product research - game content

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 bene t from the application of
database technology. Other games, such as massively multi-
player online games (MMOs), must communicate with com-
mercial databases and have their own unique challenges. In
this tutorial we will present the state-of-the-art of data man-
agement 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 manage-
ment 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 a ect performance,
and the data structures and techniques that developers use
to ensure that the game is responsive. We will discuss the
problem of consistency in games, and how games ensure that
players all share the same view of the world. Finally, we
will examine some of the engineering issues that game de-
velopers have to deal with when interacting with traditional
databases.
This tutorial is intended to be self-contained, and provides
the background necessary for understanding how databases
and database technology are relevant to computer games.
This tutorial is accessible to students and researchers who,
while perhaps not hardcore gamers themselves, are inter-
ested in ways in which they can use their expertise to solve
problems in computer games.