As researchers trying to understand games, it's invigorating – and humbling – to see the breakneck pace with which game development occurs. Every few years, revolutions in hardware, design innovations, and the changing place of video games in culture transform the marketplace in fundamental ways.

A few years ago the revolution was games' capacity for meaningful narrative experiences. Then we saw the enormous growth of MMOs. Today games are reaching new audiences through social games on emerging platforms. Games are a moving target, and understanding them means incorporating many points of view on a changing basis.

We are designers and academics who cross boundaries, and we value how engaging with each other enables us to reflect on our practices, encounter new ways to think about games, and see how other fields tackle similar problems. RTR grew out of this impulse for interdisciplinary dialog. Organic conversations at conferences such as the Game Developer's Conference, or Games + Learning + Society, occur most often during spontaneous dialog over dinner or martinis. Over time, these discussions led to further informal and formal collaborations. These include academics studying game developers' design practices, game designers conducting guest lectures and teaching game design courses, and both groups consulting on one another's work. On occasion, full-blown collaborative projects sought to push the envelope of academics and game design, as with Gamestar Mechanic, a game originally developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Gamelab, led by James Paul Gee and Eric Zimmerman.

As useful and productive as these efforts have been, we wanted to create a space to promote such interactions, without necessarily requiring one to close down the bar or have a large grant. Building on ideas from games design, could we pull from the tradition of prototyping, and create a quick and easy cycles of learning, and could we pull from learning theory and create contexts to learn through problem solving?