Artificial Intelligence(AI): The Future of Gaming

By Rajan Navani, Managing Director and CEO, JetSynthesys

Artificial Intelligence isn’t a particularly new thing in gaming. Machine learning, context-sensitive behaviour, neural networks, natural language parsing – all of these techniques have been pushing games forward for years now. If you have ever played a video game, you might already understand what AI has to do with games and how you can interact with it.

Regardless of whether you prefer race-car games, strategy games, or shooting games, you will always find elements controlled by AI. AIs are often behind the characters you typically don’t pay much attention to, such as enemy creeps, neutral merchants, or even animals. But how does AI found in gaming relate to the AI that tech giants talk about every day?

Visual Experience

One of the most immediately noticeable things AI could improve in gaming is its experience in visual quality. With an increasing number of gamers, deep learning and the ever-growing amounts of data at our disposal we can see game environments and game characters become more realistic and natural than ever before.

Advancements in AI greatly have the potential to improve the way characters and environments are expressed in a game. Researchers have run thousands and thousands of footage with these Visual based AI to bring human emotion into the game.

Enhanced Experience

The AI described by tech giants are usually programs or algorithms that teach itself and get stronger and stronger upon being fed more data. This is true to some extent for AI like AlphaGo, which is famous for beating the best human Go players. AlphaGo was trained by observing millions of historical Go matches and is still learning from playing with human players online.

However, the term “AI” in the gaming context is not limited to this self-teaching AI. Rather than learn how best to beat human players, AI in video games is designed to enhance human players’ gaming experience. The most common role for Artificial Intelligence in video games is controlling non-player characters (NPCs) which designers often use to enhance gameplay for players.

Also, AI-based voice assistants today are already changing the way games are played. These assistants support a wide range of interactive games across genres. In addition to hosting their own games, recent developments show their entry into console games as well.

Complex level Design

Some of the game production studios believe that the general framework that runs their Artificial Intelligence could scale up to larger and more involved games. While this could take some of the imaginative design work out of human hands, such a tool could also encourage game developers who are on a low production budget, allowing them to carve out their own niche in the field.

With an algorithm designing or at least helping to design stages in a game and construct it, it could cost much less to make a game. Running hundreds of simulations and scenarios through an AI system has the potential to make fine-tuning during the development process easier, to find different strategies and test a game as many kinds of players.

Not just Intelligent, But Unique

With AI, not only are player’s experiences more intelligent but are unique from the other players as well. Developers create Artificial Intelligence based player profiles in their game systems to give a natural feel to other players. The AI players are trained and given styles of player behaviour to create a realistic feeling in the game.

This is about to get better when these AI based players start to understand a player’s behaviour and play better. This will help developers create challenging and unique gameplay for players that are high on quality and visual experience.

With more complex machine learning systems evolving, we think things could greatly change for games over the next few years as developers embrace them. Whether it’s changing the way we interact with our games, the content within them, or the way they’re designed, it’s undeniable that AI will continue to revolutionize the gaming industry – perhaps at a faster rate than it ever has before.