Languages of Games and Play

Abstract

Digital games are a powerful means for creating enticing, beautiful, educational, and often highly addictive interactive experiences that impact the lives of billions of players worldwide. We explore what informs the design and construction of good games to learn how to speed-up game development. In particular, we study to what extent languages , notations , patterns, and tools , can offer experts theoretical foundations, systematic techniques, and practical solutions they need to raise their productivity and improve the quality of games and play. Despite the growing number of publications on this topic there is currently no overview describing the state-of-the-art that relates research areas, goals, and applications. As a result, efforts and successes are often one-off, lessons learned go overlooked, language reuse remains minimal, and opportunities for collaboration and synergy are lost. We present a systematic map that identifies relevant publications and gives an overview of research areas and publication venues. In addition, we categorize research perspectives along common objectives, techniques, and approaches, illustrated by summaries of selected languages. Finally, we distill challenges and opportunities for future research and development.

Desenvolvimento de Jogos Orientado a Modelo para Jogos Sérios: uma Revisão Sistemática

“…Rozen [24] fez um mapeamento sistemático em abordagens focadas no uso de linguagens para o design e desenvolvimento de jogos digitais. Um dos focos analisados foi categorizado como linguagens de software, que inclui as DSLs, com o objetivo de caracterizá-las por meio de seus objetivos, escopo, funcionalidades, limitac ¸ões e aplicac ¸ões.…”

Towards a Unified Language for Card Game Design

“…Automated Game Design (AGD) studies how to empower game designers with languages, techniques and tools that automate and speed up iterative game design processes [6,25]. Various solutions have been proposed to help designers improve a game's parts, e.g., game mechanics, levels, missions, storylines and virtual worlds.…”

“…As a result, design intent may be lost in translation. Many game-or genre-specific solutions have a narrow focus and cannot easily be reused [25]. Reusable gameplay engines, e.g., for Machinations [27] or PuzzleScript [14], are still rare.…”