Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is currently reshaping game development practices, production pipelines, and value networks in an unprecedentedly pervasive manner with cascading consequences remaining unclear. In the last five years since GenAI’s inception, a growing body of qualitative research has explored these early transformations from different settings and demographic angles. However, these studies often contextualise and consolidate their findings weakly with related work; for research to keep up with and support stakeholders in this development, the current moment calls for a synthesis of the findings emerged thus far. Here, we address this need through a qualitative research synthesis via meta-ethnography. We followed PRISMA-S to systematically search the relevant literature from 2020-2025, including major HCI and games research databases. We then synthesised the ten eligible studies, conducting reciprocal translation and line-of-argument synthesis guided by eMERGe, informed by CASP quality appraisal. We identified nine overarching themes, provide recommendations, and contextualise our insights in wider game production trajectories. With this work, we seek to provide practitioners, researchers and policy-makers with grounded insights to guide practice, research and governance.

This paper examines the development of a systematic competence framework for game development. The framework was grounded in extensive industry engagement, involved 44 individual interviews, three surveys, 15 focus-group sessions, and four industry workshops. The resulting taxonomy comprises nine archetypal competence categories — spanning Art, Audio, Business, Design, Marketing, Production, Programming, Quality Assurance, and Industry-wide roles and skill competences — intended to inform curricula and professional training. The paper argues that competence frameworks should be understood as negotiated artifacts rather than neutral skill inventories — valuable when they are grounded in professional practice, while remaining inherently incomplete and historically situated.

As interview-based studies of game developers become increasingly common in game studies, the field would benefit from more explicit, domain-specific guidance on qualitative data analysis. This paper contributes such guidance by presenting Gradual Abstraction — a thematic analysis method developed over years of exploratory interview research into game development practice [10, 11, 12]. The method introduces a staged coding process that moves incrementally from practitioner-voiced expressions toward abstracted categories, deliberately slowing the generalization process to preserve the richness and specificity of interviewee perspectives. The method is particularly benefiting studies mapping the lived experiences of game developers, where the aim is to document the existence and diversity of experiences rather than their frequency. Practical guidance for implementing the method is provided through workflows using qualitative analysis software such as ATLAS.ti, although the method can equally be applied to manual processes or integrated into other tool pipelines.

This position paper introduces biformants as a methodological concept for qualitative game development research. While game development is often treated as a globally standardized practice shaped by shared tools, technologies, and production structures, important differences persist in how development work is organised and understood across contexts. We define biformants as developers whose professional experience spans two or more structurally similar but operationally distinct contexts, positioning them to identify assumptions and practices that often remain invisible within single-context studies. The paper positions the concept in relation to existing methodological traditions, proposes several categories of biformants relevant to game development research, and reflects on how the concept emerged through prior and ongoing studies.

This paper presents findings from a three-year survey study (2022 -2024) examining evolving trends in the game industry, drawing insights from professionals across industry roles and academia.In addition to the general questions on trends, each annual survey focused on a unique theme: in 2022, we explored the impact of the pandemic on participants' information-sharing and learning practices; in 2023, we investigated perceptions of responsibility for future-oriented knowledge within the professional ecosystem; and in 2024, we examined strategies for coping with changes in the shared landscape of games.The results highlight a shift between two major trends, Generative AI and Cryptogames.This shift is situated within a broader context of respondents both experiencing and anticipating large-scale transformations, while concurrently navigating more gradual trajectories of change.

This paper reports the research method of the “Game Expats Story (GES)” project that used qualitative longitudinal research (“QLR”) incorporated with art-based research (“ABR”) in the context of game research. To facilitate greater participant engagement and a higher retention rate of longitudinal participants, we created comic artworks simultaneously while researching the case of migrant/expatriate game developers (“game expats”) in Finland 2020-2023 in two phases: (i) art creation as part of the qualitative data analysis to supplement the researcher’s inductive abstraction of the patterns, and (ii) artwork as a communication and recall tool when periodically engaging with the informants over the multi-year project span. Our findings suggest that the method of QLR-ABR helps game research as it positively influences the researcher’s abstractions of longitudinal data and participants’ continuous engagement with a high retention rate of 89%. We conclude that incorporating artistic methods provides new opportunities for ethnographic research on game development.

In this paper, we explore the historical development of playable quantum physics related games (quantum games). For the purpose of this examination, we have collected over 260 quantum games ranging from commercial games, applied and serious games, and games that have been developed at quantum themed game jams and educational courses. We provide an overview of the journey of quantum games across three dimensions: the perceivable dimension of quantum physics, the dimension of scientific purposes, and the dimension of quantum technologies. We then further reflect on the definition of quantum games and its implications. While motivations behind developing quantum games have typically been educational or academic, themes related to quantum physics have begun to be more broadly utilised across a range of commercial games. In addition, as the availability of quantum computer hardware has grown, entirely new variants of quantum games have emerged to take advantage of these machines’ inherent capabilities, quantum computer games.

In this paper, we reflect upon the development process of three videogame ‘promotypes’, prototypes designed to promote the game production pipeline service in development at Aalto University. In the process of developing example games for potential internal clients of the university, we aimed to set out realistic project goals for given resources to better communicate the scope and potential level of the delivered outcomes. Our lessons in this project were, at large, general lessons in game development, including how motivation and proficiency with production tools, alongside the anticipated expectations of clients and players for polished games, affected the game development processes. In addition, we explore how the pursuit for academic accuracy and the model of a non-intensive process of academic game development posits additional challenges in the development of a realistically balanced production pipeline.

Text-to-image generation (TTIG) models, a recent addition to creative AI, can generate images based on a text description. These models have begun to rival the work of professional creatives, and sparked discussions on the future of creative work, loss of jobs, and copyright issues, amongst other important implications. To support the sustainable adoption of TTIG, we must provide rich, reliable and transparent insights into how professionals perceive, adopt and use TTIG. Crucially though, the public debate is shallow, narrow and lacking transparency, while academic work has focused on studying the use of TTIG in a general artist population, but not on the perceptions and attitudes of professionals in a specific industry. In this paper, we contribute a qualitative, exploratory interview study on TTIG in the Finnish videogame industry. Through a Template Analysis on semi-structured interviews with 14 game professionals, we reveal 12 overarching themes, structured into 39 sub-themes on professionals' perception, adoption and use of TTIG in games industry practice. Experiencing (yet another) change of roles and creative processes, our participants' reflections can inform discussions within the industry, be used by policymakers to inform urgently needed legislation, and support researchers in games, HCI and AI to support the sustainable, professional use of TTIG, and foster games as cultural artefacts.

Design practices targeting playful movement-based interaction are changing rapidly with both technological and societal developments. In this paper, we provide a snapshot of movement-based interaction designers’ experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, by interviewing designers working in diverse roles that integrate physical human body movement and digital technologies (i.e., exergame and wearable game designers, playground and landscape architects, sports and dance trainers, and Sports-HCI professionals). Using grounded theory, we have identified two tactics from the designers’ experiences: (i) the significance of face-to-face embodied interactions throughout the entire movement-based interaction design process, and (ii) the importance of positive, yet critical, attitudes to technology for designing bodily experiences, including mixed use of non-technical materials and tools for rapid prototyping and iteration. However, it was evident that such tactics are often not feasible without physical interaction between the designer and users. The restrictions imposed by Covid-19, therefore, further revealed the importance of body movement to designing a playful movement-based interaction — from ideation to execution and testing. This paper offers a worrying view of movement-based interaction design during the Covid-19 era, while calling for further investigation to enrich the discourse that could contribute to this field, possibly also beyond the circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic has influenced people's views on work, and a significant portion of the global game industry converted to remote work during the pandemic. To explore the status of game development in this pivotal moment, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 immigrant/expatriate game developers ("game expats") in Finland analyzing their migration push and pull on societal, industrial, social, and individual factors. The results indicate societal and industrial factors simultaneously influencing game expats' migration intention, but with an increasing influence of game corporation's role on developers' both on-the-job and off-the-job embeddedness due to an absence of (local) community activities during the pandemic. The data also reveals that game developers are valuing the physical workspace for face-to-face interactions, despite the industrial norm of digital tools and seamless transition to remote work. Furthermore, an alarming stratification and hierarchization within the game industry were identified, which game developers self-dividing in-house versus outsourced workforce even if they were both required to work remotely. This paper contributes to game studies on game developers' experiences as an attempt to investigate the local context of game development. It is also one of the first snapshots of game work practices in Finland during the Covid-19 era.

In this paper, we examine the motivations and experiences of game jam organizers in Finland. For the purpose of the study, 13 game jam organizers were interviewed in 2018 - 2019. We found that motivations for organizing game jams are diverse but interlinked and can be roughly divided into six categories: Community Building, Community Driven, Education, Passion for Organizing, Supporting Creative Culture and Work Driven. Further, we noted that many organizers end up in their position through happenstance rather than actively looking for the role.

In this article we present findings from a design experiment of MurMur Moderators, talking playful seats facilitating playful atmosphere and creativity at office environments. The article describes the design and technological composition of our two prototypes, and our experiences exposing the concept to audiences at science fairs and an office environment. This research has served as an exploratory design study, directing our focus to the seats as primary and secondary play objects with a distinct narrative. Our goal with the initial exposure was to first investigate preliminary audience reactions for the high level concept and how people interact with the prototype. This was then supplemented by testing the concept in an office environment. The data we have collected gives us insight on the seats as primary and secondary play objects and how users touch, discover and socialize.