Le pragmatisme comme épistémologie pour le design de jeux : enquête sur la créativité et le processus de design

This dissertation examines the creative practice of game designers from the perspective of the pragmatist philosophy.  Game design aims to be a scientific discipline. Like other design disciplines, its main research focus is practice. In addition to professional knowledge, the term ‘practice’ also refers to the pedagogical practices that underlie practitioners’ training in game design and to scientific research practices.  Aligned with Donald Schön’s work on the epistemology of design practice, this thesis explores pragmatism as a global approach to studying scientific research practices in game design as well as the creative practice of game design students, in other words, the way they learn the design process.   The research question is twofold: 1.     What pragmatist authors and conceptual frameworks have the potential to inform a new epistemology of practice? 2.      How do these pragmatist concepts make it possible to understand and describe the game design process in an educational setting?  This dissertation begins by exploring and criticizing dominant epistemologies of game design studies and theories of creativity. It then presents a theoretical framework that builds on a combination of concepts from Donald Schön, Hans Joas, Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey. Beyond belonging to the pragmatist school of philosophy, these four authors share an understanding of a central concept to this philosophy: inquiry. They position the theory of inquiry as a philosophy, an epistemology and a methodology (of research and of practice).  Next, the dissertation focuses on game designers’ practice and creativity by examining dozens of design projects in the Bachelor program at the School of Digital Arts, Animation and Design (NAD-UQAC) and using a collaborative-project-grounded-research approach, inspired by the works of Alain Findeli and Serge Desgagné. Participants of this collaborative-project-grounded research are students in this university program and designers at the Montreal video game company Juicy Beast.  The results of the research show that the game designer becomes an “inquirer” (in the pragmatist sense) with the goal of organizing an indeterminate situation. The designer must engage in a dialogue with the situation to avoid rigid action. He/she must also use abduction (metaphorical reasoning) to explore new problems and find new ideas. Finally, the designer cannot be satisfied with only “having ideas”; the situation needs to be transformed concretely, using different prototypes.  The model of pragmatist inquiry also informs the research process. Similarly, the researcher is an inquirer who examines an indeterminate intellectual situation. This research is therefore “an inquiry on inquiry.” The pragmatist philosophy thus becomes an epistemological alternative that produces knowledge about research, practice and teaching, and contributes to the transformation and improvement of the world.

Keyphrases: game design, epistemology, pragmatism, inquiry, creativity, design process, design education, project-grounded research, praxiology, abduction