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Game design research is caught between epistemologies and disciplines, leading to a lack of grounded methodologies. Without such methodological approaches, we cannot support evidence-based claims about game design. The Method for Design Materialization (MDM) is a methodological approach to capturing game design via software version control. By embracing a time-sliced representation of a game throughout its development and pairing it with explicit materializations of design thinking through reflective writing, we believe significant progress can be made in understanding and extrapolating from the design process.

Recent years have borne witness to an explosion of games research from diverse home disciplines. Much of this work concerns game design, but the games research community has yet to agree on practices and methods for examining game design that are simultaneously rigorously scholarly, flexible enough to accommodate a design-oriented perspective, and sufficiently knowledgeable of computation to engage with the materiality of games. In this paper, we outline such an approach. We focus on the question of an appropriate method for an academic game design research practice that is grounded in making and play while respecting recoverability and context. We demonstrate what game analysis based on such a method can reveal, drawing on the case of Pippin Barr's It is as if you were doing work, and show how method and analysis in tandem can materialise tacit design knowledge, support balanced subjectivity, and illuminate the often abstract design problem space.

Reflection is the mental process that occurs when we encounter situations that cannot be effectively dealt with using previous experiences and solutions. For decades, it has been acknowledged as an important process in learning, and in recent years it has become a central focus of branches of interaction design. Games are highly appropriate vehicles for triggering and supporting reflection, but several of the dominant tropes of conventional game design directly work against reflection. In serious games, the promise of safe environments, the drive to pose problems with clear solutions and a preference for stealth learning complicate how directly we can design for reflection. In mainstream entertainment games, qualities such as immersion and the design traditions of designing for the everyplayer and quantifying motivation again run counter to a reflective agenda. Drawing on the critical and reflective design literature and on case studies of experimental games on the peripheries of mainstream game design, I propose reflective game design, a new alternative design agenda from which to design, deconstruct and make sense of play experiences.

Designers of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have long been interested in delivering personalised teaching to individual students, typically by ensuring that the student receives content appropriate to their skills and knowledge. Nonetheless, a more holistic view on what constitutes good teaching practice has challenged whether this approach to user modelling is sufficient. Teaching is not only defined by what is taught, but also by how it is taught. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploratory design research can support this view by generating a more inclusive set of user attributes for purposes of user modelling. Through a case study, we show that design research for user modelling can function as a boundary object serving three important roles, that underpin more specifically the design of user modelling and more broadly ITS design. First, design research can establish common ground by encapsulating domain knowledge in an accessible form. This can support diverse project stakeholders to make decisions on what is to be modelled. Second, design research can reveal a wide range of teaching and learning perspectives that in turn introduce transparency to the decision-making process of user modelling and provoke a sense of criticality and accountability amongst project stakeholders. Third, design research can build new bridges between the design of the technology and the user model that underpins it. To this end, user attributes deemed important, yet too complex or cumbersome to develop, can become design principles in the context of the overall ITS design.