Project
Reflective Surfaces
Designed and developed an interactive research paper for ACM DIS'24 demonstrating experimental forms of research communication in game design —
ACM Publication | Live Version | GitHub Repo
Academic publication in game design faces a fundamental tension: the work is interactive and experiential, but the papers describing it are static and textual. There is a conflict between the research infrastructure and research objects. This by itself is not novel to game design, all fields write about their object of study and long-form research is still relevant.
However, the problem is uniquely experienced in games research -- particularly research-creation -- since the text is incomplete without the artifact.
A game designer's research process — the prototyping, playtesting, iteration, and design reasoning — is inherently dynamic and holds epistemological value. That process is also deeply intertwined with the artifact of creation, and traditional publication media are inadequate for this research.
Reflective Surfaces is an interactive research paper that speculates on 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 be explore the myriad ways in which game designers design their games.
The paper was published and presented at the Designing for Interactive Systems (DIS 2024) Conference of the Association for Computing Machines in 2024.
built with javascript & react