6th International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services

Research Article

Monkey Gamer: Automatic Profiling of Android Games

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/icst.mobicase.2014.257771,
        author={Javier Santos and Simin Nadjm-Tehrani and Aruna Bianzino},
        title={Monkey Gamer: Automatic Profiling of Android Games},
        proceedings={6th International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={MOBICASE},
        year={2014},
        month={11},
        keywords={android games mobile app testing trace generation monkey gamer},
        doi={10.4108/icst.mobicase.2014.257771}
    }
    
  • Javier Santos
    Simin Nadjm-Tehrani
    Aruna Bianzino
    Year: 2014
    Monkey Gamer: Automatic Profiling of Android Games
    MOBICASE
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.4108/icst.mobicase.2014.257771
Javier Santos1, Simin Nadjm-Tehrani1,*, Aruna Bianzino1
  • 1: Linkoeping University
*Contact email: simin.nadjm-tehrani@liu.se

Abstract

Creation of smartphone applications has undergone a massive explosion in recent years and there is an urgent need for evaluation of their resource efficiency, trustworthiness and reliability. A large proportion of these apps are going to be within the gaming area. In this paper we classify game apps on the basis of their development process, their I/O process and their interaction level. We present Monkey Gamer, a software to automatically play a large class of Android games and collect execution traces, generating a state machine to describe the game structure and interactions. A significant similarity is shown when contrasting the results obtained by the Monkey Gamer and by human players, for three of the most popular Android games. We evaluate the performance of the Monkey Gamer by comparing the traces it generates with traces created when humans play the games, and find significant similarity in the trace sets.