Until a few years ago, artificial intelligence (AI) was straight out of science fiction movies and certainly not something the average person used or talked about in their everyday lives. However, all of that changed when chatbots like ChatGPT emerged on the scene, promising to change everything from how we work to our interactions with others. Even before AI went mainstream, it was hard at work powering modern gaming and having a big impact across the board, including adaptive gameplay, procedural content generation, and improving the overall gaming experience. In this article, we look at how AI has influenced everything from game design to player experiences.
AI Enhancing Gameplay Experience
If you’ve ever played a game with a non-player character (NPC) – and if you play video games, chances are you have – then you’ve experienced the magic of AI at work. NPCs use machine learning to adapt to your playing style. That means if a game is too easy for you, the NPCs will detect this and make it more challenging. The same thing happens in reverse if a game is too hard for you. This type of AI helps prevent players from getting bored with games and keeps them challenging without being overwhelming. The Last of Us Part II and Red Dead Redemption 2 are two games that use adaptive AI with NPCs that change based on the player’s decision-making.
AI also has an important role in creating the vast gaming universes we’ve all come to enjoy over the past decade. In technical circles, you’ll hear this technology referred to as procedural content generation, and it uses algorithms to create diverse game worlds that seem to change on every play-through, so you can keep playing the same game for months or years without getting bored. Games like Minecraft and No Man’s Sky have algorithmically generated landscapes, quests, and resources as examples of AI at work to bring a unique experience to each gamer.
It doesn’t stop there, though; online casinos are also using AI to deliver the best content available to their customers. As people spend time playing games on online platforms like PokerStars Casino, AI gathers data points and analyzes their behavior. If it notices a pattern, such as someone playing roulette games, the casino will begin recommending similar games to them. The more information AI gathers, the better the recommendations become, delivering an experience tailored to each player.
AI in Game Development
AI has transformed game design, testing, and creative content generation, improving it and making it more efficient. AI has allowed developers to automate the tedious tasks they once had to do manually, freeing them up to focus on the creative aspects of their work. For example, instead of engaging in extensive manual testing for bugs, developers can use AI to quickly find bugs that human testers might overlook. The same goes for analyzing code for potential vulnerabilities and testing gameplay mechanics to make sure they respond as they should.
Beyond quality assurance, AI is also essential to content generation. With AI, developers spend much less time generating art and music because they can use AI-driven tools to help them do it, reducing game development costs. Using machine learning algorithms, these tools can generate advanced and diverse game worlds, levels, and assets. The magic behind procedural content generation is that it allows players to have a new experience each time they play the game, bringing more variety to gaming than ever before.
Personalized Gaming Experience
AI is constantly analyzing players’ behavior and preferences behind the scenes as they go through games, allowing it to personalize the gaming experience in ways that would’ve been unimaginable even a decade ago. AI can do this because its systems collect and analyze a huge amount of player data that it uses to modify the gaming experience to fit the individual tastes or habits of the player. It uses this information to adjust the game’s difficulty level based on the player’s skill level, which helps keep the game fun and challenging for all players, whether they’re newbies or veteran players.
