Theory, Experience, and Instinct: A Glimpse Into AAA Game Processes and How UX Leaders Navigate Pre-Production
Foundational decisions shape a project's long-term trajectory, a dynamic that becomes especially evident in the inherent complexity of game pre-production. However, academic frameworks often see limited uptake at this stage, as they do not readily map onto industry contexts, production constraints, and cross-functional workflows. To better understand how design decisions are made in practice, we conducted interviews with 15 UX leaders from the AAA (triple-A) games industry. Our findings show that early UX decisions emerge from a dynamic blend of theory, experience, and intuition. In cross-functional structures (such as strike and competency teams), UX leaders collaboratively align player needs, technical feasibility, and creative vision. These decision-making processes involve translating academic concepts into production-ready insights, codifying experiential knowledge into reusable practices, and relying on informed intuition amid uncertainty. We argue that meaningful impact requires academia to develop malleable conceptual tools that integrate with practitioners' highly adaptive design processes. We conclude by discussing how existing frameworks might be adapted to connect academic insights with AAA workflows. Rather than prescriptive directives, we offer these as starting points for discussion that support strike and competency teams through shared language, reusable design systems, and strategies for collaborative, context-sensitive decision-making.