Reflective Surfaces

The Problem

Academic publishing in game design faces a fundamental tension: the work is interactive and experiential, but the papers describing it are static and textual. A game designer's research process — the prototyping, playtesting, iteration, and design reasoning — is inherently dynamic. Presenting it in a traditional paper format strips away the very qualities that make it meaningful.

What We Built

Reflective Surfaces is an interactive research paper that demonstrates a new form of academic communication for game design scholarship. Rather than describing our design process in static text, we built the paper itself as an interactive web experience where readers can:

• Edit content — Swap screenshots, modify text, and adjust code to explore how design choices affected the outcome
• Trace design reasoning — Follow the decision-making process through an interactive timeline, not a linear narrative
• Fork and adapt — The entire paper is an open-source React application designed to be cloned and customized by other researchers

The key philosophical decision was to keep the architecture deliberately simple. We avoided complex custom frameworks because over-engineered solutions don't translate into adoptable standards. Anyone comfortable with basic web development can clone the repo, change the screenshots, edit the text, and publish their own interactive paper.

Technologies

React 18, JavaScript, CSS, Node 20, Yarn, Git-based version control, static web hosting.

Outcome

The paper was published and presented at the Games as Research community conference in 2022. Beyond the publication itself, the project established a reusable, open-source template for interactive academic papers — proving that this format is not just theoretically appealing but practically achievable with standard web tools. Other researchers have since forked the repository to document their own design processes.