Towards Automated Video Game Testing: Still a Long Way to Go

Abstract

As the complexity and scope of game development increases, playtesting remains an essential activity to ensure the quality of video games. Yet, the manual, ad-hoc nature of playtesting gives space to improvements in the process. In this paper, we investigate gaps between academic solutions in the literature for automated video game testing and the needs of video game developers in the industry. We performed a literature review on video game automated testing and applied an online survey with video game developers. The literature results show a rise in research topics related to automated video game testing. The survey results show that game developers are skeptical about using automated agents to test games. We conclude that there is a need for better testing tools that could be used easily by smaller companies with less up-front costs and researchers should focus on the testing objective, testing oracle, and offer the replication package.

Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play

“…Second, PP's formal models also open a wide range of practical implementations in digital games. A computational model of motivationally and experientially optimal consumable uncertainty and uncertainty reduction rates could for example be used for automated playtesting (Politowski et al, 2022), experience-driven procedural content generation (Yannakakis and Togelius, 2011), dynamic difficulty adjustment (Zohaib, 2018), or adaptive AI NPCs (Merrick, 2016).…”