Structural Mismatches in Academic Game Development

In this paper we share academic game development challenges from the digital game Bloomwood Stories: Block Party [4]. We introduce the main characteristics of our game, as well as the theories it is based on and its transformational goals. We then describe our game development process, which took place over nearly two years, and what each of its phases included. During this process, we observed many problems of structural misalignment between game development and academia. We therefore share the challenges we observed in this area, strategies we used to address them, and ideas for how teams might mitigate these challenges in the future. Finally, we share our vision of opportunities that arise from developing games in academic contexts, and how the two institutional contexts can come to complement one another.