This project draws a pathway to understanding the game industry's team formation and collaboration process, pursuing solutions to empower game creators to form collectives based on their team dynamics - allowing creative talent to coordinate more efficiently. The main objective is to create a methodology for helping game devs and game incubators to develop and foster more prosperous and diverse grassroots coalitions across geographic, social, and economic boundaries. Gathering knowledge on how game devs collaborate based on specific characteristics, this study will provide a more precise, quantifiable way to understand why each person teams with one another. This research is added to the emerging literature on how game developers work together and which criteria lead to more successful teams, disruptive mindsets, and collaborative environments. Observing how teams collaborate and how algorithms can help teams better collaborate, the research outcome is to create models to help developers connect more efficiently during game jams and incubation programs. A method that facilitates and scales matchmaking can be groundbreaking for game creators. The project gives reasons to expect development of a novel algorithm-mediated matchmaking system for game developers, which can further be developed as a start-up.

• dr. Pedro Santoro Zambon