GAP - Game Advantage Protocol

Abstract

The main objective of this dissertation is to develop an API to facilitate the task of integrating real life indicators, such as energy efficiency, into virtual applications like video games, ideally making so that positive actions in real life would trigger favourable outcomes in video games thus enticing the adoption of good habits. It starts by analysing the state of the art in regards to the topics of augmented reality games and gamification, two issues that are gaining more attention as video game industry continues to grow and the media and internet become even more an integral part of human society. Also it revises the concepts and technologies of web services and online communication to evaluate how the usage of Node.js and socket.io are the best choices for the project at hand. Architecture-wise the solution was divided as follows: a java API that would be used by both application developers and data providers which would include the needed functions to ease their jobs; the communication scripts that use Node.js and socket.io, responsible for redirecting the requests from the API through the use of messages from the client side to the server which in turn would process said messages and create the appropriate query to be sent to the database. As a proof of concept an experiment was successfully carried out with a group of people to evaluate the impact having a simple common aspect of their daily lives gamified. Said aspect was minimizing unused widows when using the computer. The experiment also served to highlight the ease of usage of the GAP API when taking the role of both a developer and data provider. Due to the nature of behavioral study and the fact that the group used for the test was rather small a more in-depth and prolonged study is recommended.