Software Engineering of Networked Digital Games

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Digital games have become an increasingly important form of entertainment. Their appeal includes their engaging interactive nature, the social opportunities they afford through networked play, and their wide availability on platforms ranging over the web, mobile phones, specialized consoles, and traditional PCs. Game developers face relentless pressure to deliver better graphics, more realistic physics, more natural forms of interaction, and support for larger networked groups. Thus, games are becoming more expensive to produce and require ever more sophisticated expertise to create. At the same time, prices of game are dropping (particularly around mobile and social platforms.) Games are also proving valuable in specialized markets such as education, advertising and physical therapy, where the large teams and budgets used by traditional studios are not available. To help address these problems, we will research novel techniques aiding in the software engineering of networked games. Our goal is to raise the level of programming of networked games, providing highly-performant support for dealing with the hard problems of network communication, persistence, and consistency maintenance in presence of lag. This work will result in new programming abstractions, reified in experimental toolkits. Our new techniques will be applied to two demonstration projects, in exercise video games for children with Cerebral Palsy, and in orchestration of military simulations.