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 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.

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.