Wow! eBook
AI and artifical life in video games
Author(s): GUYW. Lecky Thompson (Author)
- Publication Date: 17 Sept. 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 598 pages
- ISBN-10: B0FRM27691
Book Description
Welcome to AI and Artificial Life in Video Games, a book intended to chal lenge as well as inform designers/programmers who want to add artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (A-Life) to their next video game cre ation. This is not a textbook on AI, nor is it an attempt to write a defini tive work on A-Life. Both fields are continually expanding, but some solid ground rules are already in place, which we can leverage in creating better games. AI helps build better games. It can increase difficulty while also helping the player with the actual mechanics of the game. In other words, AI helps the machine to act in a way that will challenge the player, as well as help him by reacting intelligently to his actions. By a similar token, A-Life can add an extra dimension of playability and immersion, while also providing some unpredictability to the nature of standard AI behavioral models. AI deals with the game’s actual think ing; A-Life deals with making the environment more lifelike. Some games are simply not possible without AI—chess, for example— whereas other games are built upon the premise of A-Life—Creatures being perhaps the first and most well known. Either way, any game, at many phases of video game development, can use the techniques in this book. Be warned, however, that this is not a book about AI in video games, as used in the industry today. Instead, it is a look at techniques that can be used to add AI and A-Life easily and cheaply to video games, without extending the current AI techniques beyond their current capacities too much. As Mark Morris, of UK games developer Introversion, states, “So why aren’t we seeing all these wonderful techniques in games now? Is it the fault of the men in T-shirts or those in white coats, and what do we need to do to ease the passage of research from the lab to production-level video games?”
