Multiplayer Games

Ao meu orientador, o professor Artur Miguel do Amaral Arsénio, pela disponibilidade, apoio e considerações finais que foram muito importantes na reavaliação do trabalho. Os meus agradecimentos à empresa Wizi na pessoa do Eng. Miguel Santos com sua criatividade, disposição e espírito de liderança que me deram a oportunidade de desenvolver este trabalho interessante e com muito para explorar. Agradeço bastante ao meu orientador inicial, o professor Rodrigo Miragaia Rodrigues, que mesmo estando distante fisicamente acompanhou todo o meu percurso na realização deste trabalho, dirigindo-me no caminho certo e esclarecendo muitos aspectos confusos do trabalho. Ao meu colega Frederico pela disponibilidade e companheirismo. A minha família pelo amor e carinho.

Ao meu orientador, o professor Artur Miguel do Amaral Arsénio, pela disponibilidade, apoio e considerações finais que foram muito importantes na reavaliação do trabalho. Os meus agradecimentos à empresa Wizi na pessoa do Eng. Miguel Santos com sua criatividade, disposição e espírito de liderança que me deram a oportunidade de desenvolver este trabalho interessante e com muito para explorar. Agradeço bastante ao meu orientador inicial, o professor Rodrigo Miragaia Rodrigues, que mesmo estando distante fisicamente acompanhou todo o meu percurso na realização deste trabalho, dirigindo-me no caminho certo e esclarecendo muitos aspectos confusos do trabalho. Ao meu colega Frederico pela disponibilidade e companheirismo. A minha família pelo amor e carinho.

Ao meu orientador, o professor Artur Miguel do Amaral Arsénio, pela disponibilidade, apoio e considerações finais que foram muito importantes na reavaliação do trabalho. Os meus agradecimentos à empresa Wizi na pessoa do Eng. Miguel Santos com sua criatividade, disposição e espírito de liderança que me deram a oportunidade de desenvolver este trabalho interessante e com muito para explorar. Agradeço bastante ao meu orientador inicial, o professor Rodrigo Miragaia Rodrigues, que mesmo estando distante fisicamente acompanhou todo o meu percurso na realização deste trabalho, dirigindo-me no caminho certo e esclarecendo muitos aspectos confusos do trabalho. Ao meu colega Frederico pela disponibilidade e companheirismo. A minha família pelo amor e carinho.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), which are typically supported by large distributed systems, require a scalable, low latency messaging middleware that supports the location-based semantics and the loosely coupled interaction of multiplayer games components. In this experimentation paper, we present three different pub/sub-driven designs for a MMOG networking engine that account for the highly interactive and massive nature of these games. Each design uses not only different pub/sub approaches (from topic-based to content-based) but also serves varying degrees of responsibilities. In particular, some of them integrate game functionality, such as interest management, into the network engine. We implement, evaluate, and compare our proposed designs in the MMOG prototype Mammoth. Our real-world results show the viability of pub/sub while at the same time highlighting clear trade-offs between the different designs used, especially in the number and frequency of the various message types, such as subscriptions.

Multiplayer games users' have increased since the widespread use of the internet. Withthe arrival of rich portable devices and faster cellular wireless networks, multiplayer games on mobile phones and PDAs are becoming a reality. For multiplayer games to be playable, they should be highly interactive, fair and should have a consistent state for all the players. Because of the high wireless network latency and jitters, the issue of providing interactive games with consistent state across the network is non-trivial. In this thesis, we propose different approaches for achieving consistency in mobile multiplayer games in the face of high latency and large and variable jitters. Although absolute consistency is impossible to achieve because information takes time to travel from one place to another, we exploit the fact that strong consistency is not always required in the virtual world and can be relaxed in many cases. Our proposed approach uses the underlying network latency and the ...

In this paper, a new technique for better management of winning conditions in online auto chess multi-player games is proposed. This technique is based on the development of a dynamic API that communicates with the server's database in real-time with minimum user intervention. Many existing mechanisms for auto-gaming rely on HTTP, which needs constant update requests from the client/player. To handle this problem, web sockets are employed that allow real-time communication between the client/player and the server, so the updates are sent immediately over the network whenever they are available. The proposed methods were validated by the practical implementation and a set of experimental tests. The web application uses Python Django REST Framework, allowing the extension of the web application to API. The database is implemented employing the PostgreSQL database management system.

The work deals with the relationship between game mechanics and user experience. Identifies the basic gameplay mechanics and elements that have the most important influence on the quality of user experience. Research is realized on the example of a specific game using the concept of game design patterns. Part of the work deals with the introduction of this concept. Furthermore, the work deals with the general theories of games, models of classification and history of computer games. Part of the work is a description of the author's practical experience in creating games as a school project.Práce se zabývá vztahem herních mechanismů a uživatelského prožitku. Identifikuje základní herní mechanismy a prvky, které mají nejdůležitější vliv na kvalitu uživatelského prožitku. Výzkum je realizován na příkladu konkrétní hry pomocí konceptu návrhových vzorů. Část práce se zabývá představením tohoto konceptu. Dále se práce zabývá obecnými teoriemi her, modely klasifikace a historií počítač...

My family, for their constant support and unwavering love. My friends, for their company and always keeping me sane. My advisor, José Borbinha, for his suggestions and guidance in the shaping of this work. Everyone at Rádio Zero and the Radia network, for their continuous help and influx of ideas. This work is dedicated to everyone who strives for a different notion of radio: one where a community of people and their interests take the front seat, leaving computers, music playlists and impersonality to a secondary role. (...) The boom was fantastic, in a sense, but it puzzled us. We had intended to establish a free radio station, not to transmit a one-way performance that disregarded listeners as most stations did. During the boom, most mini-FM stations were able to communicate to a handful of people only. But many of these stations seemed to us to be naively copying professional radio studio work. On the contrary, we paid attention to constant and serious listeners and sought to provide a community of people with alternative information on politics and social change. The radio station that my students and I had started on the campus re-established itself in the centre of Tokyo when the students finished school in 1983. The new station was called Radio Home Run. Every day, from 8 PM to midnight, one or two groups aired talk or music programs. Themes varied, but members always invited new guests who were involved in political or cultural activism. Repeating the station telephone number during each program was our basic policy. Listeners who lived close to the station began to visit. Guests sometimes recorded cassette tapes of our programs and let their friends listen. Radio Home Run quickly became a meeting place for students, activists, artists, workers, owners of small shops, local politicians, men, women and the elderly. The function was centripetal rather than centrifugal: listeners tended to want to come to the station.

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688421. The opinions expressed and arguments employed reflect only the authors' view. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of that information. Supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation under contract number 15.0268. The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of the Swiss Government.

Mobile communication systems on a near future will become Internet Protocol (IP) based using wireless access points at public hot spots as an alternative to today's high prices offered by telecommunication companies. This thesis examines and presents the necessary steps for the development of an application capable of conducting a normal conversation between users using a Pocket PC with Internet connection through GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) protocol or through Wireless networks on a peer-to-peer communication. The main goal is to provide a generic solution so that users of handheld devices can utilize their personal devices to enable Internet telephony audio environment, voice messages and voice contextualization messages in an environment where Internet connection may have congestion and packet loss at different levels affecting the quality of service and raising concerns about security and privacy. This solution called Location Based Advanced Phone Dialer (LBAPD) is integrated with the wizi web location based application (http://wizi.com) that provides the location functionality. An approach to the open-source Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) client in a peer-to-peer telephony setting, ported to a Pocket PC environment was used to accomplish the task. The second part of the paper describes the architecture and explores some of the implementation's limitations. The third part shows the integration process with the wizi application.

Mobile communication systems on a near future will become Internet Protocol (IP) based using wireless access points at public hot spots as an alternative to today's high prices offered by telecommunication companies. This thesis examines and presents the necessary steps for the development of an application capable of conducting a normal conversation between users using a Pocket PC with Internet connection through GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) protocol or through Wireless networks on a peer-to-peer communication. The main goal is to provide a generic solution so that users of handheld devices can utilize their personal devices to enable Internet telephony audio environment, voice messages and voice contextualization messages in an environment where Internet connection may have congestion and packet loss at different levels affecting the quality of service and raising concerns about security and privacy. This solution called Location Based Advanced Phone Dialer (LBAPD) is integrated with the wizi web location based application (http://wizi.com) that provides the location functionality. An approach to the open-source Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) client in a peer-to-peer telephony setting, ported to a Pocket PC environment was used to accomplish the task. The second part of the paper describes the architecture and explores some of the implementation's limitations. The third part shows the integration process with the wizi application.

Mobile communication systems on a near future will become Internet Protocol (IP) based using wireless access points at public hot spots as an alternative to today's high prices offered by telecommunication companies. This thesis examines and presents the necessary steps for the development of an application capable of conducting a normal conversation between users using a Pocket PC with Internet connection through GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) protocol or through Wireless networks on a peer-to-peer communication. The main goal is to provide a generic solution so that users of handheld devices can utilize their personal devices to enable Internet telephony audio environment, voice messages and voice contextualization messages in an environment where Internet connection may have congestion and packet loss at different levels affecting the quality of service and raising concerns about security and privacy. This solution called Location Based Advanced Phone Dialer (LBAPD) is integrated with the wizi web location based application (http://wizi.com) that provides the location functionality. An approach to the open-source Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) client in a peer-to-peer telephony setting, ported to a Pocket PC environment was used to accomplish the task. The second part of the paper describes the architecture and explores some of the implementation's limitations. The third part shows the integration process with the wizi application.

In this paper we present a platform for developing mobile, locative and collaborative distributed games comprised of small programmable object technologies (e.g., wireless sensor networks) and traditional networked processors. The platform is implemented using a combination of JAVA Standard and Mobile editions, targeting also mobile phones that have some kind of sensors installed. We briefly present the architecture of our platform and demonstrate its capabilities by reporting two pervasive multiplayer games. The key characteristic of these games is that players interact with each other and their surrounding environment by moving, running and gesturing as a means to perform game related actions, using small programmable object technologies.

A crescente exigência dos clientes ao interagirem com as organizações, bem como o aumento das pressões competitivas entre elas, leva a que se procurem soluções que optimizem os seus processos de negócio. Uma organização onde este facto ganha especial relevo é o Call Center. Ao lidar diariamente com um grande número de clientes, gera-se uma enorme quantidade de dados, que têm de ser rapidamente analisados de um modo correcto, para que continuamente se possam melhorar as operações, quer seja na redução de custos ou no aumento da qualidade dos serviços prestados. Nesta tese é descrito o processo de optimização de um processo de Extracção, Transformação e Carregamento (ETL) de dados, a criação de uma componente de visualização de dados (dashboards) que providencie aos actores do Call Center informação de um modo facilitado e simples e o desenvolvimento de um cubo OLAP sobre o modelo multidimensional de um sistema de Business Intelligence (BI). Estes módulos foram desenvolvido no âmbito de um sistema de BI enquadrado num projecto da Link Consulting, CCDM (Call Center Data Mart) que visa facilitar os processos de tomada de decisão nos call centers. Com os módulos criados, avaliaram-se os processos de ETL, para aferir da performance da solução criada e sua adaptabilidade aos requisitos do negócio. Devido às métricas de benchmark serem ainda escassas neste tipo de processos, procurou-se usar frameworks genéricas, que avaliam o sistema criado como um todo. Com esta avaliação, foi possível ainda estudar a robustez da ferramenta usada na criação destes processos (Microsoft Integration Services).

Mobile communication systems on a near future will become Internet Protocol (IP) based using wireless access points at public hot spots as an alternative to today's high prices offered by telecommunication companies. This thesis examines and presents the necessary steps for the development of an application capable of conducting a normal conversation between users using a Pocket PC with Internet connection through GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) protocol or through Wireless networks on a peer-to-peer communication. The main goal is to provide a generic solution so that users of handheld devices can utilize their personal devices to enable Internet telephony audio environment, voice messages and voice contextualization messages in an environment where Internet connection may have congestion and packet loss at different levels affecting the quality of service and raising concerns about security and privacy. This solution called Location Based Advanced Phone Dialer (LBAPD) is integrated with the wizi web location based application (http://wizi.com) that provides the location functionality. An approach to the open-source Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) client in a peer-to-peer telephony setting, ported to a Pocket PC environment was used to accomplish the task. The second part of the paper describes the architecture and explores some of the implementation's limitations. The third part shows the integration process with the wizi application.

Mobile communication systems on a near future will become Internet Protocol (IP) based using wireless access points at public hot spots as an alternative to today's high prices offered by telecommunication companies. This thesis examines and presents the necessary steps for the development of an application capable of conducting a normal conversation between users using a Pocket PC with Internet connection through GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) protocol or through Wireless networks on a peer-to-peer communication. The main goal is to provide a generic solution so that users of handheld devices can utilize their personal devices to enable Internet telephony audio environment, voice messages and voice contextualization messages in an environment where Internet connection may have congestion and packet loss at different levels affecting the quality of service and raising concerns about security and privacy. This solution called Location Based Advanced Phone Dialer (LBAPD) is integrated with the wizi web location based application (http://wizi.com) that provides the location functionality. An approach to the open-source Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) client in a peer-to-peer telephony setting, ported to a Pocket PC environment was used to accomplish the task. The second part of the paper describes the architecture and explores some of the implementation's limitations. The third part shows the integration process with the wizi application.

Mobile communication systems on a near future will become Internet Protocol (IP) based using wireless access points at public hot spots as an alternative to today's high prices offered by telecommunication companies. This thesis examines and presents the necessary steps for the development of an application capable of conducting a normal conversation between users using a Pocket PC with Internet connection through GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) protocol or through Wireless networks on a peer-to-peer communication. The main goal is to provide a generic solution so that users of handheld devices can utilize their personal devices to enable Internet telephony audio environment, voice messages and voice contextualization messages in an environment where Internet connection may have congestion and packet loss at different levels affecting the quality of service and raising concerns about security and privacy. This solution called Location Based Advanced Phone Dialer (LBAPD) is integrated with the wizi web location based application (http://wizi.com) that provides the location functionality. An approach to the open-source Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) client in a peer-to-peer telephony setting, ported to a Pocket PC environment was used to accomplish the task. The second part of the paper describes the architecture and explores some of the implementation's limitations. The third part shows the integration process with the wizi application.

Se propone el un diseño para un receptor OFDM. El esquema de sincronismo esta dividido en cuatro partes para estimar el sincronismo de los simboles, el offset frecuencial y el canal de transmision. Se implementa un esquema conjunto de ecualizacion y decodificacion basados en un algoritmo MMSE con informacion a priori y codigos LDPC, respectivamente. La asignacion de la carga de los subcanales sigue el criterio Water-filling.

Human mobility is a key factor for sustainable growth in Europe. It is currently growing at an high rate. International and long distance travelling is growing even at higher rates. A key aspect of long distance Human Mobility is the need to handle passenger's luggage. Such combination of luggage handling and multimodal transportation has not been fully addressed by the transport industry. However it is obvious for the large operators that reconciliation between passengers and luggage has major implications in transportation delays, logistics for handling all exceptions hazards for the travelers and even security related problems. Support for multimodality is already considered a key aspect in cargo transportation and in urban mobility. Relevant progress has been made in those areas. However the issue of reconciliation between passengers and luggage across the transportation chain has not been addressed yet. Thus, the fundamental contribution of this project is to know how to use advanced RFID tags to provide a completely new way for handling passenger and luggage reconciliation in a multimodal human transportation. The project purpose is to apply the information system architecture methodology that covers information and functionalities residing in RFID tags, to a real case in the area of passenger and luggage transportation. Furthermore, it seeks to use a new methodology that represents a SOA architecture from the business processes, to guarantee the alignment between IT and the business.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), which are typically supported by large distributed systems, require a scalable, low latency messaging middleware that supports the location-based semantics and the loosely coupled interaction of multiplayer games components. In this experimentation paper, we present three different pub/sub-driven designs for a MMOG networking engine that account for the highly interactive and massive nature of these games. Each design uses not only different pub/sub approaches (from topic-based to content-based) but also serves varying degrees of responsibilities. In particular, some of them integrate game functionality, such as interest management, into the network engine. We implement, evaluate, and compare our proposed designs in the MMOG prototype Mammoth. Our real-world results show the viability of pub/sub while at the same time highlighting clear trade-offs between the different designs used, especially in the number and frequency of the various message types, such as subscriptions.

Mobile applications and game development are attractive fields in software engineering. Despite the advancement of programming languages and integrated development environments, there have always been many challenges for software and mobile game developers. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a software engineering methodology that applies software modeling languages for modeling the problem domain. In this paradigm, the code is to be automatically generated from the models by applying different model transformations. Besides, manipulating models instead of code facilitates the discovery and resolution of errors due to the high level of abstraction. This study presents an approach and framework, called MAndroid, that generates Android-based classic multiplayer 2D board games in a fully automated fashion, relying on the concepts of MDE. Structural and behavioral dimensions of the game are first modeled in MAndroid. Models are then automatically transformed to code that can be run on any mobile phone and tablet running Android 4.4 or higher. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, three board games are fully implemented. Additionally, applicability, developer performance, simplicity and attractiveness of MAndroid are evaluated through a set of questionnaires. MAndroid is also evaluated technically by comparing

Networking and Services subprogramme Latency is one of the key performance elements affecting the quality of experience (QoE) in computer games. Latency in the context of games can be defined as the time between the user input and the result on the screen. In order for the QoE to be satisfactory the game needs to be able to react fast enough to player input. In networked multiplayer games, latency is composed of network delay and local delays. Some major sources of network delay are queuing delay and head-of-line (HOL) blocking delay. Network delay in the Internet can be even in the order of seconds. In this thesis we discuss what feasible networking solutions exist for browser multiplayer games. We conduct a literature study to analyze the Differentiated Services architecture, some salient Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithms (RED, PIE, CoDel and FQ-CoDel), the Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) concept and network protocols for web browser (WebSocket, QUIC and WebRTC). RED, PIE and CoDel as single-queue implementations would be sub-optimal for providing low latency to game traffic. FQ-CoDel is a multi-queue AQM and provides flow separation that is able to prevent queue-building bulk transfers from notably hampering latency-sensitive flows.

Devido ao aumento do número de funcionalidades, a complexidade das aplicações está constantemente a aumentar. Para lidar com esta complexidade crescente, os programadores começam a adoptar novas abordagens no desenvolvimento de aplicações. Um exemplo de uma dessas abordagens é o Desenvolvimento Orientado ao Domínio. Esta filosofia defende que o desenvolvimento de aplicações deve ser centrado nas entidades que compõem o problema a ser resolvido por uma aplicação-o seu domínio. Estas entidades devem ser estruturadas no que se chama de modelo de domínio. Aplicações de Modelos de Domínio Rico (MDR) são aplicações que apresentam um modelo de domínio com uma estrutura complexa e com comportamento rico. Apesar das aplicações com MDR serem bastante úteis para lidar com problemas complexos, estas apresentam alguns desafios na verificação de políticas de controlo de acesso. Abordagens comuns de controlo de acesso dão origem a problemas relacionados com a dispersão e mistura de código com objectivos diferentes, apresentam limitações a expressar e verificar políticas complexas que podem exigir um alto grau de granularidade, levam à dependência de métodos, ou não suportam delegação de direitos. Nesta dissertação, eu proponho uma solução que facilita a tarefa de desenvolvimento de aplicações no que respeita à verificação de controlo de acesso, ao resolver os problemas acima mencionados. Esta solução é composta por três componentes: um modelo que suporta autorização, amplificação de privilégios e delegação de direitos; uma linguagem específica de domínio designada Domain Model Authorization Language (DMAPL) que possui uma sintaxe que permite a especificação de uma política de controlo de acesso de uma aplicação, de uma forma simples; e um mecanismo de run-time que efectua a verificação da política especificada durante a execução da aplicação.

Devido ao aumento do número de funcionalidades, a complexidade das aplicações está constantemente a aumentar. Para lidar com esta complexidade crescente, os programadores começam a adoptar novas abordagens no desenvolvimento de aplicações. Um exemplo de uma dessas abordagens é o Desenvolvimento Orientado ao Domínio. Esta filosofia defende que o desenvolvimento de aplicações deve ser centrado nas entidades que compõem o problema a ser resolvido por uma aplicação-o seu domínio. Estas entidades devem ser estruturadas no que se chama de modelo de domínio. Aplicações de Modelos de Domínio Rico (MDR) são aplicações que apresentam um modelo de domínio com uma estrutura complexa e com comportamento rico. Apesar das aplicações com MDR serem bastante úteis para lidar com problemas complexos, estas apresentam alguns desafios na verificação de políticas de controlo de acesso. Abordagens comuns de controlo de acesso dão origem a problemas relacionados com a dispersão e mistura de código com objectivos diferentes, apresentam limitações a expressar e verificar políticas complexas que podem exigir um alto grau de granularidade, levam à dependência de métodos, ou não suportam delegação de direitos. Nesta dissertação, eu proponho uma solução que facilita a tarefa de desenvolvimento de aplicações no que respeita à verificação de controlo de acesso, ao resolver os problemas acima mencionados. Esta solução é composta por três componentes: um modelo que suporta autorização, amplificação de privilégios e delegação de direitos; uma linguagem específica de domínio designada Domain Model Authorization Language (DMAPL) que possui uma sintaxe que permite a especificação de uma política de controlo de acesso de uma aplicação, de uma forma simples; e um mecanismo de run-time que efectua a verificação da política especificada durante a execução da aplicação.

In a knowledge-driven economy, it's more valuable to effectively manage human capital than to efficiently manage finance and physical assets. To obtain returns in human capital, management must go beyond notions of productivity and cost effectiveness and develop new approaches to tap knowledge, creativity and other skills. A tool to capture employees' behaviours and competences in order to promote awareness is a necessity nowadays. The answer is 360 o Feedback, a highly effective tool by which an individual receives aggregated feedback about behaviours, skills and competences. For evaluation data visualization and analysis, we gathered the stateof-the-art of Social Network Analysis and selected the adequate software packages, achieving interoperability by developing a conversion application that applies data transformation techniques. The work was validated by applying the evaluation framework in a real-world case study, conducting an evaluation with the participation of all collaborators of an organization and assessing its impact.

Nowadays, mobile phones/tabs/netbooks are an essential part of our life and it is hard to find someone who does not have such a device. These devices are used to work, play games, listen to music, navigate on the internet, etc... Multiplayer games to such devices, while interesting and fun to play, raise serious scalability and playability difficulties as they require a massive communication flow between them, needed to maintain the game state consistent between players. The goal of this work is to raise the game scalability by reducing the number of messages exchanged between the devices which will reduce the bandwidth and CPU usage. Our work consists in the conception and development of a consistency model named VFC-reckon based on Interest Management and Dead Reckoning techniques. VFC-reckon allows us to reduce the number of messages exchanged between the devices without affecting the game playability. We developed the system for Android portable devices along with a distributed game that shows the advantages of the VFC-reckon model for ad-hoc networks.

Nowadays, mobile phones/tabs/netbooks are an essential part of our life and it is hard to find someone who does not have such a device. These devices are used to work, play games, listen to music, navigate on the internet, etc... Multiplayer games to such devices, while interesting and fun to play, raise serious scalability and playability difficulties as they require a massive communication flow between them, needed to maintain the game state consistent between players. The goal of this work is to raise the game scalability by reducing the number of messages exchanged between the devices which will reduce the bandwidth and CPU usage. Our work consists in the conception and development of a consistency model named VFC-reckon based on Interest Management and Dead Reckoning techniques. VFC-reckon allows us to reduce the number of messages exchanged between the devices without affecting the game playability. We developed the system for Android portable devices along with a distributed game that shows the advantages of the VFC-reckon model for ad-hoc networks.

This paper takes a look at narrative forms as of yet unexplored in the field of digital interactive storytelling, and proposes methods for how they can be used in engaging ways for the user. Although the various Digital Interactive Storytelling (DIS) prototypes available produce several different story genres, they stem from the same classic narrative form. With this paper, we aim to introduce narrative techniques that have successfully been used in cinema, literature and the gaming world, and show how they could be adapted to DIS. We believe that by presenting these techniques authors and engineers can gain a better understanding of how to use and extend existing systems.

Abstract. Learning and video games have been studied for a while now as a possible learning asset. However, this research is largely generalized, and does not examine specific curricula and how they could employ video games. This study will examine how the cross-curricular themes found in the National Core Curriculum for General Upper Secondary Schools (Finnish National Board of Educations, 2016) are fulfilled by two role-playing video games, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (BioWare, 2003) and Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition (Beamdog, 2012). The study employs qualitative research methods in order to conduct a cross-case analysis of the two games, examining them from a sociocultural, cognitive, and ecological theoretical point of view. The study shows that most of the cross-curricular themes listed were present in the games, and their objectives of instructions were met. The games examined created problem-based learning experiences both in familiarizing the player with the gam...

It is desirable that an infrastructure for integrated fusion modeling has support for: legacy and new components used interchangeably; consistent management of components lifecycle; allocating parallel resources consistent with the nature of participating components and the problem ...