This paper reviews the experience of Students in HE level Game Courses making the transition from taught units to self–managed study projects – particularly the problem of choosing and refining a good study topic. This review draws on examples of 40+ student projects from 3 universities, and the experiences 6 supervisors in informal discussion with the author over a period of 4 years. The paper identifies common trends, mistakes and problems. Patterns emerge of students struggling with the multidisciplinarity and newness of the field, the lack of authoritative canon, the difficulty of articulating a topic, and the tendancy of game students to stray into domains beyond their experience. From these common problems the paper proposes a checklist of steps to guide the topic selection process. Author Keywords game studies, game research, game students.