LONDON: Gaming has a lot in common with everyone’s favourite heiress, at least in the public consciousness: it’s pretty, but dumb. And now that Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony have released their latest games consoles, that statement becomes all the more pertinent — next-gen games look great, but they play like something that could have been made a decade ago. While visual fidelity has advanced exponentially over time, the technology that governs how games play, react and adapt — the artificial intelligence, or AI — remains relatively rudimentary.
A handful of developers are striving to change this. The British designer Peter Molyneux has spent his career trying to inject sentience and reactivity into games — and with his upcoming title, Fable 2, he thinks he’s made significant progress. “AI is certainly the undiscovered country of games design,” he says. “Any game genre — from hardcore shooters to the most story-driven adventure game — would be truly revolutionised by AI driving plot, characters and scenarios.”
This is because presently, every action a player makes in a game has to be anticipated by the developers; the software will break down or simply remain stagnant if asked to do something that hasn’t been pre-scheduled. More sophisticated AI would allow games to come up with solutions to player decisions on the fly.
“That’s where the great wins are, when you start improving AI,” Molyneux says. “If I as a player can do stuff in the world that is outside what the designer expects, and the game or game characters react appropriately, that’s incredibly powerful. Suddenly, you think, ‘Well, this isn’t something that’s just waiting for me to press the B-button; it’s evolving around what I’m doing.’ That is very emotionally compelling and, if you get it right, it can often be quite spooky.”
That said, Molyneux doesn’t believe AI can be solely responsible for intense, dynamic emotional experiences; they need to be married with what he calls “smoke and mirrors”.
“You have to define what games developers call AI,” he says, “as opposed to academic AI. There’s actually very little true, academic AI in games. If I go along to universities and talk to professors of AI, they sort of laugh at us and our crude attempts at real-world AI. But my promise has always been, ‘Well, good AI is what you see, not how it works.’ Whether that’s a mixture of true AI and an illusion is neither here nor there, because it’s really about what it brings to the game.”
Steve Grand — creator of the Creatures AI experiment, AI researcher, android hobbyist is probably the only person in the world with the distinction of creating a successful game driven by true AI. Which is why he’s not particularly enthused by the progress his field has made in the games industry.
“AI isn’t so much unappreciated as nonexistent,” he says. “Most of what counts as AI in the games industry is actually a bunch of ‘IF/THEN’ statements. If a computer character doesn’t learn something for itself then the programmer must have told it what to do, and anything that does exactly what it’s told and nothing else is not intelligent. This is changing, and neural networks and other learning systems are beginning to creep in. But games programmers tend to devalue the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’.
Grand, who’s now focused on robotics, remains confident that games can benefit AI research: “I think it’s probably the best environment for AI that exists, at least until we’ve cracked some of the huge problems that are holding back robotics. When you write a game, your only responsibility is to be entertaining. It’s not a mission-critical environment, so this gives you plenty of scope for new ideas.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
