Instrumentation of Video Game Software to Support Automated Content Analyses

Content analysis of video games is an important process that supports many business, policy, social, and scholarly activities related to the games industry. Unfortunately, collecting the large quantity of data and statistics required for content analyses tends to be an incredibly arduous task. Supports are clearly necessary to facilitate content analysis procedures for video games. This paper introduces an approach to automating content analyses for video games through the use of software instrumentation. By properly instrumenting video game software, content analysis procedures can be either partially or fully automated, depending on the game in question. This paper discusses our overall approach to instrumentation and automation, as well as our experiences to date in instrumenting Epic’s Unreal Engine, providing sample results from early experiments conducted to date. Results have been quite positive, demonstrating great promise for continued work in this area.