Languages of games and play: A systematic mapping study

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

The conception and role of interdisciplinarity in the Spanish education system

This article provides an overview of the role that interdisciplinarity plays in the Spanish education system. With this aim, we first describe the main conception of the term interdisciplinarity in texts written in Spanish, including other terms that have similar meaning. Then we review the role of interdisciplinarity in the Spanish curriculum at different levels of education, focusing fundamentally on compulsory education. This serves as the basis from which later to analyze Spanish research on interdisciplinarity. Finally, through results of this research and some examples of interdisciplinary school practices, we extract conclusions about the role of interdisciplinarity in teaching practices in the classroom

Panel on “Past and future of computer science theory”

The twenty-ninth edition of the SEBD (Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems), held on 5-9 September 2021 in Pizzo (Calabria Region, Italy), included a joint seminar on “Reminiscence of TIDB 1981” with invited talks given by some of the participants to the Advanced Seminar on Theoretical Issues in Databases (TIDB), which took place in the same region exactly forty years earlier. The joint seminar was concluded by a Panel on “The Past and the Future of Computer Science Theory” with the participation of four distinguished computer science theorists (Ronald Fagin, Georg Gottlob, Christos Papadimitriou and Moshe Vardi), who were interviewed by Giorgio Ausiello, Maurizio Lenzerini, Luigi Palopoli, Domenico Saccà and Francesco Scarcello. This paper reports the summaries of the four interviews

Decentralized Resource Scheduling in Grid/Cloud Computing

In the Grid/Cloud environment, applications or services and resources belong to different organizations with different objectives. Entities in the Grid/Cloud are autonomous and self-interested; however, they are willing to share their resources and services to achieve their individual and collective goals. In such open environment, the scheduling decision is a challenge given the decentralized nature of the environment. Each entity has specific requirements and objectives that need to achieve. In this thesis, we review the Grid/Cloud computing technologies, environment characteristics and structure and indicate the challenges within the resource scheduling. We capture the Grid/Cloud scheduling model based on the complete requirement of the environment. We further create a mapping between the Grid/Cloud scheduling problem and the combinatorial allocation problem and propose an adequate economic-based optimization model based on the characteristic and the structure nature of the Grid/Cloud. By adequacy, we mean that a comprehensive view of required properties of the Grid/Cloud is captured. We utilize the captured properties and propose a bidding language that is expressive where entities have the ability to specify any set of preferences in the Grid/Cloud and simple as entities have the ability to express structured preferences directly. We propose a winner determination model and mechanism that utilizes the proposed bidding language and finds a scheduling solution. Our proposed approach integrates concepts and principles of mechanism design and classical scheduling theory. Furthermore, we argue that in such open environment privacy concerns by nature is part of the requirement in the Grid/Cloud. Hence, any scheduling decision within the Grid/Cloud computing environment is to incorporate the feasibility of privacy protection of an entity. Each entity has specific requirements in terms of scheduling and privacy preferences. We analyze the privacy problem in the Grid/Cloud computing environment and propose an economic based model and solution architecture that provides a scheduling solution given privacy concerns in the Grid/Cloud. Finally, as a demonstration of the applicability of the approach, we apply our solution by integrating with Globus toolkit (a well adopted tool to enable Grid/Cloud computing environment). We also, created simulation experimental results to capture the economic and time efficiency of the proposed solution

Analysis and Reuse of Plots Using Similarity and Analogy

Abstract: A plot is a partially ordered set of events. Plot analysis is a relevant source of knowledge about the agents behavior when accessing data stored in the database. It relies on logical logs which register the actions of individual agents. This paper proposes techniques to analyze and reuse plots based on the concepts of similarity and analogy, borrowed from cognitive science and linguistics. The concept of similarity is applied to organize plots as a library, and to explore the reuse of plots in the same domain. By contrast, the concept of analogy helps reuse plots across different domains. The techniques proposed in this paper find applications in areas such as computer games and emergency response information systems, as well as some traditional business applications

Cards with Class: Formalizing a Simplified Collectible Card Game

Collectible card games (CCGs) have been a wildly popular game genre since the release of Wizards of the Coast\u27s Magic: The Gathering. These games revolve around their thousands of cards and the hundreds of thousands of interactions they can create with their many effects. For designers, it is an incredibly demanding task to ensure that every single card works properly and that each card\u27s text unambiguously conveys its intended behavior in all cases. The task only grows more difficult over time as the number of cards in the game grows and card effects become more complex or experimental. If the implementation and clarity check is done inadequately, it results in confusion that interferes with players\u27 enjoyment of the game and with designers\u27 development work. Players are forced to stop playing to try and resolve a conflict between card effects based on unclear texts, while designers must spend extra resources to fix the errors and clarify the ambiguities. I propose formal methods as a way to ease these challenges, help designers understand their CCG\u27s cards and mechanics more deeply, and facilitate the design process. I present a specification for a reduced version of Blizzard Entertainment\u27s Hearthstone that can be given to general theorem provers and expanded upon as a proof of concept