Abstract
Software engineering researchers have been actively investigating novel approaches that focus on the effective development, evolution, and maintenance of high-quality, complex systems for over 50 years. Recently, an interdisciplinary research community has emerged that spans software engineering and games. This community addresses a broad range of issues that prevail in developing games for entertainment, serious games, and gamified applications. In this book, the focus is on the latter two. Serious games are also known as games with a purpose. Beyond their entertainment value, they also fulfill a purpose such as educating or training users on specific learning objectives. Gamified systems are non-entertainment applications that are enhanced with game elements to help motivate and engage users to improve their productivity, satisfaction, time on tasks, and so on. Although distinct research topics, serious games and gamification share a core quality of service attribute: user experience. These applications possess the inherent, interdisciplinary complexity of creating user experiences that engage and motivate users to accomplish specific goals.
This introductory chapter begins with a brief presentation of background material covering serious games, gamified systems, and a description of their inherent interdisciplinary development nature. This is followed by a summary of examples for recent advances that are reported in peer-reviewed publications (2016–2022) at the intersection of software engineering and gameful systems. The results are organized around established software engineering research topics. In addition, this chapter provides an overview of the book structure and content; brief summaries of the 11 core chapters are included.
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Cooper, K.M. . (2023). Introduction to Software Engineering for Games in Serious Contexts. In: Cooper, K.M.L., Bucchiarone, A. (eds) Software Engineering for Games in Serious Contexts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33338-5_1
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