SAGA: A DSL for Story Management

Video game development is currently a very labour-intensive endeavour. Furthermore it involves multi-disciplinary teams of artistic content creators and programmers, whose typical working patterns are not easily meshed. SAGA is our first effort at augmenting the productivity of such teams. Already convinced of the benefits of DSLs, we set out to analyze the domains present in games in order to find out which would be most amenable to the DSL approach. Based on previous work, we thus sought those sub-parts that already had a partially established vocabulary and at the same time could be well modeled using classical computer science structures. We settled on the 'story' aspect of video games as the best candidate domain, which can be modeled using state transition systems. As we are working with a specific company as the ultimate customer for this work, an additional requirement was that our DSL should produce code that can be used within a pre-existing framework. We developed a full system (SAGA) comprised of a parser for a human-friendly language for 'story events', an internal representation of design patterns for implementing object-oriented state-transitions systems, an instantiator for these patterns for a specific 'story', and three renderers (for C++, C# and Java) for the instantiated abstract code.Comment: In Proceedings DSL 2011, arXiv:1109.032

RealCoins: A Case Study of Enhanced Model Driven Development for Pervasive Games

Model Driven Development (MDD) and Domain Specific Modeling (DSM) have been widely used in information system domains and achieved success in many open or in-house scenarios. But its application in the game domain is seldom and immature. In our research, we identified three issues that should be considered carefully in order to play the strength of MDD in the game development environment to a larger extend: 1) structured domain analysis should be done to assure the size and familiarity of the domain; 2) adapted process should be designed to save cost and support evolution; and 3) proper tools (especially language workbenches) should be evaluated and utilized to ease DSM tasks and accelerate iterations. In this paper, we explain these three issues and illustrate our solutions to them by presenting the development details (both technical and procedural) of one pervasive game case. We evaluate the gains and costs by involving MDD into the game development process. We reflect on the issues we have met, and discuss possible future works as well.an open access journa

Temporal hybridity: Mixing live video footage with instant replay in real time

Copyright @ 2010 ACMIn this paper we explore the production of streaming media that involves live and recorded content. To examine this, we report on how the production practices and process are conducted through an empirical study of the production of live television, involving the use of live and non-live media under highly time critical conditions. In explaining how this process is managed both as an individual and collective activity, we develop the concept of temporal hybridity to explain the properties of these kinds of production system and show how temporally separated media are used, understood and coordinated. Our analysis is examined in the light of recent developments in computing technology and we present some design implications to support amateur video production.The research was partly made possible by a grant from the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems to the Mobile Life VinnExcellence Center, in partnership with SonyEricsson, Ericsson, Microsoft Research, Nokia Research, TeliaSonera and the City of Stockholm

CREATe 2012-2016: Impact on society, industry and policy through research excellence and knowledge exchange

On the eve of the CREATe Festival May 2016, the Centre published this legacy report (edited by Kerry Patterson & Sukhpreet Singh with contributions from consortium researchers)

The data economy : How technological change has altered the role of the citizen-consumer

Citizenship and consumption have been linked for over a century, emphasizing the pivotal role played by the citizen-consumer in society as a whole, and the voting power of the consumer's money. In the modern, digitalized world of the data economy, citizen-consumers are being assigned new roles: active market party, content producer, distributor, and an important source of economic value formation. This article examines how the role of the citizen-consumer is transforming in the data economy, giving a simplified account of historical continuities and discontinuities. We concentrate on the commercial side of consumer citizenship, scrutinizing two periods in the history of technology: first, the 1930s–40s when the mobile citizen-consumer was invented, designed, and promoted by the US car industry; and second, the post-1990s when an even greater sense of mobility was introduced by cell phones and the Internet, drawing examples from outlying yet technologically advanced Finland. We close with a discussion of how the digital turn has given citizen-consumers new channels of operations, querying how technological change has influenced their everyday lives.Peer reviewe

Design and the fourth industrial revolution

The nature of design has always been related to socio-technological forces. In the twentieth century, the first and second orders of design were central in the establishment of graphic and industrial design. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the third and fourth orders of design were related to interactions and environments. This description can be associated with different phases of the Industrial Revolution: the first two phases allowed the transition from a farming and feudal society to an industrial and capitalist one, a third one was related to a post-industrial or services society. The Fourth Industrial Revolution presents the Internet, 3D printers and genetic algorithms as the main technical achievements and green energies as the energy source. It is related to computers, software, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and machine learning. These technological forces will create the space for the most important design jobs of the future

The leisure divide: Can the 'Third World' come out to play?

As billions of dollars are invested in mitigating the digital divide, stakes are raised to gain validity for these cost-intensive endeavors, focusing more on online activities that have clear socio-economic outcomes. Hence, farmers in rural India are watched closely to see how they access crop prices online, while their Orkuting gets sidelined as anecdotal. This paper argues that this is a fundamental problem as it treats users in emerging markets as somehow inherently different from those in the West. After all, it is now commonly accepted that much of what users do online in developed nations is leisure-oriented. This perspective does not crossover as easily into the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) world, where the utilitarian angle reigns. This paper argues that much insight can be gained in bridging worlds of ICT4D and New Media s