UCL Computer Science researchers win prestigious ACM/IEEE ESEM Best Paper Award

The award was given for their paper ‘Game Software Engineering: A Controlled Experiment Comparing Automated Content Generation Techniques’. The paper was a joint effort with researchers from Universidad San Jorge and developers from the video game company Kraken Empire.

As the video games industry grows, the demand for new content becomes increasingly important.  The team wanted to help develop something called Procedural Content Generation (PCG) techniques, which aims to (semi-)automatically generate new content within video games to help solve this problem. PCG technology, specifically the use of Software Transplantation, provides developers' more control over automated content generation.

PCG techniques can significantly reduce the time and effort required to generate new content, enhancing productivity and reducing manual effort. However, engineers may have concerns about using content generated automatically. To investigate PCG in practice, the researchers ran the first ever controlled experiment involving human participants (both game developers and students) to assess the content generated automatically with PCG, for the commercial video game Kromaia.

The award-winning paper was co-authored by Mar Zamorano, África Domingo, Carlos Cetina, and Federica Sarro. 

The ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) is the premier conference for presenting research results related to empirical software engineering. ACM/IEEE ESEM is supported by both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the professional home for the engineering and technology community worldwide.