Taking the Scenic Route: Automatic Exploration for Videogames

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that automatic exploration strategies can effectively explore video game state spaces, producing diverse semantic maps comparable to human gameplay, which benefits game testing and analysis.

Contribution

It introduces generic methods to quantify exploration quality over time and applies them to compare automatic strategies with human gameplay across multiple platforms.

Findings

Automatic exploration matches human gameplay effectiveness

Methods quantify exploration quality as a function of time

Diverse semantic maps are extracted from various games

Abstract

Machine playtesting tools and game moment search engines require exposure to the diversity of a game's state space if they are to report on or index the most interesting moments of possible play. Meanwhile, mobile app distribution services would like to quickly determine if a freshly-uploaded game is fit to be published. Having access to a semantic map of reachable states in the game would enable efficient inference in these applications. However, human gameplay data is expensive to acquire relative to the coverage of a game that it provides. We show that off-the-shelf automatic exploration strategies can explore with an effectiveness comparable to human gameplay on the same timescale. We contribute generic methods for quantifying exploration quality as a function of time and demonstrate our metric on several elementary techniques and human players on a collection of commercial games sampled from multiple game platforms (from Atari 2600 to Nintendo 64). Emphasizing the diversity of states reached and the semantic map extracted, this work makes productive contrast with the focus on finding a behavior policy or optimizing game score used in most automatic game playing research.