The book highlights several challenges and opportunities in the field of software engineering for serious games. It covers a wide range of topics from game design principles to software architecture, testing, and deployment and is structured into two parts. While Part I delves into various aspects of designing, maintaining, adapting, and evaluating games in serious contexts; Part II focuses on the experiences of realizing and using games in serious contexts. One of the primary challenges is to develop effective methods for evaluating serious games and measuring their impact and outcomes. Another challenge is to design serious games that are both engaging and effective, which requires a deep understanding of game design principles and instructional design. The book also emphasizes the need to develop effective software engineering practices for serious game development and the importance of gamification in improving user engagement and motivation. The potential of serious games for addressing societal challenges such as cybersecurity and healthcare is also highlighted. Despite these challenges, the book also identifies several opportunities for the field, including the potential of serious games to provide new and innovative approaches to learning and the potential of serious games to address real-world problems in new and effective ways. This book is intended for software engineers, game developers, educators, and anyone interested in how games in serious contexts can be effectively created. Overall, the chapters in the book provide a valuable snapshot of the current state of the field and offer insights into where it may be headed in the future.

"Software Engineering for Game Developers" is a unique guide—a toolbox for effectively building a computer game using practices that are fostered by software engineering. Examine each major phase of the software engineering lifecycle of an actual game and its developers and gather the tools you need to organize your programming into proper engineering patterns. This book documents a comprehensive development process that started from a set of requirements. This process guided the development team to consistently design and implement a game according to these requirements, staying within budget and delivering the game on time. The tools provided within this book are a valuable resource for software developers in any area—game software development professionals, game producers and designers, testers, writers, artists, and educators.

Featuring contributions from leading experts in software engineering, this edited book provides a comprehensive introduction to computer game software development. It is a complex, interdisciplinary field that relies on contributions from a wide variety of disciplines including arts and humanities, behavioural sciences, business, engineering, physical sciences, mathematics, etc. The book focuses on the emerging research at the intersection of game and software engineering communities. A brief history of game development is presented, which considers the shift from the development of rare games in isolated research environments in the 1950s to their ubiquitous presence in popular culture today. A summary is provided of the latest peer-reviewed research results in computer game development that have been reported at multiple levels of maturity (workshops, conferences, and journals). The core chapters of the book are devoted to sharing emerging research at the intersection of game development and software engineering. In addition, future research opportunities on new software engineering methods for games and serious educational games for software engineering education are highlighted. As an ideal reference for software engineers, developers, educators, and researchers, this book explores game development topics from software engineering and education perspectives. Key Features: Includes contributions from leading academic experts in the community Presents a current collection of emerging research at the intersection of games and software engineering Considers the interdisciplinary field from two broad perspectives: software engineering methods for game development and serious games for software engineering education Provides a snapshot of the recent literature (i.e., 2015-2020) on game development from software engineering perspectives

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Serious Games, Interaction and Simulation, SGAMES 2016, held in Porto, Portugal, in June 2016. The 19 revised full papers presented together with 2 keynote papers and an editorial introduction were carefully reviewed and selected from all the submissions. The papers cover areas like cognition, psychology, technology-enhanced education, evaluation and assessment, multimedia and information technology and feature new scientific approaches and results from experiments and real-life applications.

How can a group be empowered to improve their ability to make decisions while also reinforcing the group’s intended values, beliefs, and behaviors? Like positive reinforcement, which introduces a desirable or pleasant stimulus after a behavior has been completed and has been found to be effective for reinforcing such behavior, serious games introduce the behavior as a pleasant experience through engagement and entertainment. Where positive reinforcement relies heavily on the willpower of the subject to complete the behavior on their own, serious games introduce a motivational factor from the beginning of the behavior. Serious games are designed for purposes other than entertainment, such as training, learning, creating awareness, or behavior transformation through the introduction of content, topics, narratives, rules, and goals. They are immersive, engaging, and enjoyable, which enhances motivation and learning. The development of serious games is grounded in theoretical backgrounds, such as motivation, constructivism, flow experience, problem-based learning, and learning by doing. This method has been used in a variety of industries, including education, healthcare, military, policy analysis, and business functions such as marketing or financial purposes. They facilitate problem solving through challenges and rewards and use entertainment and engagement components. Serious games can address specific skills for many domains, foster collaboration, provide risk-free environments, and be used as analytical tools for educational research. They reinforce intended values, beliefs, and behaviors of players while conveying knowledge, skills, and attitudes, providing an integrated and effective approach to the transformation of an individual, group, or organization. The Handbook of Research on Decision-Making Capabilities Improvement With Serious Games discusses the use of advanced technologies including extended and immersive reality, digital twins, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), and IoT sensors to improve decision-making skills and learning through serious games. This book discusses user engagement, game adaptation, content adaptation, and sensor technology. It showcases how to increase decision-making skills in individuals and organizations and incorporates the latest developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Led by experts with over 20 years of experience and covering topics such as serious game design, intelligent content adaptation, and machine learning algorithms. This book is designed for professionals in education, instructional designers, curriculum developers, program developers, administrators, educational software developers, policymakers, researchers, training professionals, privacy practitioners, government officials, consultants, IT researchers, academicians, and students.

With the continued application of gaming for training and education, which has seen exponential growth over the past two decades, this book offers an insightful introduction to the current developments and applications of game technologies within educational settings, with cutting-edge academic research and industry insights, providing a greater understanding into current and future developments and advances within this field. Following on from the success of the first volume in 2011, researchers from around the world presents up-to-date research on a broad range of new and emerging topics such as serious games and emotion, games for music education and games for medical training, to gamification, bespoke serious games, and adaptation of commercial off-the shelf games for education and narrative design, giving readers a thorough understanding of the advances and current issues facing developers and designers regarding games for training and education. This second volume of Serious Games and Edutainment Applications offers further insights for researchers, designers and educators who are interested in using serious games for training and educational purposes, and gives game developers with detailed information on current topics and developments within this growing area.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Games and Learning Alliance, GALA 2016, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in December 2016. The 27 revised regular papers presented together with 14 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. The papers cover topics such as games and sustainability; games for math and programming; games and health; games and soft skills; games and management; games and learning; game development and assessment; and mobile games.

The biggest challenge facing many game programmers is completing their game. Most game projects fizzle out, overwhelmed by the complexity of their own code. Game Programming Patterns tackles that exact problem. Based on years of experience in shipped AAA titles, this book collects proven patterns to untangle and optimize your game, organized as independent recipes so you can pick just the patterns you need. You will learn how to write a robust game loop, how to organize your entities using components, and take advantage of the CPUs cache to improve your performance. You'll dive deep into how scripting engines encode behavior, how quadtrees and other spatial partitions optimize your engine, and how other classic design patterns can be used in games.