Game Design: Home

This guide introduces resources to support your research topics in game design. Use the tabs at the top of the page to help you locate background information on your topic, articles, books, and more.

If you need assistance with your research or help using library resources, please contact me, schedule an appointment, or Ask a Librarian. 

Consider using some of the strategies below to help you get started:

• Think about something that interests you and would interest others in the field. Talk with instructors, classmates, or librarians, or look over course readings.
• Review recent issues of journals or industry periodicals to explore recent articles in the field. Search by keywords related to your topic in a database and note which journals publish articles of interest. Search for those journals in the E-Journal Finder and view recent issues' table of contents. Here are a few sample journals:
  • New Media & Society
  • Game Studies
  • Games and Culture
  • Entertainment Computing
  • Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds
  • American Journal of Play
• Browse subject headings in databases. Subject headings are very specific terms that have been applied to an item (a book, an article, etc.) by a cataloger to summarize that item's content. Look for an online thesaurus in a database or perform a keyword search and look for the subject heading field in a few relevant items in your search results. Here are a few sample subject headings in Scholar OneSearch:
  • Video games
  • Board games
  • Video games -- Design
  • Computer games -- Design
  • Computer games -- Programming
  • Video games -- Social aspects