Where is the research on connecting game​ worlds?—A systematic mapping study

Abstract

Section snippets Introduction—interconnected games

During the last decade, game industry has gone through a massive growth and the competition on the markets is fierce. More and more sequels are created for game series, as players already know the background and the concept of the game. It is much easier to take up a sequel of a familiar game, than to start a completely unknown game from the scratch. A good example of how familiarity can be transferred by mixing up familiar concepts is the Kingdom Hearts Franchise, where characters from both...

Mapping study

The purpose of our research was to understand the current state of the art in academic research on connecting games together. In order to carry out the study in a rigorous and repeatable manner, we decided to use Systematic Mapping Study [1] as our research methodology. It provides a framework for creating a research strategy that can be systematically followed to perform a literature study.

Systematic Mapping Studies tend to have a wide perspective on the research field and to have multiple...

Findings and discussions

Following the previously defined study selection procedures gave us 23 academic articles. A summary of the mapping study results is shown in Appendix B—Included Research Articles in the Systematic Mapping Study. The focus and the viewpoints of the articles varied considerably. Several of the articles focused on presenting specific technological solutions, such as how to enable messaging across multiple virtual worlds and the real world [4] and how to teleport items from one virtual world to...

Conclusions

Our goal was to identify existing research on the topic of connecting game worlds together and to understand what other fields of research are related to the topic. Our main contribution to research is the mapping of the current state of the art in connecting games together. In addition, we gathered the terminology used by the researchers and showed that there does not seem to be a commonly agreed vocabulary among the scholars.

Carrying out the systematic mapping study was not straightforward,...