Artificial intelligence moving serious gaming: Presenting reusable game AI components

Computer games have been linked with artificial intelligence (AI) since the first program was designed to play chess (Shannon 1950). The challenge to defeat human expert players in rule-based strategy games such as Chess, Poker and Go has greatly advanced the domain of AI research, affecting breakthroughs in e.g. In turn, such new AI methods have been used in computer games, for instance to enhance graphical realism, to generate levels, sceneries and storylines, to establish player profiles, to balance complexity or to add intelligent behaviours to non-playing characters (NPC; Yannakakis and Togelius 2015, 2018). Over the years, however, various authors (Champandard 2004; Bourassa and Massey 2012; Yannakakis 2012; Yannakakis and Togelius 2018) have pointed at the marginal penetration of academic game AI methods in industrial game production. This limited uptake has been attributed to 1) research projects largely focusing on advanced, but non-scalable projects of little commercial or practical value, and 2) game studios reluctant to adopt and include promising but risky AI techniques (such as neural networks) rather than established, fully scripted technologies in their games.