Languages of Games and Play

Riemer Van Rozen
2020 ACM Computing Surveys  
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 in order 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
more » ... r 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.
doi:10.1145/3412843 fatcat:k25yj7aylbcg5k3ks4v5d5dueu