Green Aspects Study in Game Development

What issues game developers have?

Protocol

• Quantitative Survey (Fink 2013)
• Duration: Spring 2014 - Winter 2015
• Self-administered online survey
• English, Spanish and, Portuguese
• Private and confidential
• 4 main sections:
• Basic Information
• Green Aspects & Marketing
• Game Business and Product Design
• Migration Processes and Development work

Data Analysis

• Frequentist Methods of (Fink 2013) and (Kitchenham, et al., 2002)
• Ex. Descriptive statistics with averages, summaries, cross tabulations.

• Kendall’s tau correlation co-efficient
• Quantify the relation between two measured variables

How are games created?

Data Collection

Excel 2013 + MatlabR2013a

• Random sample (of organizations with experience in game development)
• Email, Twitter, Collaborators
• Collected answers: 33 | Times opened: 514
• 4 Continents Reached: Europe, Oceania, America, Asia.

Sustainability and Games Development share issues and challenges.

Very little is known about game development issues.

Very Very little is known about game development and sustainability intersection.

Development Phases

Research Methods for a Empirical Study

Test

Implement

Design

Analyze

In short....

RQ2: How concerned are game developer companies about green aspects?

Visual

Artists

RQ1: What are the main trends among game developer companies?

By who?

Programmers

Designers

RQ3: What are the characteristics of game developer companies regarding their software engineering methods?

Producers

Why Sustainability?

Testers

Audio Engineers

It is already possible to develop a sustainable project

Green IT

concepts

Engineers

Approaches

The Nonfunctional Requirement for the 21st Century

Specific Metrics for Sustainability

Example from findings of the Urban Water Management Platform (UWMP) by IBM research(Albertao et. al. 2010)

1. Safety

2. Security

3. Sustainability

"Software engineers can considerably improve civilization’s sustainability by taking into account

not just the first-order impacts of software systems but also their second- and third-order impacts." (Penzenstadler et. al. 2014)

What to measure?

Game Issues (Murphy-Hill et. al. 2014)

1) Development-related properties

a) Modifiability

b) Reusability

c) Portability

d) Supportability

2) Usage-related properties

a) Performance

b) Dependability

c) Usability

d) Accessibility

3) Process-related properties

a) Predictability

b) Efficiency

c) Projects Footprint

Common Approaches

RQ5: How is a software migration process in game developing

companies?

RQ6: What are the most intensive/decisive factors for a software migration in game developer companies?

A Common Understanding of Sustainability

• What is it?
• What is it not?

Network Optimization

Energy Efficiency

Green network architectures

Smart Grids

The Karlskrona Manifesto

Traditional SE do not support sustainability (Penzenstadler 2013)

Efficient algorithms

Agile Practices

Code Recycling

Knowledge management.

Game Engineers:

RQ4: How experienced are game

developer companies with software

migration processes?

But, there is a lack of a common understanding.

Software systems strongly affect our daily lives. Thus, supporting sustainability in software engineering explicitly would impact the process of making our planet greener in the long run and improving our societies, our economies, as well as our environment

Research Questions

Why?

How to improve this situation?

• Software Engineering for Sustainability

Started in 2009 with S4SE.

Aims to the integration of sustainability as a first class quality requirement in methodologies for developing software-intensive systems that meet the functional needs of users while reducing the environmental impacts brought by those systems (S4SE 2015).

• SE methods have been framed for software development

(Ampatzoglou & Stamelos 2010).

• Big differences with traditional SE

(Murphy-Hill et. al 2014).

• Lack of creative training for developers

(Ampatzoglou & Stamelos 2010).

...What did we find?

Game Development Migration Methods: RQ4, RQ5 and, RQ6

Has performed a platform migration

32%

No plan-based

Agile or Informal

RQ2: How concerned are game developer companies about green aspects?

Schedules mostly held

Accurate costs estimations

No metrics collected

Old Game Developer Companies

Less likely to have migration experience

When there is a migration, it is short.

RQ3: What are the characteristics of game development companies regarding their software engineering methods?

Older companies

dislike

Higher roles

like

Technical roles

like

Young Game Developer Companies

Higher roles = Lower appreciation for eco-impact elements

Older companies = Lower appreciation for eco-impact elements

More likely to have migration experience

When there is a migration, it tends to be long.

Do not follow any systematic methodology

61%

Follow a methodology

39%

Most Intensive Phases:

• Prototype Development
• Programming Work
• Art and Audio Production
• Alpha and Beta Stages

Often reactive (We only react to problems that actually happen, and only prepare for the most probable problems.

CMMI Level 1 Definition

RQ1: What are the main trends among software developer companies?

1. High preference for mobile development in less than two year old companies

2. Digitalization of their marketing

Conclusion

Research Results

Games! Games! Games!

Game development is different than software development and, requires an adapted SE framework, that supports creative requirements and late changes without missing essential planning phases.

A medium to train students, soldiers, medical professionals.

Fastest growing industry in media

Video games are part of our culture

Entertaining, Casual, Multi-platform, Gender/Age Agnostic, help against depression and stress

Publications

In 2012(Nayak,2013):

International Journal of Agile and Extreme Software Development (IJAESD)

-

"What Concerns Game Developers? – A Study on Game Development Processes, Sustainability and Business Models"

3x

To support sustainability, software and games industries need to create a better and common understanding of the definition of what sustainability means in their field and how it can be achieved practically. Being sustainable is no longer an extra feature for an organization but a competitive advantage in the market.

In short...

Newspapers

References

Retail software= $20 billion

References

Video Games Market = $63 billion

Interview Soon

Revenues higher than software retail

Game Industry = Successful Modern Industry

Pioneer technology

People are the main element of societies, companies, and game development. Therefore, people are the most defining factor to either support or to not sustainability. ICT efficiency alone cannot produce sustainability but a combination of efficiency and sufficient strategies (created by people) can unleash the ICT potential to green our world.

Green Aspects Study in Game Development

Agenda

Background & Introduction

Research Questions

Research Methodology

Findings & Discussion

Conclusions

Maria Victoria Palacin Silva

Supervisor: D.Sc. Jussi Kasurinen