Engineering gameful applications with MPS

• Gamification refers to approaches that apply gaming elements and mechanics into contexts where gaming is not the main business purpose. Gamification principles have proven to be very effective in motivating target users in keeping their engagement within everyday challenges, including dedication to education, use of public transportation, adoption of healthy habits, and so forth. The spread of gameful applications and the consequent growth of the user base are making their design and development complexity to increase, e.g., due to the need of more and more customized solutions. In this respect, current state-of-the-art development approaches are either too close to programming or completely prepackaged. In the former case, domain and gamification experts are confronted with the abstraction gap between the concepts they would like to use and the corresponding implementation through coding. In the latter situation, customization opportunities are remarkably limited or require again hand-tuning through coding. In both scenarios, programmer tasks are tedious and error-prone, given the intrinsic characteristics of gamified applications, which are sets of rules to be triggered as a consequence of specific events. This chapter illustrates the language engineering endeavor devoted to the creation of the Gamification Design Framework (GDF) through MPS. GDF is conceived by pursuing two main principles: correctness-by-construction and automation. The former aims at providing a language infrastructure conveying consistency between the different aspects of a gameful application in an intrinsic way. The latter aspires to maximize generative features in order to reduce coding needs. As a result, GDF is implemented by means of MPS as a set of three-layered domain-specific languages, where a lower-level language instantiates and extends the concepts defined from the language(s) above. Moreover, GDF is equipped with generators to automatically create gameful application structural components, behaviors, and deployment into a selected gamification engine.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Inbäddad systemteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Embedded Systems (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Domain-specific languages

Gamification

Model-driven engineering

MPS

Multilevel modeling

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