This article reports on an unconventional collaborative event called Real-Time Research, a project that brought 25 participants together from radically divergent fields for a playful and somewhat improvisational investigation of what it means to do games and learning research. Real-Time Research took the form of a two-part workshop session at the "Games, Learning & Society" (GLS) conference during the summer of 2008, in which attendees collaboratively designed and then conducted five research experiments that took place over the course of the two-day conference. The article reports on the results of those studies and the processes that generated them.