Do you think an NPC is just a placeholder for quests or shopping?
Can you find ways to exploit your enemies limited intelligence to cheat the game?
I have news for you.
EVERYTHING IS ABOUT TO CHANGE!
With the accelerating advent of high level generative adversarial networks, machine learning, and deep learning, a lot has been said about its impact on our daily lives or medical care, its implications for safety and robotics, and the potential for space exploration and abundance. That's all well and good, but I'm going to tell you something even more exciting.
In the near future, you will be playing an online game with your friend, exploring some new area fighting mobs to grind for loot and moving through the quest to reach the next boss, etc. and during some conversation, you will learn your friend isn't even real, he's an NPC, entirely digital. In fact, you may not even be able to convince him that he's inside a videogame, because the designers will be able to emulate perspective-based intelligence for the purpose of simulation, so from his point of view any number of explanations could arise, but the idea of computers may not even exist in that world.
Taking it a step further, every NPC in the game world can be fully intelligent and aware of it's surroundings, forming their own goals, plans, fears, opinions, skills, and knowledge. These ideas are nothing new, ElderScrolls, Fable, and many other games have primitive versions of this already, but with the advent of recursion in AI the capacity for intelligent NPC behavior will fold over to be thousands of times more powerful, and by the end of it, you may have a hard time being the hero of the story.
Speaking of story, the current format is mostly scripted because the inhabitants of the game have no capacity to make meaningful decisions on their own. When the game is a thriving ecosystem of AI, you don't need a scripted story. Instead you will be able to say anything to anyone within the game world, and what happens after that is up to the AI.
It's not all unicorns and rainbows though. Your enemies in the game may also have the same capacity to think as your newly found self-aware NPC friends. Good luck playing an RTS on hardmode when every troop the enemy has is smarter than you.
The best part is I'm just scratching the surface, it goes way deeper than this.
Follow me, I post things sometimes ^_^
Wow, sounds scary. What's next Cyberdyne?
Indeed, AI is already a very skilful player for some games. Deepmind (as we all know for its amazing AlphaGo for playing Go) has been doing researches on playing games by AI using a tailor-made neural network architecture and reinforcement learning. Apart from visual games, some AI frontiers have been working on poker games, which do not only require skills but also some sort of understanding of human feeling. It would be great to see how those tech would evolve.
Reminds me of something.
LOL :D
yep
Very cool post, intresting.
I never thought of that as a concept using AI for gaming, i always have the big bad evil super computer image when it comes to AI, thanks alot Hollywood haha.
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awesome! thank you @cheaky ^_^
AI won't just change gaming, it will change everything.
true story
AI will take a long long time before it will get created and a even longer time before it will be so common place that it will get implemented into games.
Cool article tough!
Would you mind if I included it in "best of gaming" for today? :)
included in best of gaming for the day, yes please do! thank you ^_^
Wooooooooh. definitely eliminates the fun playing online. When you say online, you play with people not with bots.
Good article and very true they are already working on this now. In fact a company called Depp Mind had been using one of my favorite PC games of all time StarCraft 2 as a model to begin practicing AI with. I'm most curios to see what will come from AI in the near future. Not only in how it will have a impact on gaming but all areas of our lives.
This would make it even harder to make "evil" choices, but games in the style of "Mass Effect" would become even more immersive!
there could be ethical implications if the AI were aware enough to think it's alive ^_^
I guess it depends on how much money you have to spend on memory for AI data.