Finding the Needle in a Haystack: Detecting Bug Occurrences in Gameplay Videos

Abstract: The presence of bugs in video games can bring significant consequences for developers. To avoid these consequences, developers can leverage gameplay videos to identify and fix these bugs. Video hosting websites such as YouTube provide access to millions of game videos, including videos that depict bug occurrences, but the large amount of content can make finding bug instances challenging. We present an automated approach that uses machine learning to predict whether a segment of a gameplay video contains the depiction of a bug. We analyzed 4,412 segments of 198 gameplay videos to predict whether a segment contains an instance of a bug. Additionally, we investigated how our approach performs when applied across different specific genres of video games and on videos from the same game. We also analyzed the videos in the dataset to investigate what characteristics of the visual features might explain the classifier's prediction. Finally, we conducted a user study to examine the benefits of our automated approach against a manual analysis. Our findings indicate that our approach is effective at detecting segments of a video that contain bugs, achieving a high F1 score of 0.88, outperforming the current state-of-the-art technique for bug classification of gameplay video segments.