| Summary: | The advent of utility computing has revolutionized almost every sector of traditional<br />software development. Especially commercial cloud computing services, pioneered by the likes<br />of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, have provided an unprecedented opportunity for the fast and<br />sustainable development of complex distributed systems. Nevertheless, existing models and tools aim<br />primarily for systems where resource usage—by humans and bots alike—is logically and physically<br />quite disperse resulting in a low likelihood of conflicting resource access. However, a number<br />of resource-intensive applications, such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and<br />large-scale simulations introduce a requirement for a very large common state with many actors<br />accessing it simultaneously and thus a high likelihood of conflicting resource access. This paper<br />presents a systematic mapping study of the state-of-the-art in software technology aiming explicitly<br />to support the development of MMOGs, a class of large-scale, resource-intensive software systems.<br />By examining the main focus of a diverse set of related publications, we identify a list of criteria<br />that are important for MMOG development. Then, we categorize the selected studies based on the<br />inferred criteria in order to compare their approach, unveil the challenges faced in each of them and<br />reveal research trends that might be present. Finally we attempt to identify research directions which<br />appear promising for enabling the use of standardized technology for this class of systems.
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