Game Code That Is Not Gameplay - IEEE CoG 2026

Title: Game Code That Is Not Gameplay

Description:
Presented at the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2026, Open Problems from Industry session. Madrid, Spain.

Mobile games require extensive non-gameplay code for analytics, monetization, and operations. SDK vendors abstract this complexity. However, when these abstractions fail, game developers must diagnose errors across unfamiliar native toolchains like Gradle and Xcode.

This lightning talk covers:

The conflict between abstraction and diagnosability.

Why a successful build does not guarantee a successful integration.

How AI coding assistants shift the developer burden from writing integrations to verifying them.

The need for joint industry and academic research on mobile SDK integration models.

The goal is to make abstractions work, and when they fail, make it clear why.

Speaker:
Ezequiel França dos Santos

Transcript

1. Game Code That Is Not Gameplay IEEE Transactions on Games Open Problems from Industry IEEE Conference on Games 2026 Ezequiel França dos Santos (ezsantos@ipca.pt) SDK Engineer
2. Ads.ShowRewarded(); ↓ ↓ SIMPLE SURFACE ↓ ↓ COMPLEX INTEGRATION ↓ ↓ Game Code That Is Not Gameplay [1] Biørn-Hansen et al., 2019
3. Telemetry Consent Missing, duplicated, or incorrect event Privacy configuration does not reach underlying propagation. SDK. Adapter SDK Upgrade Silent failures due to incompatible Unintended downstream behavioral changes. dependencies. 65 SDKs across 48,000+ Android apps Game Code That Is Not Gameplay [2] Zhang et al., USENIX Security 2024
4. Can't an AI agent just fix this? → → → → 82% reported spending less time writing code work shifts toward supervision + verification Game Code That Is Not Gameplay [6] 2026 preprint
5. What should the SDK hide? What must remain visible? When it breaks, can we find the right layer? MAKE THE ABSTRACTION WORK. WHEN IT DOESN'T, MAKE IT CLEAR WHY. Game Code That Is Not Gameplay [3] Mäntymäki et al., 2020 [4] Venigalla & Chimalakonda, 2021 [5] Greiler et al., 2023
6. References [1] Biørn-Hansen, A., Grønli, T.-M., Ghinea, G., & Alouneh, S. (2019). An Empirical Study of Cross-Platform Mobile Development in Industry. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing. Article 5743892. DOI: 10.1155/2019/5743892 [2] Zhang, Y., et al. (2024). Understanding Risks with Privacy-Configurable Mobile SDKs. 33rd USENIX Security Symposium. [3] Mäntymäki, M., Hyrynsalmi, S., & Koskenvoima, A. (2020). How Do Small and Medium-Sized Game Companies Use Analytics? An Attention-Based View of Game Analytics. Information Systems Frontiers, 22(5), 1163–1178. DOI: 10.1007/s10796-019-09913-1 [4] Venigalla, A. S. M., & Chimalakonda, S. (2021). On the Comprehension of Application Programming Interface Usability in Game Engines. Software: Practice and Experience, 51, 1728–1744. DOI: 10.1002/spe.2985 [5] Greiler, M., Storey, M.-A., & Noda, A. (2023). An Actionable Framework for Understanding and Improving Developer Experience. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 49(4), 1411–1425. DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2022.3175660 [6] The Impact of AI Coding Assistants on Software Engineering: A Longitudinal Study. (2026). Preprint. Game Code That Is Not Gameplay ezsantos@ipca.pt