Proposed practice-research project
Organizational Leadership and Narrative World-Building in Independent Game Studio Production
Primary research question
The question is intentionally bidirectional. The project does not treat organizational leadership as a management layer applied to creative work from outside. Instead, it asks whether the organization and the fictional world being built can develop as mutually influential systems.
Independent game development presents a distinctive organizational environment. Small studios frequently operate with limited capital, fluid teams, blurred creative and managerial roles, and founders who may simultaneously function as creative director, producer, designer, programmer, strategist, business lead, and custodian of intellectual property.
Leadership and organizational research often concentrates on larger organizations or more conventional employment structures. Creative-industry research provides an important counterpoint, but there is an opportunity to examine the founder-led independent game studio as a specific organizational form.
This project therefore asks what can be learned about leadership when organizational structure is being created at the same time as the creative work itself.
A particular area of investigation is the possibility that the fictional world developed by a studio can function as organizational infrastructure. Lore may provide shared vocabulary; factions may provide conceptual models for conflict and cooperation; mission structures may encode priorities; narrative principles may become creative constraints; and world identity may become intertwined with studio identity.
This is a proposition to investigate rather than a conclusion to prove.
Supporting questions
How does a studio's internal narrative framework — including lore, factions, mission language and shared conceptual vocabulary — function as an organizational tool for team alignment and external identity, particularly under conditions of changing team composition, resource constraints and production uncertainty?
How do founder-led creative practices evolve across a multi-year production trajectory, and what does that evolution reveal about sustainable leadership models for solo and founder-driven studios?
Loptr Lab will serve as the primary longitudinal practice-research site. The research will not be a study of one game. Projects including Veiled Dominion, Violet's Revenge, Returning to the Void, and related experiments will function as interconnected examples within a longer trajectory of creative and organizational practice.
The continuing history of Returning to the Void, extending back to 2016, provides a particularly useful longitudinal thread. More recent Loptr Lab work adds contemporary evidence of changing technical, creative, accessibility, and organizational approaches.
The practice archive may include:
Methodology
01 · LONGITUDINAL PRACTICE ARCHIVE
Ongoing Loptr Lab development will form the primary case. Rather than constructing a single artefact specifically for the doctorate, genuine production activity will be documented and critically examined as the studio develops.
02 · REFLEXIVE PRACTICE
As founder-practitioner and researcher, I will maintain a structured reflective record of significant decisions, tensions, changes in direction, organizational experiments, and responses to production circumstances. Reflection will be analysed rather than treated as evidence by assertion.
03 · COMPARATIVE CASES
Approximately two to three independent or founder-led creative organizations will be selected using explicit criteria. Public postmortems, interviews, development records, and other appropriate material will provide external comparison.
04 · SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS
Subject to ethics approval, interviews may be conducted with founders, collaborators, or other practitioners involved in independent game production. Consent, confidentiality, and anonymization will follow institutional requirements.
05 · THEMATIC ANALYSIS
Practice documentation, reflective material, comparative evidence, and interviews will be analysed against relevant literature in organizational leadership, creative industries, independent game production, narrative/world-building, and practice research.
Analytical loop
Practice / Artifact → Question → Method → Evidence → Analysis → Finding → Contribution
The project has the potential to contribute across four related areas.
It may contribute to understanding founder-led leadership within the particular constraints and opportunities of independent game production.
It may demonstrate how organizational decisions can become embedded within narrative, mechanics, world-building, and systems design, while creative structures can in turn influence organizational decision-making.
It may offer a model for treating longitudinal independent studio practice as a sustained site of doctoral inquiry, combining development artefacts with reflexive and comparative evidence.
It may generate a framework through which independent founders can better understand the relationship between organizational structure, creative identity, production sustainability, and intellectual property.
A central concept to be tested is therefore the game world as organizational infrastructure: a creative world may operate not only as an output for players but also as a framework through which the people producing it understand identity, values, conflict, priorities, collaboration, and direction.
The project grows directly from an interdisciplinary academic and professional trajectory. I hold two Master's degrees and have pursued doctoral study in Organizational Leadership while developing a sustained practice in interactive media and independent game production.
This combination creates an opportunity to bring organizational leadership into dialogue with practice research. My position as founder-practitioner is central to the methodology, while also requiring explicit reflexivity concerning positionality, potential bias, and the distinction between professional decision-making and research interpretation.
A key issue to resolve before formal application is the relationship between this proposed PhD and my existing doctoral study in Organizational Leadership. The project must establish clear intellectual non-duplication and an appropriate disciplinary and methodological rationale.
Indicative trajectory
Research questions, literature, methodology, ethics, archive, case selection.
Reflective documentation, comparative research, interviews, early analysis.
Thematic synthesis, theoretical contribution, integration of practice and writing.
Consolidated thesis, practice component, contribution, examination.
Proposed practice-research project · Dominique Devereaux · Loptr Lab · 2026