An Exploratory Study of Code Smells in Web Games

Abstract: With the continuous growth of the internet market, games are becoming more and more popular worldwide. However, increased market competition for game demands developers to write more efficient games in terms of performance, security, and maintenance. The continuous evolution of software systems and its increasing complexity may result in bad design decisions. Researchers analyzed the cognitive, behavioral and social effects of games. Also, gameplay and game mechanics have been a research area to enhance game playing, but to the extent of our knowledge, there hardly exists any research work that studies the bad coding practices in game development. Hence, through our study, we try to analyze and identify the presence of bad coding practices called code smells that may cause quality issues in games. To accomplish this, we created a dataset of 361 web games written in JavaScript. On this dataset, we run a JavaScript code smell detection tool JSNose to find the occurrence and distribution of code smell in web games. Further, we did a manual study on 9 web games to find violation of existing game programming patterns. Our results show that existing tools are mostly language-specific and are not enough in the context of games as they were not able to detect the anti-patterns or bad coding practices that are game-specific, motivating the need of game-specific code smell detection tools.