Tracing Research Through Design with Ponte: bridging game development repositories and qualitative research tools

As game design research is an emerging area of games research, game design researchers are still establishing consensus around baseline methodological practices that enable us to stop talking past each other and start putting our research efforts into genuine conversation. Stemming from our work on game design research methodology, we are proposing an interstitial design research step between design process data collection and design data analysis: corpus assemblage. In this paper, we overview the Method for Design Materialisation (MDM) and its workflows, then zoom in on what existing research approaches (and their supporting instruments) leave unaddressed in the context of game design research. We then introduce Ponte, a design-oriented research tool that bridges the material, technical, and methodological space that exists between design process-oriented data collection and design process-oriented data analysis. Ponte makes visible metadata, a commonly invisible layer of process-related information consistently being tracked by our digital work environments. Through the exploration and organisation of design metadata, Ponte invites design researchers to intentionally and explicitly undertake corpus assemblage as a crucial stage of data engagement that magnifies our abilities to make sense of design materials, processes, and practices.