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The paper, which focuses on the "Game Expats Story (GES)" project, details Solip's research method employing qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) and art-based research (ABR) within the realm of game research. Specifically, the study investigates the experiences of migrant/expatriate game developers ("game expats") in Finland from 2020 to 2023. Notably, the project incorporates the creation of comic artworks as part of the qualitative data analysis, which proved pivotal in enhancing participant engagement and maximizing retention rates throughout the multi-year endeavor.

The findings suggest that the method of QLR-ABR helps game research as it positively influences the researcher's abstractions of longitudinal data and participants' continuous engagement with a high retention rate of 89%.

The incorporation of art creation as part of the qualitative data analysis not only supplemented the researcher's abstractions of patterns but also served as a powerful communication and recall tool when engaging with informants over the project's extended duration. Ultimately, the study's findings underscore the potential of integrating artistic methods to enrich ethnographic research on game development, shedding new light on the practices of immigrant game industry workers.

The acknowledgement of Solip Park's paper as an "honorable mention" at CHI 2024 underscores the pivotal role of arts-based research methods in advancing the understanding of human-computer interaction within the context of game development. 

References:

Solip Park, Perttu Hämäläinen, and Annakaisa Kultima. 2024. Comic-making to Study Game-making: Using Comics in Qualitative Longitudinal Research on Game Development. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. 

Link to Solip Park's presentation at CHI 2024: