Artificial Intelligence for Adaptive Computer Games
Ashwin Ram, Santiago Ontañón, Manish Mehta · 2007
Computer games are an increasingly popular applica-tion for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, and con-versely AI is an increasingly popular selling point for commercial games. Although games are typically asso-ciated with entertainment, there are many “serious ” ap-plications of gaming, including military, corporate, and advertising applications. There are also so-called “hu-mane ” gaming applications for medical training, educa-tional games, and games that reflect social conscious-ness 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 re-sponsive, adaptive, and intelligent. Such systems learn about the player(s) during game play, adapt their own behaviors 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 artifi-cial 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 devel-oping techniques that can be used by computer game developers. We discuss three Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) (Aamodt & Plaza 1994), (Kolodner 1993) ap-proaches to achieve adaptability in games: automatic behavior adaptation for believable characters; drama management and user modeling for interactive stories; and strategic behavior planning for real-time strategy games.