The Week my game became research

For months, this project was a game with a good idea inside it. This past stretch, it became something I can actually call research and the strange part is that shift happened entirely on paper, not in the engine.

I sat down to write my abstract, thinking it’d be the easy bit. It was not. Trying to say in two hundred words, what my thesis actually claims exposed every place I was still being vague. The first lesson landed fast, the abstract is the last thing I need to finalise, but drafting it early is brutal and useful, because it forces you to find out whether you know what you are doing yet. I half-didnt. So I went looking for the scaffolding.

The first real breakthrought was finding out what kind of research this even is. I’d been quietly anxious that, “I’m building a game and studying it”, wasnt a real methodology (knew its a type of practice based research but of what kind?) that I was improvising. Specifically this was a part of deep tradition of practice based research called research through design, with reflective practice as the method. The artefact isnt an illustration of my finding building it is how the knowing happens. Discovering that my instinct had a whole literature under it was the single most reassuring moment of the project so far.

With it came a harder, more valuable lesson, one I’d have got wrong on my own. I kept wanting to claim my idea was new. Nobody’s done this, I wanted to say. And the honest, slightly deflating truth is, that’s exactly how you get taken apart. The strongest rearch almost never claims virgin territory. It claims a specific gap, a novel combination of things that already exist. “People have used this device to study X, I’m using it to study Y, and that’s underexplored.”I cannot. Learning to make the smaller, sharper, true claim instead of the grand one felt like growing up as a researcher.

Then I gave the whole thing a spine. There’s a framework in human-computer interaction that judges work like mine by four tests, is the process sound, is there real invention, is it relevant to a genuine problem and is it extensible so others can build on it. Suddenly I had a checklist for whether my contribution was actually a contribution, instead of just a vibe.

But the part that genuinely changed how I see my own project was the theory. My core idea, two people each seeing only part of a world, talking their way towards a shared understanding isnt a cute game mechanic I made up. It’s one of the most studied problems in how human think. There’s deep work on how people build “common ground” through conversations, on how pairs and teams think as a single distributed system when no one holds all the information, and my favourite on how reading itself is just a reader filling the gaps a text leaves open. Interpretation, it turns out, has always been about dealing with partial information.

That was the moment it stopped feeling like a student project and started feeling like research. I’m not inventing the question. I’m building an instrument to look at an old, serious, human question from an angle people haven’t tried.

Here’s the honest reflection to end on. Building the game scared me because of the engine the fear of not being able to make the thing. Positioning the game scared the life out of me in a completely way. it meant admitting, out loud and in writing, what I’m actually claiming, and then standing behind it. Both fears, I’ve realised, are the same fear wearing different clothes. The fear of committing. Writing it all down was me committing to the research the same way opening Unity was me committing to the build.

Next, I go back to the engine, the first cooperative puzzle that genuinely can’t be solved alone.