The interest in serious games (SG) has grown very fast in the last decade. Yet the research community rarely studies SG and the challenges SG developers are facing while creating games that should educate, train, and inform players. In this research, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model to analyze a popular Q&A site (Game Dev StackExchange) in order to understand the thoughts and needs of SG developers. We analyze the most active and popular topics about SG development. Our study reveals that SG developers' needs are very diverse, ranging widely from simple script code to simulate 3D learning environments, over best practices to design educational games for specific target groups, to features that can increase the player's motivation and learning outcomes.
Serious Games (SGs) are video games intended to educate the players instead of pure
entertainment
We used LDA topic model to identify major topics and areas of interests in SG developers searched for. We discover our topics by using SG terms and the most popular tags used in SG related posts. We rank our topics based on the number of documents. Finally, we analyzed the most popular and active topics by considering the number of documents assigned to each topic and their views. We conduct our study by using the following research questions: RQ1: What issues do serious games developers search online? RQ2: What are the most popular topics about serious games development? This paper is organized as follow: We review related works (section 2), highlight our research questions and describe our methodology to detect SG-related posts (section 3). Then, we present and discuss our findings (section 4) and conclude (section 5). 2
The research most closely related to our work are those investigating SG development and software search.
Serious Games Development. Nowadays, we observe a growing number of
software engineers and researchers focusing on SG development
Software Search is a common practice in Software Engineering that aims at
discovering suitable software for a given purpose
In this section, we describe our methodology to identify SG related posts. We present and motivate our research questions. Then we describe our data collection and analysis process which we use to answer our research questions.
RQ1: What issues do serious games developers search online? – Past research on
Software Search has mainly studied what developers seek for general purpose software
engineering
RQ2: What are the most popular topics about serious games development? – Discovering the most popular SG discussions can help the SG community to identify major areas of interest for future investigations. For instance, game companies may fine-tune various aspects of their products and SG publishers may point to areas in which practitioners have the most challenges and interest. Also, researchers may discover new research opportunities with a high chance of having an impact on practice. 3.2
To create our corpus, we first download the posts.xml file from the GameDev
StackExchange data dump (last updated June 2018) which contains user-generated
questions and related answers3. We parse the data dump which includes a total of
110,193 posts, from which 42639 are questions. For each extracted post, we maintain
a record of its metadata: the post type, timestamp and the total number of views. We
then process our corpus by removing all existing code snippets that are present in the
posts (i.e. enclosed in <code> HTML tags), as well as common English words which
do not help to create meaningful topics as demonstrated in past research
In order to found which posts of our corpus are relevant, we need a way to filter out posts which
are not really related to SG development. To achieve this goal, we examined prior work
Applied Game – Applied Gaming – Serious Game – Serious Gaming – Gamification – Games for Change – Games for Good Military – Government - Education – Corporate-Games – Healthcare – Politics – Religion – Art 3 To be found at: https://archive.org/download/stackexchange
218 152
Unity – Flash – Second life – E-adventure – Unreal – Torque3d – Cocos – Xna
SG posts found with initial keywords
SG posts found with TRT>=35%
All tags assigned to SG posts
Tags relevant to SG posts
To discover the most popular SG topics, two metrics were introduced. First, the topic
relevance metric = represents the distance of a topic distribution
as!
signed by LDA to a document to the highest distribution assigned to that same
document. We use this metric as a threshold to consider only topics with the highest
distribution values as the most relevant ones. Usually, a document will have 1 to 5 most
dominant topics assigned to it with a distribution of 0,10 or higher
Topic Modeling is a document clustering technique that uses statistical methods for
identifying abstract topics within a document collection. Several topic modelling
techniques have been developed and evaluated (such as Probabilistic Latent Semantic
Indexing, Non-negative Matrix Factorization)
In this section, we present the results of applying our research methodology to answer our research questions. We first examine the percentage of SG-related posts to all existing posts in our corpus. Then, we describe each discovered topic and finally discuss each topic qualitatively. 4.1
Before delving into our research questions, we would like to understand the importance of SG-related posts in our corpus. Thus, after extracting and processing our corpus, we can now examine (as shown in Fig. 2) the number of SG-related posts (red line) and their percentage (blue line) to all existing posts per month. Our analysis shows that at least 36% of all existing posts are related to SG development. There is an increase of SG-related posts from August 2010 to March 2013 reaching a maximal value of 300 2014 which finally gets stabilized over the following years till 2018 with an average of 27%. Thus, we conclude that the number of SG-related posts is growing and that discussions about SG development are relevant in the game development community. l u J v o N r ä l u J v o
N 2010 2011 r ä l u
J 2012 v o N r ä l u
J 2013 v o N r ä l u
J 2014 v o N r ä l u
J 2015 v o N r ä l u
J 2016 v o N r ä l u J v o N r ä 2017 2018 M
M
M
M
M
M
M
M Percentage of SG posts
SG posts per month
we merged some topics because of their semantical similarity. For instance, the topics
Collision Detection and Pathfinding are related to Game Physics and thus were merged
together. We arranged these topics in descending order according to their share metric
as proposed by
Topic Graphics Engine Game Physics/Collision Detection/Path Finding Networking Mesh File&Format Scripting Data structure Platform Game Design Component Learning Design Camera 3D Modeling/ Rendering Movement Animation Game Engine
Top keywords game java graphics creating render lwjgl library don function simple math framework multiple engines question opengl threads testing people web movement physics boxd speed libgdx simulation body path finding velocity projectile bullet gravity distance ball collision detection network server multiplayer game client side players network mmo online player networking architecture rts sync prediction browser udp prevent communication clients unity mesh rendering order error performance problem device correct triangle water android dynamic problems udk collider vertices triangles text gui xna file project monogame custom files content culling frustum format screen loading static write running pipeline possible read asset creation unity working script gameobject add properly audio object playing method new level doesn issue editor scaling set child gameobjects isn game data code structure objects implement build libgdx visual studio board designing font node cocosd rts platforms ways gamemaker style time canvas game html real games play javascript app google mobile step mode delta devices application run simple services program game games design good pattern idea creating practice making bad management gameplay effects mobile common adventure patterns story book examples system based component entity turn components systems entities particle architecture event ecs handling design strategy combat battle oriented events types learning design games learning api starting programming start platform card resources indie software programmer computer developer started language development camera screen position object mouse move moving libgdx set target issue coordinate person click shooter transform touch follow environment full multiple model models blender textures mesh single sprites objects parts unity rendering meshes building support fbx separate techniques dealing combine object point vector rotation direction rotate camera sphere rotating move calculate specific calculating plane axis angle points quaternion find tower animation character sprite unity create unityd animations skeletal states behavior flash jump controller bone animate max android trees start animated game engine open code source legal issues based engines design racing window assets browser small music develop console put projects To get a better insight about our discovered topics, we show a subset of examples related to each group of topics along with some context information (like title, body, tags, #postId) whenever needed, and will discuss their impact on SG
Game Design. We found one topic about game design. Our study reveals that SG developers seek best practices and experts' opinions for taking important design decisions, like choosing a proper design pattern (#32093) or selecting an appropriate platform to create educational games (#8359).
Title: Design Pattern for Social Game Mission Mechanics Body: When we want to design a mission sub-system like in the The Ville or Sims Social, what kind of design pattern / idea would fit the best? There may be relation between missions (first do this then this etc...) or not. What do you think sims social or the ville or any other social games is using for this? I'm looking for a best-practise method to contruct a mission framework for tha game. How the well-known game do this stuff for large scale social facebook games? [ Topic: Game Design, Tags: game-design,flash, social. PostId: #32093 ]
Title: What makes a good educational game? – Body: I'm currently creating a game framework/engine for educational games. My hope is that this can be used in elementary schools. What makes a good educational game? Which platforms should I target? [ Topic: Game Design, Tags: serious-games cross-platform educational-games.. PostId: #8359 ] Also, SG developers seek techniques to implement AI for tracking the progression of the player (#129492), assess the player’s learning outcomes (#94079) and interest (#8925), and increase his engagement in learning (#149096, #28540).
Title: Machine learning to improve strategy game AI - Body:I am currently working on a simple strategy game as a hobby and I am starting to think about designing an AI to add opponents ….My idea was to record the player's activity every X amount of time as well as the current state of some game variables. Then I would use some machine learning algo (as a black box) to find a relationship between game variables and actions to make. I would also record the final score at the end of each game so that the AI learns more from successful games than unsuccessful ones (or even better set a score threshold above which to send the data to the AI)… Any thoughts or directions towards interesting resources /tutorials would be very welcome [ Topic: Level Design, Tags: game-design ai strategy reinforcement-learning, PostId: #129492 ] Title: How can I ensure the player learns all skills in a single open level? Body: I am making a game that only has a single level. It is a survival game. … I can have the player learn new skills gradually.
For example, level one requires jumping, level 2 requires climbing, level 3 requires both. Is there a common strategy to force the player to learn all the necessary skills to succeed?
Currently I have 4 directions which the player can travel from the
starting point. Each of which…[ Topic: Learning Design, Tags:
level-design tutorials reinforcement-learning, PostId: #94079 ]
Title: Things that make a game more interesting for kids – Body:
What makes a game more interesting or fun to play… Does the age
of consumer play an important role in his/her interest of game?What
can I put in a game to make it more fun, educational, and interesting
to play? – Topic: Game Design PostId: #8925 Tags: game-design
serious games
Title: How to calculate players engagement?- Body: What metrics
could be used to know what certain people think about the game
and how much they liked it? [ Topic: Game Design, PostId:
#149096 Tags: game-design -design metrics ]
Title:What are the downsides of only explicitly informing the player
of *success*? – Body: I working on educational software and
trying to increase engagement (“fun”) [ Topic: Game Design, Tags:
game-design, PostId: #28540 ]
There are two emerging research fields that focus on tracking and analyzing players’
interactions. First, Game Analytics (GA)
Modeling/Rendering. Our study reveals that SG developers seek instructions and efficient tools or programs for creating and rendering (nice-looking) 3D objects even with limited knowledge, skills, and time (#121634, #44168).
Title: Creating a large amount of sprites and animations. Body: For
my AP U.S. Government and Politics class, I am making a spinoff
of Mortal Kombat. Because of time constraints, I'm using an open
source version of the game and want to create new characters. I have
about two weeks to do the project.. I want it to look as nice… What
Title: Software rendering 3d triangles in the proper order
Body: I'm implementing a basic 3d rendering engine in
software (for education purposes, please don't mention to use an
API). When I project a triangle from 3d to 2d coordinates, I draw
the triangle. If I'm sorting all the objects, this is n*log(n). Is this
programs or techniques would be best…? – [ Topic: 3D Model- the most efficient way to do this? [ Topic: 3D
Modeling/Rendering/Rendering, Tags: sprites animation, PostId: #121634 ] ing, Tags: 3D, rendering, software-rendering PostId: #44168 ]
3D Modeling is the process of using software to generate a representation of 3D
characters and objects for use in a game
Physics. Game physics (known as Physics) refers to the process of introducing
classical laws of mechanics in games
Title: How to simulate early politics? – Body: I'm making a historically accurate game where the player can interact with past times and
shape the future. The entire game is scientifically generated with math and real physics…The player can build anything they want and it
will use physics to simulate each creation based on the materials it's made of. I was considering just modeling our political system and
then applying mathematical regression to the algorithm to regress it 100 million years. However, I'm worried about the limitations of
floating point numbers and I think that errors will compound.…P.S. I'm mostly talking about American dinosaurs, because they had the
most impact on world politics. [ Topic: Physics, Tags: mathematics procedural-generation simulations, PostId: #53137 ]
Existing game engines provide a variety of features and algorithms for AI, rendering,
and simulation that can be used right away by developers
Scripting. Our study reveals that SG developers seek specific code (like
unityscript) to control the behaviour of their games and do animation (#161824, #163929).
The literature refers to three levels of coding
Scripting File&Format 3D Modeling Level Design Class/Object
Platform Game Physics
Animation Game Design
Rendering Average Views NumberOfDocs
Networking. We found that SG developers seek help to create games that allow
multiple users to play together over greater distance and on a distributed environment
like the Web (#157707). Networking technologies are responsible for the scalability
and security of games and also deal with issues related to bandwidth and latency
Title: Optimization for end-to-end multiplayer pong-like game – Body: I've developing a small pong-like game for educational purposes and I've reached the point where I'm looking at implementing network gameplay. I was looking into what optimizations are usually performed for a smooth experience since latency can cause jitterry movements if not handled properly….
I know that client-side prediction is used and read up on it but it seems to me that this is applies in client-server types of multiplayer. Is this true, and if yes why?
Topic: Networking, Tags: networking, multplayer, optimization, pong PostId: #157707 4.3
0 2000 4000 6000
In this paper, we have used the LDA topic model on GameDev StackExchange corpus to quantitatively detect and classify the main topics SG developers usually search. For instance, we have found out that Rendering and Game Design are very active topics (suggesting that SG developers are seeking best practices and common strategies to do one thing), while discussions about Physics and Animation belong to the most popular topics, which suggests that they are seeking help to fix their issues. Our study also reveals that SG developers seek different things, ranging from simple scripts for stimulating 3D learning environments, over best practices to design educational games, to specific algorithms for increasing the player’s motivation and learning outcomes. We believe that future research in SG should focus more on standardizing common practices (like design patterns, design concepts) and tools to facilitate the development of specific game genres and the reuse of common features that add a good balance of learning and pedagogical objectives to games. This will motivate developers and gaming companies to easily and efficiently design, develop, and deliver full-scale SGs while being able to reduce the time to market. For this to be successful, a good understanding of SG filed and theories (game design, learning theories, and domain content) is needed.
This research was partially funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644187, the RAGE project (www.rageproject.eu).