How AI is Changing the Gaming Industry

In recent years, the world of technology has been rocked by a series of extremely impressive developments in artificial intelligence. However, there’s one major technological niche that has benefitted from AI for much longer. For decades, video games have needed to be programmed to respond intelligently to input from the player – the difference is that now the AI programs are being built slightly differently, and used in different ways.

But how has the industry responded to more recent developments? There are a number of changes to note.

Revolutionizing Game Development

Developing a modern game means creating a huge number of diverse assets. These might be models, textures, sprites, and audio clips. Using traditional means, these must be created by hand by artists. This process can be time-consuming and expensive, especially when larger games are being developed.

Using modern AI, these assets can be generated procedurally, which might allow a vast number of diverse objects to be installed into an enormous world. Artificial intelligence might also be used for quality assurance and testing. An AI can play a given build endlessly, and spot all of the game-breaking flaws and glitches.

Of course, there are some tasks that machines can’t perform. For example, the physical hardware on which these programs operate will need to be maintained by human beings with a good knowledge of which cables to connect, and which connectors to use.

Enhancing Player Experiences

Artificial intelligence can also guide the behaviour of non-player characters, which might allow those characters to react to what the player is doing in an unguided, ‘emergent’ way. Artificial intelligence might even monitor the tastes of a given player, in order to provide exactly the kind of virtual opponents that might provoke the desired reaction.

Transforming Industry Dynamics

Artificial intelligence looks set to seriously disrupt the industry. It might make certain tasks, which have traditionally been performed by human beings, the preserve of algorithms. This has caused some concern among developers. But it might also create opportunities for those same people.

For example, rather than a human being painstakingly editing a texture of some brickwork, a machine-learning algorithm might be trained on countless different real-life photographs of bricks. The role of the human being in this process might be to supervise. In effect, the developer of the future might have dozens, or even hundreds, of different creative directors, each overseeing a specific aspect of the game, while entrusting much of the actual work to artificial intelligence.

It remains to be seen what the long-term impact of these changes might be. However, it appears likely that they will be considerable – and that much of the content of the future will be generated algorithmically.