A Systematic Review on Software Engineering in Pervasive Games Development

A digital pervasive game can be defined as a game in which the gaming experience is extended to the real world. This is possible due to the use of sensor-based mobile devices. Developing digital pervasive games involves additional requirements, such as dealing with ubiquitous computing challenges. Part of these requirements affect directly the design and development processes of pervasive games. Software Engineering techniques should be adapted to increase the overall quality of game software. The main objective of this paper is to present a systematic review of this area in order to capture the state of the art research in Software Engineering for Pervasive Games. A standard systematic review methodology using digital databases for research was applied and 100 relevant studies were found within 1304 obtained from searches. We were able to identify the main topics of pervasive games research area in the last five years, the most relevant research methodologies, topics and challenges in terms of numbers for pervasive games research field.