Have you put a real killer application that exploits AI into volume production use? As of last year, only 4 (that's FOUR) percent of 3,182 CIOs world-wide report they've put an AI-related application into production (or planned to do so within the next 12 months.) CIOs don't always know everything going on in the enterprise, but this number most likely isn't off by more than a factor of 2. (And maybe eight percent of enterprises have such an application in production, but 8 percent is probably an overestimate.) On 27 June this year, we published research for our clients on AI Technical Maturity for Enterprise Architects and Technology Innovators. On the face of it, there has been breathtaking progress on AI in the last decade: The science of AI continues to blaze new, highly valuable trails.

We propose that AI for interactive computer games is an emerging application area in which this goal of human-level AI can successfully be pursued. Interactive computer games have increasingly complex and realistic worlds and increasingly complex and intelligent computer-controlled characters. In this article, we further motivate our proposal of using interactive computer games for AI research, review previous research on AI and games, and present the different game genres and the roles that human-level AI could play within these genres. Our conclusion is that interactive computer games provide a rich environment for incremental research on human-level AI.