Games are an interdisciplinary medium that combine the best of every field: design, production, art, sound, development, narrative, and many more skills, into this one experience that feels incomplete if even one of these is missing. Games being what is essentially a very delicate balance of interwoven systems requires an understanding of all of these processes and their interactions with each other.

As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. It’s difficult to come up with a complete game pitch fully formed on the fly, much less a comprehensive game design document to be scrutinized and edited, without *some kind* of base knowledge supporting your game idea. Having a strong foundation of research leads to a strong game— the presence of some objective facts can inform the more subjective choices in design, leading to more thoughtful and meaningful choices.

What makes good research for games?

Fundamentally, research is about establishing comprehension in whichever subject you are conducting research in. For games, that might take the form of systems implementation, weighing the pros and cons of different strategies; it may be part of ideating on design, gauging the effectiveness of a game play loop.

Research certainly has the most heft when deciding the theme or emotional core of a game: knowing what exists in the center of everything makes it easier to see how the rest of the game branches out from it. Tying down a game’s core, I’ve noticed, tends to be the most abstract and experimental phase, since the designer is responsible for condensing a certain emotional response or message into the path that the player takes throughout the game. In this case, research is a good way to broaden one’s perspective and fully understand what the game is going to be before taking on that task of simplification.

Smoke & Mirrors

As a Resonant Voices game, Smoke & Mirrors is based on an echoes interview with Henry Padrón-Morales, a Rochester-based activist-educator. He had brought up Theatre of the Oppressed in his discussion on cultural education and continuity, which is an educational framework wherein participants are made to act out situations of social injustice or inequity to prompt meaningful action in their daily life. I had never heard it before, so upon looking into it further, I learned about the sub-practices of analytical theater and photo-romance, immediately grabbing my attention: this was something I was curious about.

At the root of these two practices was how society influences one’s thinking and perspective on life, something that changes dramatically once that person is placed in a different environment. This juxtaposition of perspectives became Smoke & Mirrors’ emotional core and the basis upon which we made the rest of our design choices.

Grow Together

Grow Together is a game I am currently working on in Games for Change, an IGME elective class where we are tasked with creating games with themes of social change. In Grow Together, the player is tasked with bringing their neighborhood together through shared maintenance of their community garden.

Figuring out the initial pitch for this game was incredibly research-intensive: firstly, I had to ask: what about urbanism did I want to talk about? How can this help other people? How can I communicate something meaningful?

I started out with looking at other games about urbanism or that focused on cities in some way and took notes on what they did. I didn’t think this was especially useful at first, but it revealed that we could make a game about cities without the “city builder”, basically creating a community-sim but in a city setting, which had the added benefit of subverting the players’ expectations.

After a team meeting where we compare findings, we settle on focusing on the social impact of urban environments. We plan out a simulation, because players are more inclined to resonate with a digital world if it closely reflects their own.

An entire city was too big to accurately simulate, but what about a neighborhood? A single street? A house? An apartment? We kept paring down the scope until we arrived at the community garden; a perfect solution. From then on, research was smooth sailing: academia surrounding community gardens was extensive and we could tackle it from any angle we wanted, so finding sources on the social benefits of community gardens in urban spaces was simple.

From there, we used our research to design for a slightly abstracted but still fairly accurate simulation of a community garden, where the player can tend to plants and interact with their neighbor NPCs, beautifying their neighborhood, as a representation of how real community gardens provide a public green third space in otherwise fully urbanized areas.

Methods for Research

In the digital age where we walk around with supercomputers in our pockets, with unlimited access to the breadth of all human knowledge at our fingertips, it’s very easy to go overboard when researching. There have been many times where I started research for games only to emerge out of a daze hours later, staring at a JSTOR article that is very unrelated to my original task, finding myself at a loss on what to do next.

Over my three years of schooling here at RIT, I’ve found two main ways to keep myself on track when delving into research for games:

Choose Your Source Wisely

While it seems obvious at first, choosing what you need to research is an oft overlooked skill. It’s best to identify what your question is and try and answer it as directly as possible: start from a broad search and narrow it down from there, and as your searches become more and more specific, so will that starting question.

The hard part is trawling through search results and deciding what may or may not be related to your original question. This can only really be perfected with time— sifting through a Google Scholar result is based on your own understanding of what you want to find. After narrowing down your selected sources, really look at them and ask as many questions as you can think of. Pay close attention to what was intriguing about the sources you selected and try to expand on them.

Documentation and Note-Taking

The point of taking notes is to make connections. It’s to pause and recognize similarities or differences between two sources that might otherwise have nothing to do with each other; it gives you time to sort through what you’ve looked at and see what makes sense. I usually jot down my main takeaways from a source, a handful of things I found intriguing, and any questions that I have. There are other ways to visualize this, like with digital whiteboards or old-fashioned corkboard and string— I compile all my findings in a small notebook— but choose a medium that’s easy to access and update.

The greatest part of taking notes is that it can be done even without the intent of reading papers to apply them for games. Writing down reactions to playing games, watching movies, reading books, lecture notes all helps; this, too, is research, and it expands your mental library, making it easier to make conclusions on your own without the need for supplemental sources to bridge the gap for you (though noting down connecting literature is still handy).

In sum…

Stopping to look things up, in the fast-paced field of game development, can feel a bit like slamming down on the brakes when you’ve finally gotten yourself going. However, when done carefully and thoughtfully, dedicating time to research for a game idea offers much in the way of organizing one’s thoughts and ideas, creating a solid foundation to build a sturdy and well-polished game upon.