Artificial Intelligence and Games: Applications and New Directions

Computer games form an important sector of the digital economy, computing and entertainment industries, and are very sophisticated in many ways. They have gone beyond pure entertainment value and the game paradigm and technology are now increasingly used in education, training, storytelling and anywhere one needs to create an engaging environment. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques facilitate the creation of such experience, and the need for better AI in games is deeply felt and recognized by industry, and is expanding as a new successful area in research. This special issue focuses on the connection between Games and AI in the broad sense. Games offer novel challenges and excellent application domains for AI research. Vice versa: applications of AI and Machine Learning (ML) techniques are increasingly used to improve not only the dynamics of the games, but also their graphical representation and interaction techniques, pushing the frontiers of 3D graphics, Virtual Reality and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research. To date, the AI techniques that typically appear in digital games, are of a basic kind, and the more advanced techniques seldom make an appearance. Reasons for this have historically been (a) that game designers were usually trained in programming or digital arts, but not in AI, and more importantly (b) that powerful AI techniques are demanding to run, and require a lot of computer processing time and memory to be feasible in a commercial game. These are no longer limitations, and the contributors to this special issue show some of the possible applications of AI:. When used well, AI can add a great deal to digital games. AI is a disparate research field, and it is not possible to cover all of it in a single issue; but these articles do give both a broad impression of many sorts of AI work being done in games, and a deeper sense of what may be possible tomorrow. The articles include literature reviews of their various areas, which would be helpful ways into relevant research for those new to the field, wanting a more comprehensive overview. The topics covered in this issue are not fo-cused on the state of the art of current established games, but rather on active current research into AI and games yet to come. This includes ways to improve automatic story-telling, the