AI in games – Industry and Academia

When it comes to comparing AI that's applied to video games, both in Academia and in the Industry, there is a big discrepancy. I would say that there was almost a fight between the two. Let's have a look at the reasons behind this. In fact, they have very different goals.

Academia wants to create AI agents for games that think intelligently to act in the environment and interact with the player.

On the other hand, the game industry wants to create AI agents for games that seem to think intelligently to act in the environment and interact with the player.

We can clearly notice that the first leads to a more realistic AI, whereas the second leads to a more believable AI. Of course, commercial games are more worried about the latter rather than the former.

We will explore this concept in more detail in Chapter 14, Going Beyond, when we talk about the psychology and game design involved in creating an AI system for games. In fact, to achieve a believable behavior, you often need to try and be realistic as well.

However, in more formal terms, we can say that game AI falls in the category of weak AI (opposite to strong AI), which focuses on solving a specific task or problem intelligently, rather than develop a consciousness behind it. In any case, we won't venture further into this.