Prototyping Games for the Online Hybrid Lab's Game Production Pipeline - Read our latest research for the FDG '23 Conference.

New research from the Online Hybrid Lab has been published in the Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. "Promotypes - Prototyping Games for a University Game Production Pipeline" by Edward Morrell, Annakaisa Kultima, Ylva Grufstedt and Tomi Kauppinen was presented and highlighted as a feature paper for the 2nd Workshop on Academic Game Development. All four authors were able to attend the workshop at Lusófona University where they engaged in many constructive dialogues relating to the role of game creation within academia. The conference paper has been made available Open Access via the ACM library in agreement with Aalto University.

The conference paper

The research paper is framed as a game development 'post-mortem', wherein the challenges and constraints of making educational games are expanded upon through the reflections of the game designer, further contextualised within the boundaries of academic game making. The paper details the development of several 'promotypes', promotional prototype games created to demonstrate some of the potential outcomes of the Online Hybrid Lab's Game Production Pipeline. In developing a pipeline that is measured, non-intensive and research-oriented, further complexities are added to a development process that already has to balance the needs of educators, proficiencies of developers and expectations of players. Through this publication and future research, we hope to improve the process of educational game development by openly communicating both the problems and solutions we encounter in developing a production model that aims to better support online learning.

The workshop

The FDG workshop provided an opportunity for members from our team to collaborate alongside other professionals and educators interested in how game development can better fit within the academic context. As a theme for the day, we looked closer into how game literacy and expectations can widely vary across the different stakeholders associated with a game project, across funding consortiums to coordinators, evaluators and students. This is an important topic to us at the Online Hybrid Lab as we understand that educators may not always be familiar with how games can function both as a medium and as an extension of learning, alongside all of their potential benefits to students. As discussed in our paper, we have been developing games at the Online Hybrid Lab to provide example cases to help in managing the expectations of what can be achieved within certain constraints. Our role has always been to facilitate communication between those parties interested in educational games and the developers capable of implementing them. In expanding this discourse through our academic publications and collaborations we expect to further ever more innovative and effective approaches to game development for education and research.