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Runtime Monitoring of Temporal Logic
Properties in a Platform Game
Simon Varvaressos, Dominic Vaillancourt, Sébastien Gaboury,
Alexandre Blondin Massé, and Sylvain Hallé
Laboratoire d'informatique formelle
Département d'informatique et de mathématique
Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Canada
shalle@acm.org
Abstract.
We report on the use of runtime monitoring to automatically
discover gameplay bugs in the execution of video games. In this context,
the expected behaviour of game objects is expressed as a set of tempo-
ral logic formulæ on sequences of game events. Initial empirical results
indicate that, in time, the use of a runtime monitor may greatly speed
up the testing phase of a video game under development, by automating
the detection of bugs when the game is being played.
1
Introduction
The domain of video games is currently booming; a recent Gartner survey re-
vealed that consumer expenses for video games would raise from 67 billion dollars
in 2011 to more than 112 billion by the year 2015 [2]. Similar to all computer
systems, video games have not been spared from programming errors making
their way to the release of a product. For example, in
Halo Reach
(2010), it is
possible for players to go out of the game's map in some places, allowing them
to make actions that would otherwise be forbidden [1].
It is therefore important for a designer to detect a maximum of gameplay
errors as soon as possible during the development phase of a game, since for
some systems, correcting an error using an update after the product's release
is technically impossible. Moreover, video games are a special type of
emergent
system: their complexity arises from the combination of multiple simpler parts
like the physics engine, the graphics or the graphical user interface. A minor
problem can bring a bigger one later in the execution. Therefore, to facilitate
debugging, it is important to identify exactly when a bug occurs and report it
as fast as possible.
Typically, video game companies hire manual testers, whose hourly salary
varies from $20 to $100, with the special purpose of discovering gameplay bugs
and manually filing them into a bug tracker database. Obviously, this technique
With financial support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
of Canada (NSERC) and the Fonds de recherche Québec - Nature et technologies
(FRQNT).
