The Industry and Policy Context for Digital Games for Empowerment and Inclusion:Market Analysis, Future Prospects and Key Challenges in Videogames, Serious Games and Gamification

The effective use of digital games for empowerment and social inclusion (DGEI) of people and communities at risk of exclusion will be shaped by, and may influence the development of a range of sectors that supply products, services, technology and research. The principal industries that would appear to be implicated are the 'videogames' industry, and an emerging 'serious games' industry. The videogames industry is an ecosystem of developers, publishers and other service providers drawn from the interactive media, software and broader ICT industry that services the mainstream leisure market in games, The 'serious games' industry is a rather fragmented and growing network of firms, users, research and policy makers from a variety of sectors. This emerging industry is are trying to develop knowledge, products, services and a market for the use of digital games, and products inspired by digital games, for a range of non-leisure applications. This report provides a summary of the state of play of these industries, their trajectories and the challenges they face. It also analyses the contribution they could make to exploiting digital games for empowerment and social inclusion. Finally, it explores existing policy towards activities in these industries and markets, and draws conclusions as to the future policy relevance of engaging with them to support innovation and uptake of effective digital game-based approaches to empowerment and social inclusion.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Re-engineering jake2 to work on a grid using the GridGain Middleware

With the advent of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), engineers and designers of games came across with many questions that needed to be answered such as, for example, "how to allow a large amount of clients to play simultaneously on the same server?", "how to guarantee a good quality of service (QoS) to a great number of clients?", "how many resources will be necessary?", "how to optimize these resources to the maximum?". A possible answer to these questions relies on the usage of grid computing. Taking into account the parallel and distributed nature of grid computing, we can say that grid computing allows for more scalability in terms of a growing number of players, guarantees shorter communication time between clients and servers, and allows for a better resource management and usage (e.g., memory, CPU, core balancing usage, etc.) than the traditional serial computing model. However, the main focus of this thesis is not about grid computing. Instead, this thesis describes the re-engineering process of an existing multiplayer computer game, called Jake2, by transforming it into a MMOG, which is then put to run on a grid

Comparison between Famous Game Engines and Eminent Games

Nowadays game engines are imperative for building 3D applications and games. This is for the reason that the engines appreciably reduce resources for employing obligatory but intricate utilities. This paper elucidates about a game engine, popular games developed by these engines and its foremost elements. It portrays a number of special kinds of contemporary game developed by engines in the way of their aspects, procedure and deliberates their stipulations with comparison

An Architecture Approach for 3D Render Distribution using Mobile Devices in Real Time

Nowadays, video games such as Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) have become cultural mediators. Mobile games contribute to a large number of downloads and potential benefits in the applications market. Although processing power of mobile devices increases the bandwidth transmission, a poor network connectivity may bottleneck Gaming as a Service (GaaS). In order to enhance performance in digital ecosystem, processing tasks are distributed among thin client devices and robust servers. This research is based on the method ‘divide and rule’, that is, volumetric surfaces are subdivided using a tree-KD of sequence of scenes in a game, so reducing the surface into small sets of points. Reconstruction efficiency is improved, because the search of data is performed in local and small regions. Processes are modeled through a finite set of states that are built using Hidden Markov Models with domains configured by heuristics. Six test that control the states of each heuristic, including the number of intervals are carried out to validate the proposed model. This validation concludes that the proposed model optimizes response frames per second, in a sequence of interactions

Open software to innovation: the critical success factors of massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) in China and Ireland.

This project investigates the factors leading to the success of China’s Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) market and gives an analysis of how Open source has contributed to these success factors. It then will look at how the use of open source is mirrored in Ireland’s market for example, the software sector to see if the same factors are apparent or there are indicators of these. Knowledge Management plays a very important role for fasten the innovation of Open source software development in China

Multiplayer game for Android platform

Tato bakalářská práce se věnuje problematice vývoje real-time mobilních her pro více hráčů na platformě Android. První kapitoly se zabívají analýzou a možnostmi vývoje aplikací na této platformě. Následuje popis různých principů používaných při tvorbě her pro více hráčů. Součástí práce je také popis technologií, které byli analyzovány a poté použity při implementaci 2D real-time bojové hry a herního serveru. V práci je postupně popsán proces návrhu, implementace hry a testování celé aplikace.This bachelor thesis deals with issues of real-time multiplayer mobile games development on Android platform. First chapters are devoted to the analysis of this platform and its possibilities of applications development. This is followed by the description of differenent approaches used for multiplayer game development. Part of the thesis describes different technologies, that were analyzed and then used for implementation of a 2D real-time fighting game and a server. The thesis contains the description of the game design, implementation and testing processes of the application.

Measurement and Enhancement of Cloud-based Online Gaming Systems

University of Minnesota M.S. thesis. July 2017. Major: Computer Science. Advisor: Haiyang Wang. 1 computer file (PDF); v, 54 pages.Cloud gaming refers to the technologies that offload parts of game software from traditional game consoles to powerful and elastic cloud infrastructure. This design effectively shifts the game system requirements as well as the necessary computational workload to remote cloud platforms and thus has been attracting an increasing amount of attention from both service providers and end users. We have seen commercial cloud gaming systems such as Gaikai and OnLive being available in the market with a considerable user base. However, the pitfalls as well as the design challenges of cloud gaming still remains largely unclear for the general public. In this thesis, we take an initial step towards the understanding of cloud gaming performance in virtualized environments. Different from existing cloud gaming implementations, we migrate the entire gaming system into a fully virtualized local cloud environment and compare its performance to a pure datacenter-based deployment. From our experiments, we find that the virtualized environment will significantly affect the latency as well as the frame rate of the game. As a result, we find the tested games running much slower on the cloud than on their non-virtualized counterpart. In particular, latency increases by about 176 ms and the frame rate decreases by almost 40% in our test platform. To make the matters worse, the resource utilization on the server also increases due to cloud virtualization. To address these issues, we propose a shared-memory-based enhancement to reduce the overhead of games running on virtualized environment. Our evaluation indicates that our approach can successfully reduce the cloud gaming latency by about 6% without noticeable increase of system's CPU and memory utilization