A case study on Service-Oriented Architecture for Serious Games

Abstract

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a set of practices for architectural design of software that exploits services as loosely coupled components orchestrated to deliver various functionalities. The SOA paradigm is not well established in the Serious Games (SG) domain, but it is expected to provide benefits, particularly in reducing the conceptual and technological complexity of the development. In this paper, we propose and study the application of a SOA approach to SG development. We have used the SOA approach to develop an adaptive serious game for teaching basic elements of probability to high school and entry-level university students, called The Journey. Details of the architecture implementation are offered, as well as the results of an evaluation of the system using the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM). Based on our experience, we argue that the SOA approach can make SG development shorter, more flexible and more focused.

Towards a Service-Oriented Architecture Framework for Educational Serious Games

“…The adoption of SOA for serious games is currently limited [2], but there are examples of using SOA in entertainment games, particularly online multiplayer games, upon which we can draw, as the examples below show.…”

“…In order to deliver a proof of concept, we applied our findings to propose the refactoring of an existing game, called "The Journey" [2]. The game is a serious game for teaching basic elements of probability to high school and entry-level university students, in which players have to understand how to calculate the probabilities of events and use their knowledge to make the best possible decisions along the way.…”

“…Thus, main barriers for large scale deployment of serious games are the high production costs, challenging and time-consuming production process, and low reusability of the final product and its components [1]. Based upon well proven concepts of using Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) for increasing the reusability by maintaining a high customization degree, it has been proposed that SOA can also benefit serious games development by reducing costs and time to market, while at the same time allowing customization in a relatively easy and reconfigurable way [2].…”

An architecture for the autonomic curation of crowdsourced knowledge

“…It provides a well structured procedure to evaluate an architecture's fitness taking into account a set of non-dominant quality attributes (in the sense that improving one attribute will implicitly worsen another). ATAM has been successfully used for analysing software architectures in cloud computing [30], with a special focus on the security aspect [13], for investigating the design of service-oriented systems for serious games [8] as well as a starting point for bespoke approaches considering the impact of uncertainty on software requirements and architectures [29], the importance of enterprise information systems availability [33] or the sustainability of software architectures [50]. When applied to the Aviator domain, ATAM enabled the identification and management of the following factors.…”

“…Usage scenarios 8 Users are exploring and tagging career related resources, while their annotations are captured by a sensor and integrated in the underlying knowledge base without interrupting their browsing. New job postings and relevant user reviews are captured automatically.…”