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How AI Will Change the Way Video Games are Played

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How AI Will Change the Way Video Games are played!

The development of increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence, also called AI, is opening the door to interesting new opportunities in the game industry when people go to live playing. But how is artificial intelligence used in today’s video games, and why exactly are these developments so significant?

What Is AI In Gaming

Artificial intelligence is programming that enables some characters in a video game, such as non-playable characters (NPCs) and opponents, to behave as if they were directed by a person or had their own thought processes.

AI is employed to make games more immersive, but what does this really entail? If you have ever played the iconic game Pac-Man, you have encountered one of the most well-known instances of early artificial intelligence. As Pacman attempts to gather every dot on the screen, he is relentlessly followed by four ghosts of varying hues. However, they do not just follow him; throughout gameplay, they seem to be attempting to ambush the player. How did they achieve success? Pacman’s position is encoded into the ghosts, but each ghost is designed to react differently to it.

One of the ghosts is programmed to wander, one is programmed to follow Pacman aggressively, one is programmed to move randomly unless another ghost is close to catching Pacman, and the final ghost is programmed to follow Pacman when he is far away but go to a specific location on the map when he is close.

Even in a 1980 video game, these four characteristics make these ghosts seem to have their own will. They have vitality, and this is the aim of artificial intelligence in video games.

Why Is It Important

Virtually all technology use AI in some manner. It would be impossible for a game to provide an immersive experience without it. The objective of artificial intelligence is to fully immerse the user by giving fantasy game characters a realistic appearance. As AI evolves and gets more complex, so are the ways in which it may interact with a player’s experience.

Pathfinding and finite state machines have been the mainstays of AI in video games up until now. Pathfinding is the code that instructs an AI-controlled NPC where it may and may not go.
This is still essential, from retro-styled 8-bit games to gigantic open-world RPGs. The developers of a town do not want the people to be able to walk through barriers or become trapped in the earth. Additionally, they do not want them to remain totally motionless.
In contrast, finite state machines let the AI alter its behavior depending on particular situations. The guards that patrol in the Metal Gear Solid series are an excellent illustration of this in action. When you reach their range of view and are detected, an alert is triggered, and all nearby opponents converge on your position to launch an attack. You must exit their line of sight and conceal yourself until the guards give up the hunt and return to their original places.

The “Chase” state and the “patrol” state are effectively two separate states. These may seem like elementary notions, yet they control the majority of AI programming today. When AI gets hungry in the SIMS series, they receive food. When exhausted, they retire to bed.
This simulates real-world decision-making, but it is really the state of a SIM shifting from “neutral” to “Go to the closest source of food” and pathfinding programs directing them to that source.

How does AI evolve?

Already, the sheer number of pathfinding and states that creators may provide NPCs has radically altered the landscape. After all, there is a vast difference between Pacman and Skyrim. But the same AI technology that is already being utilized to make self-driving vehicles and detect faces is likely to revolutionize the field of AI in gaming. In the near future, pathfinding may include more than merely telling an AI where it may go. It might generate whole, lifelike landscapes from scratch, determining instantly which barriers it can and cannot pass through. What kinds of narratives might be conceivable in video games if NPCs had true emotions, personalities, memories, aspirations, and desires, as well as an intellect indistinguishable from that of humans? Data scientists have yearned for years to imbue AI with genuine emotions, and with the findings of recent AI experiments at Expressive Intelligence Studio, they are coming closer. After their success, it won’t be long until we see these AI in games. In other words, pathfinding and states, the foundational idea upon which artificial intelligence has been constructed, may soon be challenged.

In a few short years, AI may begin to play a greater part not just in games themselves but also in their creation. Recent experiments with deep learning technology have enabled artificial intelligence to remember a sequence of pictures or text and apply what it has learned to simulate the experience. It is now being utilized to create artworks reminiscent of Picasso and emails that seem to be authored by a human. This same technique is presently being used in game production; in one experiment, artificial intelligence was able to build a playable game level using just images.

As this technology gets more trustworthy, big open-world games might be produced by AI and then tweaked by developers and designers, therefore accelerating the development process.

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