Cooperative game with Clojure and ClojureScript

Abstract

The goal of this project was set to demonstrate the viability of designing and developing a co-located game that enhances the player's cooperation and social interaction in a playful way. The methods used in this study include specific design patterns such as high interdependency, a common goal, and shared control among several determinants of social interaction and player’s experience. According to the researches, mechanics of the gameplay, the setup, the scoring system determines whether the gameplay is supposed to be competitive or cooperative. The game design plays an important role when crafting the game as an important motivator for players to cooperate and interact with each other. In this study, Aikakone multiplayer puzzle game was designed and developed as a proof of concept. The expressive representation of data in Clojure and ClojureScript allows writing and manipulating the game state more easily and simply. Additionally, they helped to predict where the game mutation will happen and make a game less error-prone. Game functionalities from the Phaser were utilized by interpolating the functions and properties in the Phaser. Sente enabled communication between clients and servers and synchronization of the game states of all clients via WebSocket and Ajax. The User interface components were made with Reagent and ‘Re-frame’ was used to handle app state to route between different game pages as a form of SPA. As a result of this study, the game playtesting has proved that interdependency, common goal, and shared control in a game foster users to talk to each other to achieve the goal of the game. The case study showed it is possible to design and implement the game which encourages the players to interact with each other more and also generated the cooperative play experience. For a future refinement, studies on methods of physiological measures and gameplay metrics are suggested to assess the social aspects of a cooperative game. Since the game was developed to enhance the player’s collaboration, evaluating the impacts of game patterns on social factors of a game possibly brings more meaningful findings in the project.