What if videogames had actual AI?

Is there any artificial intelligence in a typical videogame? Depends on what you mean. The kind of AI that goes into games typically deal with pathfinding and expressing behaviors that were designed by human designers. The sort of AI that we work on in university research labs is often trying to achieve more ambitious goals, and therefore often not yet mature enough to use in an actual game. This article has an excellent discussion of the difference, including a suggestion (from Alex Champandard) that the "next giant leap of game AI is actually artificial intelligence". And there's indeed lots of things we could do in games if we only had the AI techniques to do it.

So let's step into the future, and assume that many of the various AI techniques we are working on at the moment have reached perfection, and we could make games that use them. In other words, let's imagine what games would be like if we had good enough AI for anything we wanted to do with AI in games. Imagine that you are playing a game of the future.

You are playing an "open world" game, something like Grand Theft Auto or Skyrim. Instead of going straight to the next mission objective in the city you are in, you decide to drive (or ride) five hours in some randomly chosen direction. The game makes up the landscape as you go along, and you end up in a new city that no human player has visited before. In this city, you can enter any house (though you might have to pick a few locks), talk to everyone you meet, and involve yourself in a completely new set of intrigues and carry out new missions. If you would have gone in a different direction, you would have reached a different city with different architecture, different people and different missions. Or a huge forest with realistic animals and eremites, or a secret research lab, or whatever the game engine comes up with.

Talking to these people you find in the new city is as easy as just talking to the screen. The characters respond to you in natural language that takes into account what you just said. These lines are not read by an actor but generated in real-time by the game. You could also communicate with the game though waving your hands around, dancing, exhibiting emotions or other exotic modalities. Of course, in many (most?) cases you are still pushing buttons on a keyboard or controller, as that is often the most efficient way of telling the game what you want to do.

Perhaps needless to say, but all the non-player characters (NPCs) navigate and generally behave in a thoroughly believable way. For example, they will not get stuck running into walls or repeat the same sentence over and over (well, not more than an ordinary human would). This also means that you have interesting adversaries and collaborators to play any game with, without having to resort to waiting for your friends to come online or have to resort to being matched with annoying thirteen year olds.

Within the open world game, there are other games to play, for example by accessing virtual game consoles within the game or proposing to play a game with some NPC. These NPCs are capable of playing the various sub-games at whatever level of proficiency that fits with the game fiction, and they play with human-like playing styles. It is also possible to play the core game at different resolutions, for example as a management game or as a game involving the control of individual body parts, by zooming in or out. Whatever rules, mechanics and content are necessary to play these sub-games or derived games are invented by the game engine on the spot. Any of these games can be lifted out of the main game and played on its own.

The game senses how you feel while playing the game, and figures out which aspects of it you are good at as well as which parts you like (and conversely, which parts you suck at and despise). Based on this, the game constantly adapts itself to be more to your liking, for example by giving you more story, challenges and experiences that you will like in that new city which you reached by driving five hours in a randomly chosen direction. Or perhaps by changing its own rules. It's not just that the game is giving you more of what you already liked and mastered. Rather more sophisticatedly, the game models what you preferred in the past, and creates new content that answers to your evolving skills and preferences as you keep playing.

Although the game you are playing is endless, of infinite resolution and continuously adapts to your changing tastes and capabilities, you might still want to play something else at some point. So why not design and make your own game? Maybe because it's hard and requires lots of work? Sure, it's true that back in 2015 it required hundreds of people working for years to make a high profile game, and a handful of highly skilled professionals to make any notable game at all. But now that it's the future and we have advanced AI, this can be used not only inside of the game but also in the game design and development and process. So you simply switch the game engine to edit mode and start sketching a game idea. A bit of a storyline here, a character there, some mechanics over here and a set piece on top of it. The game engine immediately fills in the missing parts and provides you with a complete, playable game. Some of it is suggestions: if you have sketched an in-game economy but have no money sink, the game engine will suggest one for you, and if you have designed gaps that the player character can not jump over, the game engine will suggest changes to the gaps or to the jump mechanic. You can continue sketching, and the game engine will convert your sketches into details, or jump right in and start modifying the details of the game; whatever you do, the game engine will work with you to flesh out your ideas into a complete game with art, levels and characters. At any time you can jump in and play the game yourself, and you can also watch a number of artificial players play various parts of the game, including players that play like you would have played the game or like your friends (with different tastes and skills) would have played it.

If you ask me, I'd say that this is a rather enticing vision of the future. I'll certainly play a lot of games if this is what games will look like in a decade or so. But will they? Will we have the AI techniques to make all this possible? Well, me and a bunch of other people in the CI/AI in Games research community are certainly working on it. (Whether that means that progress is more or less likely to happen is another question...) My team and I are in some form working on all of the things discussed above, except the natural interaction parts (talking to the game etc).

If you are interested in knowing more about these topics, I recently wrote a blog post summarizing what I've been working on in the last few years. Last year, I also co-wrote a survey paper trying to give a panoramic overview of AI in games research and another survey paper about computational game creativity. Also, our in-progress book about procedural content generation covers many of these topics. You might also want to look at the general video game playing competition (and its results) and the sentient sketchbook and ropossum AI-assisted level design systems. For work on believable NPC behavior, check out the Mario AI Turing Test competition and procedural personas.

Finally, I've always been in favor of better collaboration between AI researchers and game developers. I wrote a post last year about why this collaboration doesn't always work so well, and what could be done about that.