Proceso de Desarrollo de Experiencias de Juego Sociales Pervasivas. (La expansión social del juego)

Resumen

The growing importance of incorporating playful activities in various aspects of life is reflected in the emergence of new terms such as Marczewski's "Game thinking", which addresses the design of applications to provide the user with new experiences through fun interfaces and game elements. The theory of "Game Thinking" takes advantage of psychology to understand the human mind, highlighting the need to build motivating interfaces that generate parallel mechanics to maintain motivation over time. The game, as an activity that brings fun and enjoyment, has been studied for a long time and in a profound way, through the metaphor of Huizinga's "Magic Circle", a voluntary structure that defines the space and time where the participant has fun and lives the experiences provided by the game. The expansion of this circle translates into the confusion between the real and virtual space of the game, the feeling that every moment of life is related to the game, and the inclusion of people outside the games. This temporal and spatial expansion is enhanced by pervasive computing, which provides devices with computing power, geolocation and connectivity. In socially expanded games, the role of the spectator and his or her awareness of the game are crucial. The spectator can be an obstacle, witness, message receiver or object to be collected. Innovation in socially expanding game play involves incorporating elements that keep participants engaged. The SocialPG model presented in this paper emerges as a conceptual framework for understanding the necessary components in the construction of pervasive social game experiences. This model highlights the importance of the spectator, introducing a new role for the construction of game mechanics that involve non-traditional interactions. Social expansion offers significant opportunities for innovation, but it is essential to understand the underlying elements and the challenges facing designers. The results of this validation indicated that SocialPG provides a valuable contribution to understanding the complexities inherent in building pervasive social game experiences. Based on this reference model, a set of pervasive social games was analyzed with the intention of collecting good practices related to the social dimension that could be incorporated into a catalog of patterns in such a way that could support the development team during the design and construction process, reducing design and development times, minimizing the risk of errors and increasing the quality of the game. Among the activities developed within the present work is the construction of a reference architecture to support the features of the SocialPG conceptual model, in order to provide an organized structure of interconnected components to simplify planning, design and decision making related to the construction of this type of game experiences. The proposed software architecture addresses aspects of scalability and extensibility, to face challenges related to the increase in the number of participants and the complexity of the game scenarios, responding to high concurrency environments and offering the capacity to satisfy the needs and preferences of the users. Finally, to verify the usefulness of the SocialPG conceptual model, an application called AGATHA was built, which used the formulated pattern catalog and integrated part of the designed reference architecture, also an agile development process based on SCRUM was adapted to address the specific functionalities of pervasive social gaming experiences, integrating activities that solve the particular needs of this type of applications.