Database research in computer games

This tutorial presents an overview of the data management issues faced by computer games today. While many games do not use databases directly, they still have to process large amounts of data, and could benefit from the application of database technology. Other games, such as massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), must communicate with commercial databases and have their own unique challenges. In this tutorial we will present the state-of-the-art of data management in games that we learned from our interaction with various game studios. We will show how the issues involved motivate current research, and illustrate several possibilities for future work. Our tutorial will start with a description of data-driven design, which is the source of many of the data management issues that games face. We will show some of the tools that game developers use to create and manage content. We will discuss how this type of design can affect performance, and the data structures and techniques tha...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Alan J. Demers, Johannes Gehrke, Christoph Koch, Ben Sowell, Walker M. White
• Keywords: Data Management Issues, Database, Multiplayer Online Games, Performance Keywords Games, SIGMOD 2009