Panoramic views
.
of Game AI
Introduction
• This is to help people understand how a particular
area relates to other areas within this increasingly
growing field, how the reader can benefit from
knowledge created in other areas and how the reader
can make her own research more relevant to other
areas.
• To facilitate and foster synergies across active
research areas we place all key studies into a
taxonomy with the hope of developing a common
understanding and vocabulary within the field of AI
and games.
• In this section we view game AI research from three
high-level perspectives
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1. Methods(Computer)
Perspective
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• The first panoramic view of game AI we present is
centered around the AI methods used in the field.
• For each of the game AI areas investigated we have
identified the AI methods that are dominant or
secondary in the area. While the dominant
methods represent the most popular techniques
used in the literature, secondary methods
represent techniques that have been considered
from a substantial volume of studies but are not
dominant.
• Evolutionary computation is a dominant method for
playing to win, for generating content (in an
assisted/mixed-initiative fashion or autonomously),
and for modeling players; it has also been
considered for the design of believable play (play
for experience) research. Supervised learning is of
substantial use across the game AI areas and
appears to be dominant in player experience and
behavioral modeling, as well as in the area of AI
that plays for experience.
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• Behavior authoring, on the other hand, is useful
solely for game-playing. Reinforcement learning
and unsupervised learning find limited use across
the game AI areas, respectively, being dominant
only on AI that plays to win and player behavior
modeling. Finally, tree search finds use primarily in
playing to win and it is also considered—as a form
of planning—for controlling play for experience
and in computational narrative
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2. End
User(Human)
Perspective
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• The second panoramic view of the game AI field puts an
emphasis on the end user of the AI technology or general
outcome (product or solution). Towards that aim we
investigate three core dimensions of the game AI field and
classify all game AI areas with respect to the process AI
follows, the game context under which algorithms operate
and, finally, the end user that benefits most from the
resulting outcome.
• The classes identified under the above dimensions are
used as the basis of the taxonomy we propose. The first
dimension (phrased as a question) refers to the AI process:
In general, what can AI do within games?
• We identify two potential classes in this dimension: AI can
model or generate. For instance, an artificial neural
network can model a playing pattern, or a genetic
algorithm can generate game assets. Given that AI can
model or generate the second dimension refers to the
context: What can AI methods model or generate in a
game?
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• The two possible classes here are content and behavior.
For example, AI can model a players’ affective state, or
generate a level.
• Finally, the third dimension is the end user: AI can model,
or generate, either content or behavior; but, for whom?
The classes under the third dimension are the designer,
the player, the AI researcher, and the producer/publisher
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3. Player –Game
Interaction
Perspective
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• The third and final panoramic perspective of game AI
presented in this section couples the computational
processes with the end user within a game and views all
game AI areas through a human-computer interaction—
or, more accurately, a player-game interaction—lens.
• Putting an emphasis on player experience and behavior,
player modeling directly focuses on the interaction
between a player and the game context.
• Game content is influenced primarily by research on
autonomous procedural content generation. In addition
to other types of content, most games feature NPCs, the
behavior of which is controlled by some form of AI.
• NPC behavior is informed by research in NPCs that play
the game to win or any other playing-experience
purpose such as believability.
• Looking at the player-game interaction perspective of
game AI it is obvious that the player modeling area has
the most immediate and direct impact on the player
experience as it is the only area linked to the player-
game interaction directly.
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Thank You