Community-driven Game Design Research

Summary

Digital games are an ever evolving, culturally significant, and economically substantial form of contemporary media. The medium now consistently outpaces the consumption and revenue of film and music. Despite the medium’s ubiquity and diverse consumer base, however, the industry disproportionately remains made up of-and caters to-white men.

Scholarly and popular commentators suggest the industry diversify the perspectives and backgrounds of its members to escape the medium’s too often exclusionary nature and broaden the creative potential of games. However, there are few clear and consistent solutions for how a competitive, discordant, and sometimes fiercely risk-averse industry may pragmatically reform. 

One facet this problem is digital game production relies on a combination of creative and technical skills, and technology that can be difficult to access based on socio-economic, cultural, or regional contexts. Developing creative skills can be difficult without access to expertise. Developing technical skills can be difficult without economic resources for expensive computing tools. Achieving comfort, confidence, and safety in a community of practice can be challenging for anyone who represents identities and demographics that have been historically excluded.

Our project seeks to improve the game medium, industry, and cultural expression they represent by supporting design, technical, production, and personal capacity and skill development in historically overlooked or excluded communities. That is, communities excluded based on demographic identifiers or similar, and regional communities such as Aberdeen that are not traditionally known for game production expertise or output. 

We expect this project to encourage individuals to leverage their up-skilling toward creative personal and professional activities and create additional pathways to expression and success within these communities. Community members would be collaborators and even leaders as they practice digital game creation, to support the pursuit of a career in industry or independent development.

Community-driven scholarly approaches to design in creative industries rare as well. This project has scholarly impact in its development of a collaborative, community-driven framework for shifting similar approaches or methods in related creative and professional domains. 

Our team will work with external collaborators in the region and beyond. We will reach out to Abertay University, known for its game program, for example, as we expand beyond Aberdeen. We are also working to include active game industry professionals. However, our key initial collaborator is Crow House Projects, with their experience with similar efforts related to the film industry.

Crow House Projects is a Community Interest Company based in Aberdeen, dedicated to building a vibrant creative economy in the North East of Scotland by up-skilling and promoting local creatives globally. Crow House has successfully up-skilled local creatives through its hands-on “Film Accelerator Programme,” offering real-world experience in film production, with mentorship from industry professionals. 

A hopeful PhD student should be motivated to contribute to and expand this project. They should possess demonstrated experience and interest in research methods that involve human subjects, in situ. They should have an interest in game design and production, with demonstrated expertise in these areas being a strength. Experience in pedagogy and design-thinking are valuable.

Supervisors

Discuss this further with a potential supervisor for this research degree:

Research Themes

Find other Research Degrees in the same theme: