AI Researchers, Video Games Are Your Friends!

TL;DR

This paper advocates for the mutual benefits of integrating AI and video games, highlighting how games serve as ideal testbeds for AI development and how AI can revolutionize game design and experience.

Contribution

It presents a compelling argument for using video games as platforms for advancing artificial general intelligence and explores how AI can enable innovative game development.

Findings

Video games are ideal for testing general AI capabilities.

Advanced AI can enable new types of video games.

Video games can accelerate AI research.

Abstract

If you are an artificial intelligence researcher, you should look to video games as ideal testbeds for the work you do. If you are a video game developer, you should look to AI for the technology that makes completely new types of games possible. This chapter lays out the case for both of these propositions. It asks the question "what can video games do for AI", and discusses how in particular general video game playing is the ideal testbed for artificial general intelligence research. It then asks the question "what can AI do for video games", and lays out a vision for what video games might look like if we had significantly more advanced AI at our disposal. The chapter is based on my keynote at IJCCI 2015, and is written in an attempt to be accessible to a broad audience.