Video Game Automated Testing Approaches: An Assessment Framework

The video-game industry has recently grown from focused markets to mainstream. The advancements the industry has been enjoying motivated researchers to propose techniques and tools to support the activities across the different phases of the game development lifecycle. Game testing is one of the crucial activities within the game development process. Due to the nature of game testing, many automated game testing techniques have been proposed in the literature. However, there is no framework that could be used to aid practitioners in selecting appropriate techniques suitable for their particular development efforts. In this article, we present an attribute-based framework to classify and compare these techniques and provide such aid to practitioners. The framework is also meant to guide researchers interested in proposing new game testing techniques. The article discusses a number of prominent techniques against the framework. Analysis of the discussion reveals gaps and suggests open points for future research.