In a Q&A session at PAX West, Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, expressed his desire to bring AI technology to QA and testing of video games.
as found VGC, Booty said he has asked AI researchers to develop a system that can test games. Booty emphasizes the difficulty and multifaceted nature of game development, so adding small features can have a profound impact. He said, “A game … can be ready for release, and the designer will say, ‘I have this little feature, I’m just going to change the color of this thing’, and then it somehow blows up something, and now the game didn’t play for the first 10 minutes.” These knock-on effects ensured that the entire game had to be thoroughly tested with every addition. Such testing requires a lot of time and manpower.
In theory, AI might be able to solve some of these difficulties, allowing developers to complete more tests faster. Booty speculates, “I want to be able to launch 10,000 instances of the game in the cloud, so 10,000 copies of the game are running, deploy an AI bot to test the game overnight, and then in the morning we get a report.” So thousands of hours of Work can be done overnight. Whether such a test will work as expected, or how much human assistance such an AI will require, remains pure guesswork.
Over the past few generations, the game has gotten bigger. In the same Q&A, Matt Booty noted that multiple game studios working on one game are the new normal, not a cause for concern.
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