Where is the game architecture research?

I was reading this paper on EA's internal STL implementation, and it got me thinking -- where is the game architecture research?

There is a large amount of academic research poured into real-time graphics, experimental gameplay and entertainment, AI, and even MMO server design. But I find there are a number of architecture issues unique to games that are lacking in any sort of research. I've done searches and not come up with a whole lot, maybe I'm just not using the correct keywords.

Memory is not a solved problem for game consoles
Most if not all garbage collection research is focused on desktop or server based memory usage patterns. They assume virtual memory paging. Many gc algorithms are impractical for a fixed memory environment where utilization needs to be close to 100%. While some game engines use garbage collection, the algorithms are primitive compared to the state of the art generational collectors found in desktop environments, and the waste of memory resources is often 10-20% of total memory. Games generally can not afford large mark or sweep phases as they must execute at a smooth frame rate. Fragmentation can still be an issue in a fixed memory environment, although in this case many allocator strategies exist to combat this.

Multicore architectures for games 
While this is still an active area of research for desktop and server applications, too, I've found exactly one paper that attempts some research in this area for game architectures. This is a particularly fruitful area for research since there are many competing ideas out there (message passing! software transactional memory! functional programming!), but very few researchers testing any of them in the context of building a game. It is difficult enough to make a game by itself, let alone test multiple techniques for exploiting multiple cores. I find this somewhat interesting because aside from servers and scientific processing, games are pushing the state of the art in multicore programming more than anything else.

Automated testing
This is something the EA STL paper brings up -- traditional automated testing techniques break down pretty quickly beyond unit testing lower level libraries. So much of the end result of game code is subjective and emergent that determining how to test even basic functionality automatically is a huge unsolved problem. This results in a large amount of manpower being used for game testing, particularly in the area of regression testing.

This research is being done as a part of production by many companies inside the industry. But it is always going to be the case that in a production environment, you just aren't going to have the time and resources to, say, try three different approaches to multicore architecture and compare them. Generally you make an educated guess and hope for the best. Additionally, because much of this research is done as part of product development, rarely are the results published, which means we're all out there doing the same work over and over.