Graph of Game Worlds

Abstract

Software architectures of video games have evolved radically over the past decade. Researchers and practitioners have proposed architectural patterns such as stand-alone configuration, peer-to-peer, client server and hybrid, and some of them have successfully been used in commercial game titles. A conceptual framework for game architectures—Game Worlds Graph (GWG)—is presented in this paper for three purposes: 1) classifying existing architectures, 2) communicating and sense-making of game architectures, and 3) exploring and discovering future game architectures. The framework is based on the Game World and the World Connector concepts, which reveal some essential characteristics of game architectures—thus can be more descriptive and informative than existing taxonomies.