Reproducing Bugs in Video Games using Genetic Algorithms

Video games are usually manually tested by a dedicated team. As such, testing is an expensive activity, both financial and emotional as most of the testing is mostly carried out before a release. This paper proposes a technique based on using Genetic Algorithm (GA) to reproduce bugs in video games. It consists in searching for a sequence of joystick and keyboard actions that lead to a faulty state of the game. We successfully applied our technique on two different video games, thus suggesting that using GA is a viable technique to reproduce bugs in video games.