3rd Workshop on Academic Game Development
at the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) Conference 2025
at the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) Conference 2025
The 3rd workshop on Academic Game Development will be held on April 15, 2025 between 13:00 and 16:15 as part of the FDG 2025 conference.
What is Academic Game Development?
This workshop aims to deepen our understanding of ‘Academic Game Development’ by inviting participants who have developed games within an academic setting to share their experiences, engage in discussions and participate in a few lively exercises as we work towards building an ontology that could better connect our work together. We don’t necessarily believe that academic game development is exclusively related to educational games, rather that their primary distinction is being ‘developed within academic institutions for the generation, evaluation or dissemination of knowledge’ (Gómez-Maureira et al., 2022). Whilst still sharing many of the same tools, assets and learning resources, this game making context remains utterly distinct from the commercial games industry, and the relationship between these two domains could still be better understood. Through exploring the specificities of academic game development, particularly the constraints and expectations that most inform the process, we intend to be more thoroughly prepared to negotiate all the challenges and opportunities it presents.
Marcello A. Gómez-Maureira, Max van Duijn, Carolien Rieffe, and Aske Plaat. 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 (Athens, Greece) (FDG ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 4, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555858.3555926
What is the Academic Game Development Workshop?
The first workshop on Academic Game Development, held as part of the FDG 2022 conference in Athens, was titled 'Developing Digital Games in and for Academic Contexts' and set out the agenda we build on today. That is, there remains a lack of discourse on the idiosyncrasises that come with developing games in the academic context, and it benefits reflective researchers and designers to come together and explore all the challenges and opportunites at stake.
The second workshop was held in Lisbon, at FDG 2023, and titled 'Professionalizing the Creation of Video Games for Research Purposes'. Picking up on the threads of the last workshop, particular focus was given to game literacy and expectations, developing under an academic schedule and aligning developmental and research goals.
For the third workshop to be held in Vienna 2025, which we have titled 'Understanding the Opportunities and Challenges of Developing Academic Games', organisation of the workshop has been passed from the Game Research Lab at Leiden University, to an alliance formed from former participants of the workshops who would like to keep the discussion going. Research from the previous two workshops is shared in the library below, alongside information on the current organisational team.
SUBMISSION INFO
Full Paper Submission Deadline: 7 February 2025
Abstract Only Submission Deadline: 10 March 2025
We invite both full papers (to be published in the FDG proceedings) and abstract only submissions. In either case one of the authors for each accepted submission must register for the conference and attend the workshop. For both submission types, authors will be asked to give a brief presentation.
As we have for the previous two workshops, we are specifically asking for post-mortem papers about games developed in an academic context. As we define academic games above, the scope is fairly wide, including any and all games made for research, arts based research, etc. What is more essential is that the paper communicates the process of game making and the involved design knowledge in a reflective tone relevant for other academic game designers.
SUBMISSION DETAILS
Full Papers should be up to 10 pages (excluding references / appendices). Papers should follow the conventions of the FDG conference: use the ACM Double Column Format (ACM SIGCONF version) of the ACM Primary Template. All submissions should be anonymized for the double-blind peer review process. Each paper will be peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers and one paper chair. Accepted Full Papers are planned to be published as part of the FDG 2025 proceedings.
Papers should be submitted through EasyChair to the "Workshop on Academic Game Development" track.
What is a Post-Mortem?
A post-mortem is an established practice in industries where projects comprise defining scope and goals, conducting design activities, and carrying out implementation and production. A post-mortem is usually an internal study of a project meant to codify and analyze informal knowledge attained by developers in one project to make that knowledge available for subsequent projects in the same company.
In video games, there are also public post-mortems, as opposed to internal studio post-mortems. Here, the post-mortem works as a critical reflection on the part of the practitioner or creator. The trade magazine Gamasutra (currently Game Developer) regularly publishes post-mortems by developers. Successive editions of the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) have featured developers giving post-mortem talks. Public post-mortems have also been published in scholarly books to reflect on more artistically-driven game projects, for instance, the ‘The Mechanic is the Message’ series. In this role, post-mortems turn informal project knowledge into critical public discourse for the medium, advancing the understanding of the medium.
A public post-mortem brings together critical reflection, practical issues, and approaches to deal with those issues. The post-mortem answers several questions about a project. What was this about? What did it set out to achieve? What were the possible approaches? Which approach was chosen? Why? How did it go? What was unexpected? What are the lessons learned? How will it be done next time? In what way did the project achieve its goals? To what extent? What are the implications, looking back?
For academic game development, the post-mortem deals with tensions between game development and scholarly efforts. It explores the chosen game design approach and research design approach, why they were chosen, how their implementation went, and what alternate paths could have been explored. Unexpected challenges, for instance, ethical or experimental control issues with participants and informants and their solutions, should be carefully framed against the scope and intent of the study.
An academic game development post-mortem is not a mere report or even a white paper. It problematizes the project, explores that problem space, critically reflects on what could have been done differently, and provides an empirical account of practice.
Overall, an academic post-mortem is a communication in design research taken as a research method.
The FDG Academic Game Development Workshop Library
2022
A Reflection on Delivering a Game Specific Course on a Common Entry Programmes
James Vincent Patten
Developing the Relic series - Exploring the Effects of Remediating Naively Generated Narrative
Henrik Warpefelt
Serious game design in practice: lessons learned from a corpus of games developed in an academic context
Nicolas Szilas
Structural Mismatches in Academic Game Development
Gal Fleissig, Morgan Evans, Avonelle Wing and Jessica Hammer
The Crypt of Notation: Rote Learning through Video Games For Adult Beginner Keyboard Learners
Jack Brett, Christos Gatzidis, Tom Davis and Panos Amelidis
The Kerdroya Postmortem: Navigating the Labyrinth of Co-creative Design and Collective Vision
Jeff Howard, Brian McDonald, Tim Philips, Tanya Krzywinska, John Speakman, Douglas Brown, Alex Mitchell and Alcwyn Parker
2023
Promo-types – Prototyping Games for a University Game Production Pipeline
Edward Morrell, Annakaisa Kultima, Ylva Grufstedt, and Tomi Kauppinen
UNDERSTANDING A DISTINCT MODE OF OPERATION FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF FACTS, FICTION AND (OCCASIONALLY) PLAYABLE ARTEFACTS
ORGANIZERS & COMMITTE
Edward Morrell is a doctoral researcher and game design teacher at Aalto University, exploring experimental, theoretical and fictional forms of games and art. He develops educational games as a member of the Aalto Online Learning - Online Hybrid Lab. His motivation in running this workshop is to broaden our understanding of academic games and build on what is possible beyond the commercial games industry.
Max Chen is a PhD student in Computational Media at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her research focuses on game pedagogy and studio practice, AI for game prototyping, and developing AR/VR applications for educational purposes. Her motivation in organizing this workshop is to better understand speculative design, prototyping, and project management in developing academic games.
Annakaisa Kultima is a game scholar at Aalto University, whose research includes game development cultures, creativity and industry trends. Her work on Game Design Praxiology examined our understanding of ‘games as created’. Her research group at Aalto continues advancing critical perspectives and discussions between game scholars and practitioners. Her motivation in running this workshop is to further our understanding of different kinds of game development processes and their contexts.
Marcello A. Gómez Maureira is a game researcher and developer working on game user research. Originally trained as a game artist and designer, he worked in that capacity for commercial projects before focusing on research and education involving video games. His motivation for this workshop is to develop a better understanding of different fields that come together when games are made for research purposes.
Shuyin Zheng is a game developer and master’s student in Media and Human-Centered Computing at TU Wien. Her work focuses on game design and game-based learning in higher education. Her motivation in organizing this workshop is to gain transdisciplinary insights into academic games.