We contextualise the adoption of GenAI within larger trends in game industry & provide rigorous methodological detail and reflexivity on meta-ethnography as a yet underexplored method in HCI. Fantastic collaboration with Alexandru Ternar, Alena Denisova, Annakaisa Kultima and @jmacunha from @aaltouniversity, University of York and Coimbra University.

NB that our findings derive from studies scattered over time and thus must not be understood as a snapshot of the present. We recommend not to use them as the only input to practice/policy, but, combined w the identified research gaps, as guide for up-to-date research within the specific context of interest.

What makes adoption fragile: risks around originality, ownership, labour precarity & need for provenance to be embedded in workflows. We argue governance is not an optional overhead; GenAI reshapes authorship and can drive stylistic convergence if left unchecked.

Efficiency claims are contested & conditional: speed-ups are task-/phase-dependent, and often eroded by configuration, verification, and integration overhead. Pipeline fit is real bottleneck: current tools rarely fit production requirements w/o adapters, acceptance criteria & evaluation gates.

Existing qualitative studies suggest that GenAI’s strongest value is upstream: ideation and exploratory prototyping, not end-to-end authorship. Across studies, the shared conclusion is that systems broaden option spaces but humans still frame, judge, and steer what becomes “the work”

A consistent finding across the corpus is that human-in-the-loop refinement is the production norm. Generative outputs behave like provisional artefacts: teams iterate, curate, correct, and integrate, and prompting becomes progressive specification work rather than a one-shot query.

A fantastic opportunity to join a creative, open-minded research group just outside Helsinki in the happiest country on earth + to work with fantastic researchers worldwide, e.g. collaborators Tom Froese (OIST), Jon McCormack (Monash University) & Takashi Ikegami (University of Tokyo).