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Artificial Intelligence is a term used a lot these days. Intelligent data collection, self-driving cars, smart customer service chatbots, and more; AI is very much already in our lives already. Where we imagine incredibly smart intelligences stereotypically taking over the world and fighting humans when we think of AI, in actual fact, limited-role AI is already changing the way we live for the better:

• Autonomous vehicles, including self-driving automobiles and air vehicles.
• Tailoring of advertising and marketing to individual preferences.
• Healthcare and medical imaging implementations.
• Aiding smoother and more data-driven warehousing and supply chain workflows.
• Customer-service chatbots and smart assistants.

But putting aside modern limitations for a moment, where might AI go in the next five to ten years? What can we imagine the future of AI looks like across a spectrum of industries? Video games offer an exciting and tangible insight into how AI will change how we interact with our world, in this case, how we play. Consumer technology is exploding in terms of performance and possibility; processors have more cores and threads, while improving energy efficiency, while graphics cards offer huge leaps in performance and new technologies like ray-tracing. This rapid increase in power gives developers the overhead to include better AI programming and possibilities.

Video Games That Never End: Infinite Stories and Player Choice

Titles such as No Man’s Sky and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor use procedural generation to develop various aspects of their gameplay; for No Man’s Sky, an infinitely generated number of planets inhabited by flora and fauna means every player can experience an individual journey of discovery, while in Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, players encounter procedurally generated opponents, who react dynamically to encounters with the player characters, developing a history and growing over time. While impressive, these mechanics present a window into a future where smart AI systems in games develop titles that simply never end. Traditional role-playing games limit characters to a handful of choices, usually between ‘Good’, ‘Evil, or a ‘Neutral’ middle between the two. This offers players binary choices on their journey through those games. But with AI, we could quickly see games become truly individual experiences for each player, offering options to gamers no other player has experienced before, developing stories dynamically in response to player choices and offering potentially infinite replayability and player agency.

A Higher Level of Detail: Games That Build Themselves

Additionally, we can expect games to become much more detailed as AI is continually included in the design process of video games. Developers often have to make a choice between depth and breadth; do they hand-make large environments, offering an increased level of detail and believability? Or do they let development tools dictate those aspects, offering swifter development timelines, at the cost of detail? AI can resolve these choices, intelligently designing environments and in-game assets to make intricate, believable worlds without developers needing to spend additional time in those areas. Finally, we could see in-game characters generate realistic responses and personalities through the use of AI. In AAA titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2, firing upon innocent civilians generates intelligent responses; non-combatants flee, while the authorities are called to prevent further violence. We could see future implementations of AI enhance this type of responsiveness in games. The inclusion of AI could see responses dynamically change, removing predictable patterns from games for players looking to experience deeper immersion in game worlds. One more far-fetched idea (though still in the realm of possibility in a future of AI), is the concept of a game where, with player voice input, players could have dynamic and complex conversations with in-game characters not limited by simple player dialogue choices, but true conversational interactions. Voice commands in games have been a reality for years, but the inclusion of AI technologies that could adapt and learn player’s voices and speech could see those voice commands quickly become more organic, responsive, and informative.

Games Adapt to Player Ability: Responding to Player Ability

AI in gaming has already proven to be tough competition. AI has beaten one of the world’s top professional teams in Valve’s popular competitive title, Dota 2. Additionally, an AI system beat or drew 100 games with the world’s best chess-playing computer program, after teaching itself the games rules in four hours. While these are somewhat limited applications, it’s not hard to imagine a time where players experience different difficulty levels and challenges based on intelligent systems in-game that monitor player progress and skill, adapting as needed to provide players with a challenging but enjoyable experience.   In conclusion, the future of AI in video games is exciting; we’ve not even considered how AI combined with virtual reality systems will blur the line between our physical world, and future digital worlds video game developers are already creating. Keep an eye out for future articles, where we’ll look at how future AI systems could continue to change businesses and our world, including in manufacturing, office spaces, and beyond.