Posted September 19, 2023 by Amy Salomon
Gathering research for topics related to Game Design has always been a bit of a challenge. Game design as a field of study is relatively new, compared to fields that have been researched and documented for years, like literature or film. There's also a lot more variation in terms of how a game can be built in comparison to a book or film, and how it can be engaged with, that finding all the documentation explaining how to do certain things and why they're important can be difficult.
Thankfully, if designing your game around a specific topic or theme, a lot of your research can be about that thing. For example, I'm in the process of designing a game about Cybersecurity, and while that isn't a very popular subject, it has enough research and papers written on the subject that it wasn't a nightmare to find very interesting ideas to pull from.
The way to go from there though, is the hardest part. Pulling out meaningful aspects based on the research you've done to build a game around those aspects can be a tiring creative process. As another example concerning my Cybersecurity research, I've found very interesting topics related to cybersecurity that approach it from different angles: One is about remote hacking into cars, one is about overloading and shutting down emergency call centers, and one is about hijacking medical implants to cause harm to the people using them. Even though all of these topics are under the category of cybersecurity, I need to be able to pick out one of them to make a meaningful design out of it, otherwise my focus for what kind of narrative I want to push may be skewed between many different ideas.