While I was relaxing the other day and playing Plants vs. Zombies 2 on my phone, I came to the conclusion that there are way more games to choose from than ever before. While game graphics have unquestionably improved over the last three decades since I’ve been an avid computer gamer (anyone besides me remember Archon, Balance of Power, Bard’s Tale, Doom, M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, Wolfenstein 3D, or Zork?), I couldn’t help but wonder if we have enjoyed the same amount of progress in game artificial intelligence (AI).
While today’s games are a visual feast, offering lots of ‘eye candy’, the unfortunate answer is ‘no’, game AI improvements have lagged behind graphical improvements over the last 30 years. Let’s briefly review why game AI has lagged, the opportunities for improvement, recent changes in the game industry, and the social implications of more games and improved game AI.
It’s easy to recognize bad game AI when you see it. One obvious example is where the computer player merely copies your moves. Another is where it performs an obviously stupid move such as run into a wall, or fall into a trap instead of walk around it. Too obvious! Why would games have such poor AI?
One early problem game AI faced was CPU competition: the consistent push to improve graphics left only a fraction of the CPU available for AI (Fairclough, Fagan, MacNamee & Cunningham, 2001, p. 5). Another reason for unsophisticated AI is lack of development time. AI is sometimes added at the end of the development cycle, well after gameplay and the graphics engine have been completed, leaving too little time remaining in the timeline to implement good AI (Fairclough et al., 2001, p. 5).
Fortunately with the advent of dedicated graphics processors, which offload graphics processing work from the main CPU, over time more of us will have access to computers with the capability to both display good graphics and support sophisticated AI calculations.
But better hardware isn’t the only catalyst for change. The game industry itself has changed with the advent of “persistent online games, digital distribution platforms, mobile and social games” (Riedl & Zook, 2013, p. 1). More digital distribution schemes lower the barriers to game publishing. Together better hardware and democratized digital distribution represent opportunities for indie game developers to innovate, create and publish games with better AI.
The financial fundamentals bode well for gaming. The world loves video games more (or is more willing to pay for them) than movies and film. Video games are a $78 billion global industry (Reuters, 2012), which is over twice the size of the $34.7 billion worldwide theatrical film industry (MPAA, 2012).
The social implications of a large, rich video game market include more jobs and career opportunities in this growing industry than ever before. You can now even obtain degrees in game design and game development – degrees which were not widely available a decade ago. With growing industry revenue eventually comes more funding and research interests in making the games better and more realistic. This will inevitably include better AI as a “product feature” — a way to stand out from the competition. In some games computer non-player characters (NPCs) are needed to perform secondary roles that humans would not do. This means one or more characters you interact with in your games will be computer controlled, and this represents an opportunity for good game AI.
A second social implication of more gaming and the lowering of barriers to game creation and publishing will be yet more games. With more gaming platforms, devices, and game app stores where anyone can publish a game, come the availability of niche games that will appeal to eclectic audiences who might not have played games before. This means more gamers among the general populace.
Another social implication of the spread of video games in our homes and mobile devices is the gamification of our culture. Gamification is “the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging” (Gamification, n.d., para. 2). Some cultures may be more “gamified” than U.S. popular culture, such as that of Japan where video games are so enshrined in popular culture that now there is even a movement to save early video gaming consoles and games in the “Video Game Archive Project” (Yabuki, 2013, para. 3). Will we in the U.S. come to revere our early gaming consoles to the point where we try to save them, like endangered animal species, as the Japanese are doing? Only time will tell… Until then game on, my friends. Game on!
References
Fairclough, C., Fagan, M., Mac Namee, B., & Cunningham, P. (2001). Research directions for AI in computer games. Retrieved December 7, 2013, from https://www.cs.tcd.ie/publications/tech-reports/reports.01/TCD-CS-2001-29.pdf
Gamification. (n.d.). Gamification Wiki Community Portal: definition of gamification. Retrieved December 7, 2013, from http://gamification.org/wiki/Gamification
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). (2012). 2012: Theatrical Statistics Summary. Retrieved December 7, 2013, from http://www.mpaa.org/resources/3037b7a4-58a2-4109-8012-58fca3abdf1b.pdf
Reuters. (2012). Factbox: A look at the $78 billion video games industry. Retrieved December 7, 2013, from http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/01/us-videogameshow-e3-show-factbox-idUSBRE8501IN20120601
Riedl, M. O., & Zook, A. (2013, August). AI for game production. In IEEE Conference on Computation Intelligence in Games (CIG ’13) (pp. 1-8).
Yabuki, T. (2013). Professor races against time to preserve Japan’s video game culture. Retrieved December 7, 2013, from http://ajw.asahi.com/article/cool_japan/culture/AJ201309220054
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