Building on case study data, this paper identifies processes and actors that form an enabling ecosystem for indie porn game development consisting of: game platform technologies, asset stores,commission-based artists, F95zone, Steam, Discord, and crowd-funding platforms (e.g., Patreon). Co-creational and organisational perspectives provide a rewarding exploration of this phenomenon.

This article examines the prominent role of Patreon in the rapidly growing sector of crowdfunded pornographic games. Recent research has indicated that, on average, more people (patrons) are funding pornographic digital games on Patreon than other (non-adult) digital games (Lankoski & Dymek, 2020). Graphtreon’s ‘Top Patreon Creators’ list from 9 June 2021 includes six NSFW game projects among the top 50 projects (ranked by number of Patrons).1 For example, Summertime Saga (Dark Cookie), the highest-ranked pornographic game, is third in terms of the number of funders, with 27,791 patrons funding $74,657 per month. While Wild Life – An Adult RPG (Adeptus Steve), which reportedly only had 9417 patrons as of 9 June 2021, receives a monthly income of $94,129 from those pledges.2 The current funding levels for both Patreon projects are considerably higher than when we began our sampling: since January 2020, the funding level for Summertime Saga has risen by 27.86%, while for Wild Life – An Adult RPG it has risen by 21.45%.

Pornographic games have historically been distributed outside of mainstream channels. Steam, in 2018, change its policy allowing uncensored pornographic games to be sold. We found 452 games or DLCs that were tagged as mature content and sexual content. We analyzed 40 of those games in detail. 17.5% of these games only contain nudity while the rest graphically depicted sex. Visual novels and adventure games were the most numerous genres. Drama and fantasy were the most used milieus. Two of the games contained only male-male sex whereas the rest depicted heterosexual sex or heterosexualized same-sex sex. The pornographic scenes or nude images were tied to the game's progression structure.

This paper looks at the history of game industry platforms in Finland and Sweden between 1979 and 2020 via 745 games. Both are relatively small countries where developers perform exceptionally well in a global market context. Developers and games developed in both countries are rather similar with some notable differences: Finnish developers focused on mobile games on Symbian in the 2000s, whereas Swedish developers focused on PC and console games, continuing a PC focus during the 2010s. The number of game companies has increased rapidly in Finland and Sweden since 2010 but peaked in Finland in 2014. From a platform studies perspective our data highlights rewarding historical insights about the dynamics of game industry platforms in Finland and Sweden with dimensions such as influence by demo scene, price of hardware/software (computers), mathematics education, third-party game engines, and finally higher education programmes in game development, consequently framing the data in socio-material perspectives on game industry platforms as application ecologies. 

The paper revisits a central question in the study of characters in digital games: Do players of, for example, a racing game steer the virtual car directly themselves, or are they controlling the body of a virtual driver? This seemingly technical question is shown to be primarily cognitive and conceptual: players draw ontheir real-life and fictional frames of reference in an ongoing epistemological processof situating themselves vis-à-vis gameworld and playable figure. The traditional metaphor for this relationship, that of a cyborg, neither captures the variety of relationships suggested by games, nor the range of interpretations open to players. To overcome this limitation, I propose six conceptual types, based on the significance that tools and vehicles have for the playable figure. I ask: is there a co-dependence between equipment and user, is it permanent, and do they have a metonymic relationship to eachother? These abstract categories are shown to be connected to archetypical proto-narratives epitomized by characters from mythology and popular culture, which players implicitly refer to in conceptualizing their relationship to the gameworld. The essay, then, offers a framework for the conceptual variety of player-playable figure-relations,which, in drawing on cultural history, should be equally transparent to scholars of game studies and narratology.

Patreon is a crowdfunding platform where pornographic games are funded; even the most successful game developer in terms of the number of members is developing a pornographic game. We looked at 42 developers and their Patreon pages in order to examine the effects of the Patreon crowdfunding model on videogame development. Especially we studied membership rewards. As a result, developers were not only selling the game, but rewards we much about Community, Influence, and Recognition. Regulating Content Access is used regularly but often the latest version of the game is made available to everybody, just later to the members funding the development. We propose that certain rewards are similar to backstage passes in the music business and suggest that Patron pornographic games funding deviates from the crowdfunding model is not following mainly product-oriented commodity logic but a more community-oriented concept.

This paper presents a case study of a Bachelor level game research methods course (15 ECTS). The course covers observations, interviews, and introduction to statistical analysis. The course set-up follows \textit{constructive alignment} design where the aim is that the learning goals, learning tasks, and evaluation are aligned. During the course, students first learn research design and later design their research based on a set of examples and conduct data gathering and analysis. The evaluation of the pedagogical approach used is based on students' learning diaries where the focus is the methods and applying methods. Qualitative evaluation indicates that students can better describe their research designs and analyses.

Research into the design aspect of games has proliferated since the early 1970s. Currently, early historical overviews appear and categorical divisions within the field become more pronounced. It is therefore timely to reflect on the development untiltoday, take stock of the current landscape, and consider future topics. This position paperdoes so by bringing together seasoned and emerging scholars, as well as practitioners and industry insiders. Together, they consider which topics are already engaged, and what new ones might be necessary. In addition, the paperwill discuss the relationship between game design research and independent/industry practices as well as implications for game design education.

The design has been a study topic in various fields where design methods have been the focus of inquiry.

Design research, or design studies as it is also called, has been gaining momentum as a field of academic inquiry since the beginning of 20th century. Originally, design research focused on design methods and processes but it has moved to cover more varied research questions related to design. Current research topics include, for example, how to study design and what methods can be used to study design along with the more fundamental questions such as what is design in the first place and what kinds of knowledge design research produces. The topics of design research have also become more wide and varied with active research on architecture, information systems, product, service, graphic, and interaction design to name a few. Game design research, however, has received surprisingly little attention regardless of the large body of work in the more general design research.

The main aim of this book is to situate game design research within and alongside general design research.