Applied Machine Learning for Games: A Graduate School Course

TL;DR

This paper presents a graduate course that teaches students to apply advanced machine learning techniques like deep learning and reinforcement learning to solve open challenges in the gaming industry, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive course designed to equip graduate students with practical skills in applying machine learning to gaming, bridging academia and industry without requiring prior game development experience.

Findings

Students gained hands-on experience with state-of-the-art ML techniques.

Projects included training AI-bots and understanding human decision patterns.

Course fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and industry readiness.

Abstract

The game industry is moving into an era where old-style game engines are being replaced by re-engineered systems with embedded machine learning technologies for the operation, analysis and understanding of game play. In this paper, we describe our machine learning course designed for graduate students interested in applying recent advances of deep learning and reinforcement learning towards gaming. This course serves as a bridge to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among graduate schools and does not require prior experience designing or building games. Graduate students enrolled in this course apply different fields of machine learning techniques such as computer vision, natural language processing, computer graphics, human computer interaction, robotics and data analysis to solve open challenges in gaming. Student projects cover use-cases such as training AI-bots in gaming benchmark environments and competitions, understanding human decision patterns in gaming, and creating intelligent non-playable characters or environments to foster engaging gameplay. Projects demos can help students open doors for an industry career, aim for publications, or lay the foundations of a future product. Our students gained hands-on experience in applying state of the art machine learning techniques to solve real-life problems in gaming.