Game Design Praxiology Seminar 2026 – Researching Together

Adams, E. (2010). Fundamentals of Game Design. 2nd ed. Berkeley: New Riders Press.

Consalvo, M., & Staines, D. (2021). Reading Ren’Py: Game engine affordances and design possibilities. Games and Culture.

Cross, N. (2007). From a Design Science to a Design Discipline: Understanding Designerly

ways of Knowing and Thinking. In: Michel, R. ed. Design Research Now. Essays and

Selected Papers. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser Verlag AG. pp.41-55

Eladhari, M. P. and Ollila, E. M. I. (2012), ‘Design for research results: Experimental prototyping and play testing’, Simulation & Gaming, 43:3, pp.391–412.

Fullerton, T. (2014). Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative

Games. 3rd ed. Natick, Massachusetts, USA: A K Peters/CRC Press.

Godin, D., Roux-Girard, G., Flayeux, J.-P., Boisvert, J.-P., & Savard, S. (2020). Game development praxiography: A methodological approach to setup a knowledge brokering pipeline between higher education institutions and the game development industry. The Computer Games Journal, 9(1), 15–27.

Gómez-Maureira, M. van Duijn, M. Rieffe, C. & Plaat, A. (2022). Academic Games-Mapping the Use of Video Games in Research Contexts. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1–10. 

Healy, John P. and Kultima, A. (2024). Firewatch: (Studying) the Anatomy of a Game Design Process. In the Proceedings of DiGRA 2024 Conference.

Houška, J. (2025, June 16). Platform alternatives or platform power: Custom and commercial game engines in the work of foreigners in Czech game production. Conference Proceedings of DiGRA 2025: Games at the Crossroads. Conference Proceedings of DiGRA 2025: Games at the Crossroads. https://doi.org/10.26503/dl.v2025i2.2449

Kankainen, V., Kultima, A., & Meriläinen, M. (2019). Motivations of Game Jam Organizers: Case of Finnish Game Jam Community. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG ’19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3337722.3341840

Keogh, B. (2021) Hobbyist Game Making Between Self-Exploitation and Self-Emancipation. In Sotamaa, O., & Švelch, J. (Eds.). Game production studies. Amsterdam University Press. 

Kerr, A. (2017). Global games: Production, circulation and policy in the networked era. Routledge.

Khaled, R. & Barr, P. (2023a). Generative Logics and Conceptual Clicks: A Case Study of the Method for Design Materialization. Design Issues 39(1):55-69.

Khaled, R. & Barr, P. (2023b). A Method for Design Materialization: Accountable Game Design Research. In the Proceedings of DiGRA 2023 Conference: Limits and Margins of Games.

Kultima, A. (2025). Trends in Gaming – Views of Industry Professionals and Game Scholars. In the Proceedings of Foundations of Digital Games (FDG25) 2025. ACM Digital Library. 

Kultima. A. (2021). Game Jam Natives?  The Rise of the Game Jam Era in Game Development Cultures. In the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Game Jams, Hackathons and Game Creation Events (ICGJ’21). ACM Digital Library.

Kultima, A. (2018). Game design praxiology (Acta Electronica Universitatis Tamperensis, No. 1885) (Doctoral dissertation, Tampere University). Tampere University Press. 

Kultima, A. (2015) Defining Game Jam. in The Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2015), June 22-25, 2015, Pacific Grove, CA, USA.

Kultima, A. (2015). Developers’ perspectives on iteration in game development. In Proceedings of the 19th International Academic Mindtrek Conference (pp. 18–25). ACM.

Kultima, A., Ojanen, R., & Nylund, N. (2024). Noita: A Long Journey of a Game Idea. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association 7 (1), 155-181.

Lassheikki, C. (2022). Game writers and narrative designers — The evolving role of storytelling 
professionals in game development. School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master’s thesis.

Lemarchand, R. (2021). A playful production process: For game designers (and everyone). The MIT Press. 

Morrell, E., Kultima, A., Grufstedt, Y., & Kauppinen, T. (2023). Promotypes – Prototyping Games for a University Game Production Pipeline. In the FDG ’23: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital GamesApril 2023 Article No.: 73. Pages 1–8. 

O’Donnell, C. (2014). Developer’s dilemma: The secret world of videogame creators. The MIT Press. 

Park, S. (2023). To Become a Cultural Fit, or To Leave? Game Industry Expatriates and the Issue of Migration and Inclusivity. DiGRA’23 – Proceedings of the 2023 DiGRA International Conference. DiGRA, Seville, Spain. http://digra.org:9998/DiGRA_2023_CR_3667.pdf

Park, S. (2024). Embracing Global and Local: How Game Industry Expatriates Work Between Global and Local Game Development Practices. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, Accepted for Publication in ToDiGRA Special Issue: Interdisciplinary Embraces, Selected Articles from the Nordic DiGRA Conference 2023, 7(1), 47–87. https://doi.org/10.26503/todigra.v7i1.2183 

Pelletier, C. (2022). Charming work: An ethnography of an indie game studio. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 28(2), 561–578. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211072636

Penix-Tadsen, P. (2020). Three Generations of Women Developing Games in the Southern Cone. Feminist Media Histories, 6(1), 163–197. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2020.6.1.163

Piispanen, L. (2025). Quantum games – Definition and development practices. School of Science | Doctoral thesis.Aalto University.

Sotamaa, O. (2010). When the Game Is Not Enough: Motivations and Practices Among Computer Game Modding Culture. Games and Culture, 5(3), 239-255. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009359765 (Original work published 2010)

Sotamaa, O., & Švelch, J. (Eds.). (2021). Game production studies. Amsterdam University Press.

Politowski, C., Petrillo, F., Ullmann, G. C., & Guéhéneuc, Y. G. (2021). Game industry problems: An extensive analysis of the gray literature. Information and Software Technology, 134, Article 106538.

Rocha, A. C., Woodcock, J., & Grohmann, R. (2025). Labour and migration in the games industry: Circulation of workers and struggles across Brazilian and British contexts. Globalizations, 0(0), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2025.2512689

Stenros, J. & Kultima, A. (2018). On the Expanding Ludosphere. Simulation & Gaming. Volume: 49 issue: 3, page(s): 338-355.

Tanenbaum, J., & Tanenbaum, K. (2014). Challenges in Indie Game Development: An Autoethnographic Account. In Proceedings of FDG 2014.

Washburn, M. Jr., Sathiyanarayanan, P., Nagappan, M., Zimmermann, T., & Bird, C. (2016). “What went right and what went wrong”: An analysis of 155 postmortems from game development. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 1234–1245). ACM. 

Westecott, E. (2020). Game sketching: Exploring approaches to research-creation for games. Virtual Creativity, 10(1), 11-26.

Nygren, N., Kankainen, V. & Brunet, L. (2022). Offsetting Game—Framing Environmental Issues in the Design of a Serious Game. Simulation & Gaming, Vol. 0(0), 1–30.