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Image by Andy Kelly on Unsplash
In our new thought leadership series, we're discussing some of the most important issues facing the games industry today. Today, we're thinking about Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is creating a turning point in technological change akin to the Industrial Revolution – we can either ignore it, or we can help to shape it.
Over the course of human history, the advent of revolutionary new technology always brings with it new fears. But AI is only as scary as what we train it to do. And with 3.6 billion players on the planet, video games serve as an amazing scaffold for the creative abilities of AI. In fact, AI has been used in some form by the games industry since the 70s – and it’s certainly not going away.
Traditionally, AI is a term used in video games to describe a very broad set of algorithms that determine behaviour for computer-controlled entities within a game. For example, direct opponents in a game of chess, or pathfinding for non-player characters in Pac-Man. Since the 90s, game AI has started to employ sophisticated imitations of human neural networks to produce more immersive and creative work than ever before.
Games have always been a space in which the possibilities of technology can be applied in a structured and creative way.
Take for instance the home computer. The consumer interest in its ability to render games has created a market of increasingly powerful PCs, accelerated by game developers reflecting the new capabilities of these machines in their releases. We could see this same principal in AI development as consumers respond to the unique and innovative games it's able to produce.
Today’s AIs can be used to speed up elements of game development such a playtesting and QA, allowing studios to spend more time and budget on more creative or sophisticated tasks. AI can complement human moderation in online games, helping to manage fast-growing userbases. And the procedural generation of levels pioneered in Space Invaders is now used to create terrain, landscape items and quests – with Guildford-based No Man’s Sky boasting over 18 quintillion planets available for players to visit.
But to guide the future of AI down a productive path, we must consider the policy decisions that will be necessary in the coming decades.
Not just in the realm of regulation, which must be pro-innovation and based on existing risk of harm, but also in developing an AI literate workforce. Ukie’s Digital Schoolhouse and SkillsFuture, together with industry veteran Ian Livingstone, have long called for a computing curriculum that teaches pupils not to fear AI, but to ask it the right questions. We should also consider how we can use the newly established Video Games Research Framework to provide objective, robust evidence to strengthen our understanding in this space.
As AI becomes more visible in the public sphere, it’s more vital than ever that we are educated in what it is and crucially, how to use it. And we can look to the video game industry as a case study of how AI does not need to exist in opposition to human creativity, but rather as a tool for us to harness.