Explaining the Behaviour of Game Agents Using Differential Comparison

Ezequiel Castellano, Xiao-Yi Zhang, Paolo Arcaini, Toru Takisaka, Fuyuki Ishikawa, Nozomu Ikehata, Kosuke Iwakura

Abstract: The difficulty in exploring the game balance has been increasing, especially in Game-as-a-Service (GaaS) with updates in every few weeks, and due to the complexity in game design and business models. In the limited time available for testing, using automated game agents enables much more test plays than using human test players does, and it has been accelerated by the recent progress of deep reinforcement learning. However, understanding specific behaviours of each agent is hard due to their “black-box” nature. In this paper, we propose a method for explaining the behaviour of game agents using differential comparison between agents. This comparison approach is motivated by our experience with existing explanation techniques that often extracted uninteresting, common aspects of the behaviour. In addition, there are large potentials for the application of the comparison: between agents with different learning algorithms, between human agents and automated agents, and between test agents and users. We applied our technique to a prototype of a commercial GaaS and confirmed our technique can extract specific differences between agents.