Artificial Intelligence in Gaming

Computer games are increasingly popular application for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, and conversely AI is an increasingly popular selling point for commercial games. Although games are typically associated with entertainment, there are many serious applications of gaming, including military, corporate, and advertising applications. There are also so called "human" gaming applications for medical training, educational games, and games that reflect social consciousness or advocate for a cause. Game AI is the effort of going beyond scripted interactions, however complex, into the arena of truly interactive systems that are responsive, adaptive, and intelligent. Such systems learn about the player(s) during game play, adapt their own behaviour beyond the pre-programmed set provided by the game author, and interactively develop and provide a richer experience to the player(s). The long-term goal of our research is to develop artificial intelligence techniques that can have a significant impact in the game industry. In this paper, we present a list of challenges and research opportunities in developing techniques that can be used by computer game developers. We discuss three Case Based Reasoning (CBR) approaches to achieve adaptability in games: automatic behaviour adaptation for believable characters; drama management and user modelling for interactive stories; and strategic behaviour planning for real-time strategy games.