A Preliminary Field Study of Game Programming on Mobile Devices

TL;DR

This study analyzes a large dataset of mobile applications to identify characteristics of game scripts and factors influencing their popularity, providing insights for enhancing end-user game programming on mobile devices.

Contribution

It presents the first large-scale field study comparing game and non-game applications on mobile devices, highlighting key features and popularity factors of game scripts.

Findings

Game scripts tend to have specific design characteristics.

Certain features correlate with higher game popularity.

Insights suggest ways to improve end-user game programming.

Abstract

TouchDevelop is a new programming environment that allows users to create applications on mobile devices. Applications created with TouchDevelop have continued to grow in popularity since TouchDevelop was first released to public in 2011. This paper presents a field study of 31,699 applications, focusing on different characteristics between 539 game scripts and all other non-game applications, as well as what make some game applications more popular than others to users. The study provides a list of findings on characteristics of game scripts and also implications for improving end-user programming of game applications.