FrAG: A Framework for the Analysis of Games

FrAG is a Framework for the Analysis of Games, allowing us to harness game-playing AI techniques to assist in the reverse engineering of historical video games for which the binary form of the game is the only thing remaining. Moreover, FrAG allows us to perform this task at scale, and search for patterns of game development that might otherwise be overlooked. Game development is done by humans, of course; our interdisciplinary approach is not exclusively technical, and also involves the field of archaeology and its well-established theories of humans and technology. Here we present FrAG’s architecture along with our preliminary results using the framework on a test suite of Atari 2600 games.