Group items tagged

"Video game accessibility may not seem of significance to some, and it may sound trivial to anyone who does not play video games. This assumption is false. With the digitalization of our culture, video games are an ever increasing part of our life. They contribute to peer to peer interactions, education, music and the arts. A video game can be created by hundreds of musicians and artists, and they can have production budgets that exceed modern blockbuster films. Inaccessible video games are analogous to movie theaters without closed captioning or accessible facilities. The movement to have accessible video games is small, unorganized and misdirected. Just like the other battles to make society accessible were accomplished through legislation and law, the battle for video game accessibility must be focused toward the law and not the market."

story of a game developing in the 1990s and the difficulty of getting a legal copy or the source code today

Abstract: ""Sequence Breaking" is a type of feature interaction conflict that exists in video games where the player gains access to a portion of a game that should be inaccessible. In such instances, a game's subsuming featur e - its storylin e - is disrupted, as the predefined set of valid event sequences - event s being uninterruptable unit s of functionality that further the game's story - is not honoured, as per the game designer s' intentions. We postulate that sequence breaking often arise s through bypassing g eographic barriers, chea ting, and misunderstanding on the player's behalf. Throughout this dissertation, we pre sent an approach to preventing seque nce breaking at run - time with the help of Use Case Maps. We create a "narrative manager" and traversal algorithm to monitor the playe r's narrative progress and check the legality of attempted event calls. We verify our solution through test cases and show its feasibility through a game , concluding t hat our solution is sufficient and feasible."

Abstract: "The most popular Facebook games are being played by millions of users, sometimes only a few weeks after introduction. Although several of these games and their users have been studied, there currently exists no open-source version of such a game. In this thesis we present the design, implementation, and performance analysis of WebHack, a Facebook-integrated multiplayer game. WebHack is built upon the classic, but still popular, game of Nethack. We discuss the technical difficulties with file handles, process limits, communication networks, and handling failures. Further, we consider aspects specific to legacy applications, for example legal issues and technical limitations. We propose methods to circumvent these issues, and show a successful integration of the legacy game Nethack into our Facebookintegrated game system. We present the design of our system and evaluate the performance of the design in various scenarios. Among other results, we show that WebHack is a highperformance system, able to support over 300,000 concurrent players, handle arrival rates for up to 1,750 new players per second for over 60 seconds, and is able to recover within 10 seconds from a server failure."