| dc.description.abstract | Modern computer games are difficult to develop. Emerging pervasive games make
this situation even harder, mainly by introducing physical space to computer games.
To help developers create games more quickly and easily, various authoring tools are
used as they provide visualized user interfaces and code automation. However, these
ready-made tools are usually targeted towards certain and narrow game domains.
They may not be able to meet certain requirements coming from other game domains.
Customized (authoring) tools may provide an alternative between creating
games from scratch and creating games with ready-made tools. Model Driven Software
Development (MDSD) and Domain Specific Modelling (DSM) can be utilized
to implement such customized tools in a formal and efficient way. MDSD has been
widely applied in many other domains, and research has shown it to be useful. When
it comes to the game domain, research exists where MDSD has been applied. However,
some important conceptual and procedural characteristics of computer game
development have not been well addressed. These issues can have a major impact on
the quality and efficiency of the final application of MDSD. The pursuit of improving
the quality and efficiency of model driven pervasive game development has been
the inspiration for this Ph.D. thesis. In this thesis, the following research questions
are proposed to address the conceptual and procedural challenges:
RQ1: What important concepts need to be considered regarding creating
pervasive games with a model driven approach?
o RQ1.1: What important characteristics should/ may a pervasive game
have?
o RQ1.2: What concepts can be used in a Domain Specific Language
(DSL) of pervasive games?
RQ2: How can MDSD techniques be applied in a traditional pervasive
/computer game creation process?
o RQ2.1: How can a formalized domain vocabulary be used to enhance
the domain analysis process in order to create pervasive games with a
DSM approach?
o RQ2.2: How can a traditional computer game development process be
adapted to support DSM tasks in an efficient and iterative way?
These research questions are answered mainly through one review and several
rounds of DSL development. Case studies and a user acceptance survey were performed
to evaluate the research results. The main contributions of this thesis are:
RC1: A conceptual framework named TeMPS (meaning Temporality, Mobility,
Perceptibility and Sociality) to summarize important characteristics of
pervasive and social games.
RC2: An ontology named PerGO (meaning Pervasive Game Ontology) to
structure and accelerate domain analysis for model driven pervasive games
development.
RC3: A process named GCCT (meaning Game Creation with Customized
Tools) to make use of model driven techniques within the traditional computer
game development process.
The first two contributions add to the conceptual base of the computer game and pervasive
game domains towards wider application of model driven game development.
And the third contribution utilizes the conceptual base, and provides a compact and
practical solution to apply MDSD in the computer game domain. | nb_NO |
