Game Arts & Game Design

When starting your research, you'll need to get the big picture on your topic. One good way to go about this is to consult a reference source like wikipedia. Use this stage as an opportunity to get deeply familiar with your topic: learn the specialized lingo, read about related topics, and identify key themes or issues. 

When you search for books, articles, and more, it is a good idea to carefully select keywords to reduce your results to only sources that are relevant to your topic. Because you've already familiarized yourself with the key themes of your topic, you'll probably have a handful of keywords to use.

Use these tips to super-charge your search results:

• use AND in between search terms to group them together
  (ex: "Games AND neuroscience" searches for results that contain both key words)
• use OR for more results
  (ex: "3D OR CGI" shows results for both)
• use NOT if you want to exempt a word from your results
  (ex: "Video Games NOT Mario" returns results for all video game related records except ones containing the word "Mario") 
• use quotation marks "_" to isolate phrases
  (ex: "Video Games" returns results that have the exact phrase in the record content while ignoring results with just the words 'Video' or 'Games' independently)
• use the wildcard * to get all versions of a word
  (ex: "Gam*" returns results for 'Gamer' as well as 'Gaming.')

Try these databases to narrow yourself to good sources of Game Design literature.

Researching Game UI Design? You might be interested to check out these databases:

• InterfaceInGames - a great source of inspiration for Game UIs.
• GameUIDatabase - a database of video game user interfaces