From octoroks in The Legend of Zelda to enemies in Call of Duty, odds are that if you’ve played a video game you’ve encountered artificial intelligence – whether you’ve realised it or not. Game AI can take many forms, but generally speaking it’s any entity that has a sense of awareness or knowledge of the world around it, and can act or react to it accordingly. There’s a tendency among players to think of AI as just ‘organic’ things in the world, like humans or animals, but the reality is that AI can be anything that acts with awareness of the world around it – it doesn’t even have to be organic! For example, a turret in a level that shoots at someone in its area of influence is an AI (since it is reacting to a target’s presence in the world). A human NPC in a world might not even necessarily be an AI if they just stand in one spot and don’t actually take any action or process information about the space around them, in which case they’re just like any other game element. This distinction matters because anything that exhibits this sort of reactionary awareness usually needs to be tamped down to maintain a fair level of challenge. At a baseline, a game engine controlling the AI will always have all the information about the game – where the player is, what they’re doing, how fast they’re moving, where they are relative to the AI, and so on. The player, on the other hand, only really knows what they can see and hear from their perspective. Therefore the AI easily has the ability to go Terminator mode and beat the player with expert tenacity since they can read all the factors of a situation. It’s similar to if you were playing a game of Counter Strike where every member of the enemy team was using an aimbot – it would be almost impossible to win unless you’re incredibly lucky (or have thousands of hours in CS:GO) because everyone knows exactly where you are and where to aim. This is why much of the work of AI designers is mostly limiting what information an AI has and is able to use at any given time, which allows them to control their efficiency in performing their task to give players a fair challenge. It’s a fine balance to be sure, and a lot of the work is ensuring that the appropriate level of “fairness” is achieved. AI that has too few limitations can be too smart and be too difficult for a player to overcome, while AI with too many limitations might be seen as too confused and easy to defeat.
Game AI: The tricks designers use to make non-player characters seem real
From octoroks in The Legend of Zelda to enemies in Call of Duty, odds are that if you’ve played a video game you’ve encountered artificial intelligence – whether you’ve realised it or not. Game AI can take many forms, but generally speaking it’s any entity that has a sense of awareness or knowledge of the world around it, and can act or react to it accordingly. There’s a tendency among players to think of AI as just ‘organic’ things in the world, like humans or animals, but the reality is that AI can be anything that acts with awareness of the world around it – it doesn’t even have to be organic! For example, a turret in a level that shoots at someone in its area of influence is an AI (since it is reacting to a target’s presence in the world). A human NPC in a world might not even necessarily be an AI if they just stand in one spot and don’t actually take any action or process information about the space around them, in which case they’re just like any other game element. This distinction matters because anything that exhibits this sort of reactionary awareness usually needs to be tamped down to maintain a fair level of challenge. At a baseline, a game engine controlling the AI will always have all the information about the game – where the player is, what they’re doing, how fast they’re moving, where they are relative to the AI, and so on. The player, on the other hand, only really knows what they can see and hear from their perspective. Therefore the AI easily has the ability to go Terminator mode and beat the player with expert tenacity since they can read all the factors of a situation. It’s similar to if you were playing a game of Counter Strike where every member of the enemy team was using an aimbot – it would be almost impossible to win unless you’re incredibly lucky (or have thousands of hours in CS:GO) because everyone knows exactly where you are and where to aim. This is why much of the work of AI designers is mostly limiting what information an AI has and is able to use at any given time, which allows them to control their efficiency in performing their task to give players a fair challenge. It’s a fine balance to be sure, and a lot of the work is ensuring that the appropriate level of “fairness” is achieved. AI that has too few limitations can be too smart and be too difficult for a player to overcome, while AI with too many limitations might be seen as too confused and easy to defeat.