When and how will AI and Video Games collide?

[Gregz]

If computers can now out-think humans in the strategic space, what can we look forward to in video games? When do you think we'll start seeing these changes? Will a new genre of video game emerge?

[rusty_shackleford]

If computers can now out-think humans in the strategic space,

Worth pointing out that the decision space in Chess is absolutely tiny compared to the massive majority of video games.
Also, AI that has no restriction on communication or acts as a monolithic entity will dominate team-based competitive games first. But really, it's just cheating. One of the most difficult aspects of these games is good communication & team play, something it doesn't have to do at all unless it's a constraint put on it somehow.

[asf]

I want to know when they will use AI for something interesting instead in games, like running sims

[Gregz]

If computers can now out-think humans in the strategic space,

Worth pointing out that the decision space in Chess is absolutely tiny compared to the massive majority of video games.
Also, AI that has no restriction on communication or acts as a monolithic entity will dominate team-based competitive games first. But really, it's just cheating. One of the most difficult aspects of these games is good communication & team play, something it doesn't have to do at all unless it's a constraint put on it somehow.

Artificial constraints will always be necessary in order to cater to the player, but perhaps AI will "learn" how to optimally please the player by massaging those constraints? I.e., maybe AI won't adopt an adversarial posture, but will instead find a way to maximize engagement for the player on an individual basis.

[Acrux]

I want to know when they will use AI for something interesting instead in games, like running sims

There's a company that's using AI to create an MMO where NPCs will have interactive dialogue.

https://exputer.com/news/netease-adding ... ce-online/

The company revealed a demo of the AI technology on Billi Billi. According to playtesters, NPCs have the ability to freely interact and talk to players and give logical feedback based on past interactions. This is a huge step ahead of scripted dialogue.

This AI is also planned to be able to generate quests, and it could enable AI to have dynamic memories, as in NPC could remember what you have said to them in the past, and have dynamic interactions with players based on previous dialogue.

These dynamic AI-powered NPCs could change how players interact with RPG games. While RPGs like The Witcher, Elden Ring, and Mass Effect have various endings, they are still somewhat linear in each path. Dialogue is still routine. With AI, different endings and paths players take could be much more varied.

Daniel Ahmad gives the example of a character telling the AI NPC that their house is on fire, and they would run home to check.

[Gregz]

Exclusive Q&A: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

The iconic Dallas game developer, rocket engineer, and VR visionary has pivoted to an audacious new challenge: developing artificial general intelligence—a form of AI that goes beyond mimicking human intelligence to understanding things and solving problems. Carmack sees a 60% chance of achieving initial success in AGI by 2030. Here’s how, and why, he’s working independently to make it happen.

[agentorange]

Maybe one day we will have games

If computers can now out-think humans in the strategic space,

Worth pointing out that the decision space in Chess is absolutely tiny compared to the massive majority of video games.
Also, AI that has no restriction on communication or acts as a monolithic entity will dominate team-based competitive games first. But really, it's just cheating. One of the most difficult aspects of these games is good communication & team play, something it doesn't have to do at all unless it's a constraint put on it somehow.

Artificial constraints will always be necessary in order to cater to the player, but perhaps AI will "learn" how to optimally please the player by massaging those constraints? I.e., maybe AI won't adopt an adversarial posture, but will instead find a way to maximize engagement for the player on an individual basis.

Sounds nightmarish (and funny enough sounds eerily similar to level scaling only with a different more attractive name), and a lot like the systems that many mobiles games, and games like Diablo 4, already have, where the game analyzes player performance and behavior and adjusts itself to "personalize" a difficulty setting that will keep the person playing as long as possible, "maximizing engagement." Some single player games have tried this as well, like the new Resident Evil 2 Remake, where factors like the amount of damage that enemies can take will change on the fly depending on player performance, the amount of ammunition found on enemies will change (I believe the nuDoom games do this as well), and so on, and it always feels remarkably worse than having a constant difficulty level.

When I play a single-player game I want to be challenged by a series of problems that the developers carefully decided on while they were developing the game, something that has a beginning and an ending, not be endlessly lead around and jerked off by something that is tailoring itself at all times to "please" me. I can test my abilities and knowledge of the game against other people because I know they are getting the same experience that I got. But I suppose people who like loot treadmill skinnerboxes and vampire survivor type games where they can veg out while watching numbers get bigger forever will enjoy having their constraints massaged.

As far as multiplayer games, the whole fun of a multiplayer game is playing against other humans who you know want to win at any cost, however because they are human their potential abilities are reasonably similar to your own. If the computer opponent were allowed to win at any cost then it would cheat, or perform at a level that is far out of reach of human potential that it is akin to cheating, at which point why bother, and the alternative is that it handicaps itself in which case you aren't playing against something that is trying its best to win, so why bother. It's not like this is some hypothetical scenario either, since you can already play games against AI opponents.

Go ahead and play a game of SMAC versus the AI at Transcend difficulty, it cheats and the only way to win is to play the game like a puzzle game where you do very exact strategies in their correct sequence. Play the game against a lower level AI however and the limitations make it very boring after a while. It's only really fun when you're playing against other humans who can be be as good as you, worse than you, better than you, but all within the basically similar human potential range and who are all trying to win. A player who is extremely good can **** up from a moment of carelessness or shortsightedness, and you know he ****** up accidentally, not because he was made to **** up once in a while in order to keep you "engaged." A poor player might once in a while have a stroke of genius or do something unexpected and against established norms. There's also the whole psychological factor of you playing against another real person who exists somewhere and that you might know, which feels intrinsically different than playing against an AI. Telling an AI "gg ez" after a brutal 3 hour long game that you barely won is simply not the same as doing it against a person who will get mad and report you.

[GothGirlSupremacy]

Also applies to arcade games back in the day, especially fighting games that had ********** AI that read your inputs and could do things no human could actually do.

Fun video on this to watch:

[rusty_shackleford]

There's something to be said about the unpredictability of machine learning though. Watch some of those machine learning AIs vs tournament-level dota 2 matches or whatever they were, the announcers were unable to follow the match because they didn't know how to follow what the AI was doing.
Not sure if I'd say it's good, but it will definitely impact how humans play even if AI doesn't compete at all. For the same reason you have high-ranked random chess players that would beat Bobby Fischer now due to all the computer aided learning available, exposing them to plays that a human wouldn't come up with.

[Ol' Willy]

In all games where AI is mostly scripted (for specific actions or encounters) and doesn't have real freedom to act, it is predictable and exploitable. You, even unconsciously, will be exploiting AI.

This is very obvious when you switch from SP to MP. You may obliterate the hardest AI but then you play against real people and the result is different.

AI in Stalker is fairly good, it is still scripted but dummies have more freedom to act; Stalker always felt a tad differently from other shooters.

The better AI is scripted, the harder it is to exploit it, but once you find the way AI just doesn't know how to counteract.

What is really needed is the level of AI that knows the basics of what it has to do in the game.

For example, AI in OFP and ArmA games (don't know if it was fixed in ArmA 3) doesn't really know how to break the line of sight under fire. I stopped playing because of this, having peps just lying in the center of the street like nothing happens

[Shillitron]

This is a Older video - but extremely fun to watch on 2x speed.

Adversarial AI learning to play "Hide and Seek" in Unity vs each other..

The AI's start off super ********, doing nothing, running in circles.. then as each AI tries to one-up the other they start learning techniques to beat each other - eventually both AI's end up Exploiting the game using exploits in the physics / collisions - breaking out of bounds to beat each other.

TL;DR - AI's become dirty ******* cheaters just to win.

[Gastrick]

Exclusive Q&A: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

The iconic Dallas game developer, rocket engineer, and VR visionary has pivoted to an audacious new challenge: developing artificial general intelligence—a form of AI that goes beyond mimicking human intelligence to understanding things and solving problems. Carmack sees a 60% chance of achieving initial success in AGI by 2030. Here’s how, and why, he’s working independently to make it happen.

Very disturbing that the AI dystopia could be here as early as 2030. The immigrants and outsourcing analogy Carmack used is a good one, except in this case, there are trillions of electronic pajeets that can be cloned over and over again. They are much cheaper and don't need a wage, and can finish work much faster than humans can. All intellectual jobs are going to be dead, and physical jobs soon after, once the AI designs cheap and versatile robots. Humanity will either be kept alive in a useless state living off welfare, or be allowed to starve for being useless to the elites, or be kept as pets and cattle by the machines (like humans and animals), or actively killed off like in The Terminator. Carmack should watch out for time travelers coming back in time to kill him.

[aeternalis]

Carmack should watch out for time travelers coming back in time to kill him.

Maybe Romero can go back, make Carmack his ***** and force him to suck it down. Daikatana had time travel, after all.

[Segata]

What you expect: ultra-competitive, hard as hell enemy AI

What you get: the AI beats the game for you

[J1M]

I think one of the first successful introductions of AI into gaming will be serving as a Dungeon Master. There is a shortage of DMs, results are determined by hidden rolls, and the goal is to generate walls of text.

[aeternalis]

I think one of the first successful introductions of AI into gaming will be serving as a Dungeon Master. There is a shortage of DMs, results are determined by hidden rolls, and the goal is to generate walls of text.

Well, it feels like this gets into the old tabletop RPG trifecta of gamism vs. simulationism vs. narrativism

An AI can't do narrativism, because it won't be able to weave a cohesive and coherent meaningful narrative with enough scope (this is the problem of AI writing). Simulationism is also going to be pretty difficult; Dwarf Fortress is the furthest any program has ever advanced in simulation of a world, and it's rather imperfect. Gamism is more down to the choice of system, but an AI won't "comprehend" a tabletop RPG system. That leaves it in the space of assistance rather than as a pure agent, and... I mean, I've done a campaign where I as the DM generated plenty of stuff with the aid of dice rolling (think "Solo RPG" systems like Mythic; there are some shows on YouTube that do these) and I guess AI could be an assistant like this, to help jog ideas for a blocked human. Otherwise, I'm pessimistic, and I don't think I saw any good results with AI Dungeon or NovelAI here either despite people's attempts

[J1M]

That's nonsense. It can be fed adventures to direct a coherent story and taught the game rules.

[aeternalis]

That's nonsense. It can be fed adventures to direct a coherent story and taught the game rules.

I'm a programmer. It's my professional opinion that AIs won't derive a model of a satisfying story structure from being fed volumes of text; current language models basically come up with frequency and probability distributions of what's likely to follow, but that's on a more localized level. Also, I'm not so sure they can be "taught" the game rules, although you could code the game rules and put a text-generative quest model on top of that.

[aeternalis]

I'm sorry. My previous post was excessively combative and also resorted to appealing to expertise, which was unfair.

You're absolutely entitled to your own opinion and I may very well be wrong. No offense intended.

[agentorange]

Games will be further dumbed down and streamlined to accommodate these "AI DM" type systems. Isn't D&D already doing something like this. Everything will be reduced to the most simple, compact form that can easily be recognized as relevant data and cobbled together with other relevant data as quickly as possible to produce “content.” (not relevant to this thread but let me say how much I hate the term “content creator.”) Search engine optimization but for games, books, movies, everything.

PNP isn't and shouldn't be a purely consumer activity, it's fundamentally a creative, imaginative, social activity, where the DM and the players are together making something as they go along. It can be performative and theatrical. It requires effort and patience. The DM is the one who initiates the creative process, he makes the world, makes the story, acts as the catalyst for the other players to role-play, improvise, and problem solve. It requires human creative motivation and it’s something to be proud of. When you make a story you put a little of yourself into it, and even if you are borrowing ideas from elsewhere you are the one making the choices of where to take from and how; you know what you like and dislike, you have control over it and there is effort and wisdom required in being discerning and cultivating good taste in regards to what you take from and what you don’t take from (focusing on PNP here but this post is really about all creative endeavors, replace DM and PNP terms with game development terms, drawing terms, music making terms, whatever). You take the things you like and synthesize them in your brain together with your own various personal experiences, thoughts, philosophies in a way that no machine ever will. These are all human elements, and taking any of these away and replacing them with a device for the sake of convenience makes the experience more vulgar.

There are less and less DMs because people more and more want to do nothing but passively consume. So what is the solution? Put some effort in and become a DM yourself? Be patient and wait for a DM? Get a group together and speech skill someone into becoming the DM? Play a video game because a video game is in essence a pre-made campaign where the developers were the DMs? Realize you are an uncreative, lazy person and PNP isn’t for you and go do something else? No, the solution is to throw more technology devices at the problem. Reduce something human to automated data input content output for the sake of convenience. What makes me angry is that not only will relying on some device like this give the person using it a lesser, more vulgar experience, but it is yet another device that gives people a convenient “out” which might prevent someone from putting in the effort and learning to be creative had they no other choice (again this applies to many other fields). As the more vulgar version of something becomes more commonplace, the powers that be decide that there is no reason to keep the original, non-vulgar version of the thing going because it requires more effort, more and more people turn to the vulgar version because it is convenient and easy, and the vulgar version becomes the norm, lowering the bar for everyone. So any argument of “Well how does the device affect you? Just don’t use it,” is ********.

The funny thing is how much more we already have, how many conveniences we already have at our disposable, far more than at any point in history. Imagine trying to get a PNP game going in the 70s. You had no roll20 to easily host a campaign online, no internet chat-rooms or forums to gather people together, no wiki like databases for easy perusal of dozens of different rule-sets and game systems, no access through the internet to an infinite amount of books and movies and various historical and fictional resources to draw character and plot ideas from, and yet there were still DMs making stories and players using their imagination to get through them. Now we have all of that, but somehow it still isn’t enough, because people find it too difficult to look through that **** and make something of their own. I want to consume now, with minimal effort, minimal thought.

Another step towards a society where no one can create anything and no knows anything because everything is left up to various devices that other people made that people blindly trust, at first because they find them convenient and later because they cannot do without them. A precarious house of cards stretching upwards like the tower of babel held together by technological gum and string. The people on the upper most levels have absolutely no clue how the lower levels of the structure were made, nor do they have any idea how the various feeding apparatuses and entertainment devices that keep them pacified every day function (the devices will remind them from time to time that they have never been more liberated), nor do they have any desire to understand the things around them in the first place.

Seeing the eagerness with which people desire a device to be used as a surrogate for human creativity and imagination is loathsome to me, it makes me angry. What is also loathsome is how many options people already have if they want to do nothing but veg out and consume, but, that it is never enough and therefore imaginative, creative activities have to be turned into vegetative activities. In the nightmare network of the future you’re going to wish you had protected and held onto the few things that make you more human and hadn’t so willingly given them up to a machine that you don’t understand and have no real control over for the sake of convenience and instant gratification.

[Fedora Master]

AI will be huge for MMOs because you can finally ditch pubbies and solo the content with NPC groups.

[GhostCow]

AI will be huge for MMOs because you can finally ditch pubbies and solo the content with NPC groups.

Great, a new way to make the genre even worse

[Gastrick]

Might as well play an actual single player RPG at that point.

[Tweed]

Wasn't the point of a lot of early CRPGs to let the computer be the DM? Handle the world, the encounter tables, the dice, etc etc etc so the player could just play? It was certainly the goal of the first two TES games, let the computer handle the crunch so the player could be who they want. The pipe dream has been to deliver a PNP style experience. If AI can make good on that then we've accomplished what the original developers of CRPGs started back in the 80s.

[MadPreacher]

Wasn't the point of a lot of early CRPGs to let the computer be the DM? Handle the world, the encounter tables, the dice, etc etc etc so the player could just play? It was certainly the goal of the first two TES games, let the computer handle the crunch so the player could be who they want. The pipe dream has been to deliver a PNP style experience. If AI can make good on that then we've accomplished what the original developers of CRPGs started back in the 80s.

Yup, but it's never lived up to its promise. AI is a misnomer since they're just a group of subroutines that tell the computer how to act.

I really don't see AI being able to replace a human as the game master. I may be wrong, but I think humans have a better handle on it.

As for the lack of DMs for Generic Fantasy Superhero RPG the Fifth ********, it's because the rules suck *** from what I've heard. GMs/DMs for other games aren't having any problems with players finding them.

[Tweed]

Wasn't the point of a lot of early CRPGs to let the computer be the DM? Handle the world, the encounter tables, the dice, etc etc etc so the player could just play? It was certainly the goal of the first two TES games, let the computer handle the crunch so the player could be who they want. The pipe dream has been to deliver a PNP style experience. If AI can make good on that then we've accomplished what the original developers of CRPGs started back in the 80s.

Yup, but it's never lived up to its promise. AI is a misnomer since they're just a group of subroutines that tell the computer how to act.

I really don't see AI being able to replace a human as the game master. I may be wrong, but I think humans have a better handle on it.

As for the lack of DMs for Generic Fantasy Superhero RPG the Fifth ********, it's because the rules suck *** from what I've heard. GMs/DMs for other games aren't having any problems with players finding them.

I know it's not true AI, true AI is impossible. No glorified spellchecker is going to replace human nuance, but if they can offer more dynamic experiences than what's been possible I say embrace the AI overlords. Or at least I would except that they're giving AI brain damage by making it woke.

[NEG]

[Fargus]

[Fargus]

lul

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova gives you an entire galaxy to explore and customize. Using cutting-edge AI technology, you will be able to create entire civilizations that both look and feel unique just by entering a few lines of text. The AI will generate custom lore, diplomatic dialogues, starship choices, and ambassador images, leaving you with a one-of-a-kind civilization to play as or against.

[Tweed]

ou will be able to create entire civilizations that both look and feel unique just by entering a few lines of text.

There once was an alien from Venus, who's body was shaped like a...