AI for Game Developers

Chapter 1. Introduction to Game AI

In the broadest sense, most games incorporate some form of artificial intelligence (AI). For instance, developers have used AI for years to give seemingly intelligent life to countless game characters, from the ghosts in the classic arcade game Pac Man to the bots in the first-person shooter Unreal, and many others in between. The huge variety of game genres and game characters necessitates a rather broad interpretation as to what is considered game AI. Indeed, this is true of AI in more traditional scientific applications as well.

Some developers consider tasks such as pathfinding as part of game AI. Steven Woodcock reported in his “2003 Game Developer’s Conference AI Roundtable Moderator’s Report’ that some developers even consider collision detection to be part of game AI^[1]. Clearly, some wide-ranging interpretations of game AI exist.

We’re going to stick with a broad interpretation of game AI, which includes everything from simple chasing and evading, to pattern movement, to neural networks and genetic algorithms. Game AI probably best fits within the scope of weak AI (see the sidebar “Defining AI”). However, in a sense you can think of game AI in even broader terms.

In games, we aren’t always interested in giving nonplayer characters human-level intellect. Perhaps we are writing code to control nonhuman creatures such as dragons, robots, or even rodents. Further, who says we always have to make nonplayer characters smart? Making some nonplayer ...