clara has presented her work at various international academic and industry conferences, such as DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association), Foundations of Digital Games, the Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Game Developer’s Conference (GDC), and East Coast Games Conference. She has worked on commercial games for Warner Bros., Die Gute Fabrik, the Spanish National Ballet, and Big Fish Games among others. Her book, Introduction to Game Analysis, is now on its third edition.
[1] Stephanie de Smale, Martijn J. L. Kors, and Alyea M. Sandovar. 2019. The Case of This War of Mine: A Production Studies Perspective on Moral Game Design. Games and Culture 14, 4 (June 2019), 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412017725996 Publisher: SAGE Publications.
[2] Sebastian Deterding. 2017. The Pyrrhic Victory of Game Studies: Assessing the Past, Present, and Future of Interdisciplinary Game Research. Games and Culture 12, 6 (Sept. 2017), 521–543. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412016665067 Publisher: SAGE Publications.
[3] Adam Hammond. 2021. The far shore: Indie games, superbrothers, and the making of JETT. Coach House Books.
[4] Rilla Khaled and Pippin Barr. 2023. Generative logics and conceptual clicks: A case study of the method for design materialization. Design Issues 39, 1 (2023), 55–69. Publisher: MIT Press One Broadway, 12th Floor, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA.
[5] Annakaisa Kultima, Riina Ojanen, and Niklas Nylund. 2024. Noita – A Long Journey of a Game Idea. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (2024).
[6] Jaakko Stenros and Annakaisa Kultima. 2018. On the Expanding Ludosphere. Simulation & Gaming 49, 3 (June 2018), 338–355. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1046878118779640