Invited lecture — Empirical (RETRO) Game Research

I gave a guest lecture titled Empirical (RETRO) Game Research in INFR 3375U/CSCI 5550G — Retro Game Development, the course taught by Andrew Hogue at Ontario Tech.

What the lecture covered

The first part set up what empirical research means in this context: building knowledge from observation, measurement, and evidence rather than intuition or advocacy, and what that looks like when applied to games.

The hard part is that games have subjective goals. Ordinary software is judged on correctness, reliability, and performance. Games are judged on fun, fairness, immersion, frustration, pacing, and balance — none of which can be measured directly, so empirical game research leans on proxies. That splits the field in two: research on game development (bugs, patching practices, testing strategies, engine usage, maintenance) and research on the game experience (difficulty, balance, pacing, immersion, engagement).

Four case studies

The rest of the lecture walked through projects from the lab, all of them on retro games:

Creativity Beyond Functionality: An Observational Study of Easter Eggs in Video Games — with Claudio Di Sipio, Benoit Baudry, Michalis Famelis, and Houari Sahraoui, published at the 10th International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering (GAS 2026). Where do easter eggs come from, what counts as the first one, and what does a dataset of them across decades of releases actually show?

Iterating a Game Series’ Identity: Mixed-Methods Analysis of the Creative Process Developing Dragon Quest I–VI — with Aleksander Franiczek, presented at the International Conference on Games and Narrative (ICGaN 2025). A studio iterating on a series wants each entry to be better while reusing assets to keep the work tractable. But what does “better” mean, and how do hardware constraints such as cartridge size shape those creative decisions?

Rewriting Nostalgia in Official and Unofficial Iterations of Final Fantasy IV — with Aleksander Franiczek, accepted at the Canadian Game Studies Association Conference (CGSA 2026). Final Fantasy IV has been ported, remastered, and remade repeatedly, and fans produce ROM hacks that remix features across versions. That makes it a strong case for treating nostalgia as an active process rather than a fixed memory.

Decompiling (retro) Pokémon games — reverse engineering an executable back into human-readable code, and asking whether a feature you see in the game is really the code you think it is.

Thanks to Andrew for the invitation.