THE FUTURE IMPACT OF THE INDUSTRY
For the previous decades, the gaming industry has concentrated their development of AI on making the player’s experience more complex and immersive. This goal will apparently remain unchanged in the future as the gaming industry will focus on creating a more unique and immersive user experience, according to Andrew Wilson, the CEO of Electronic Arts: “Your life will be a video game.” With the emergence of Virtual Reality (VR, an immersive viewing experience through a specific display) and Augmented Reality (AR, combination of reality and virtual elements), gaming companies are aiming at blurring the limit between the player’s reality and virtual world. The famous Pokémon Go phone game has shown the impressive market demand and interest for Augmented Reality games. The CEO of Electronic Arts, Andrew Wilson, has in fact recognizes the market appeal for such immersive games and so, the future of AI development will be focused on making the game extremely immersive.
All the interviewed game design students agreed that Artificial Intelligence will become more complex, almost human-like and more broadly used throughout the gaming industry in order to create more interactive and immersive virtual worlds. One went even further by acknowledging that Artificial Intelligence could never fully replace human interactions in multiplayer video games, giving limits to the use of AI in the gaming industry.
Credits: PixelNet
In fact, this excitement regarding this focus on AI in video games have sparked the question for developers and players alike: will multiplayer game survive in a world where AI has matched human beings? But this fear should be calmed as Electronic Arts CFO, Blake Jorgensen, has said very infamously that single player games are fading out of fashion in comparison to multiplayer ones, a statement which has been refuted by countless other gaming companies. (Harbing, 2017)
Furthermore, some researchers and game developers have hope regarding the future of AI in the video game industry. Indeed, some have called for the development of a “unified conceptual framework”. There are undeniable generalizations that can be made between games; the knowledge gained during the development of one game can be applied later to another. A unified conceptual framework would thus be an efficient way to create and share solutions for common problems across the video game industry. These solutions would have to remain “conceptual” to be able to be shared and adapted across the industry.
Credits: EU Science Hub
On top of making game development more efficient and complex across the industry, this unified conceptual framework would be beneficial for AI researchers in general as it would share possible problems and solutions encountered during the development of AI. This can be applied at a later time to other AI algorithms if need be, as the AI development would progress independently of each video game. Some hypothesize that it would lead to the commercialization of the best AI solutions to encountered problems instead of collaboration focused on open-source solutions. Thus, in the event that such a unified conceptual framework ever comes to existence, the general development of Artificial Intelligence would improve much faster than ever before making the dream of many companies and researchers possible: an adaptive and complex AI. (Safadi, 2015)
Credits: PlayStation
The future of the partnership between AI research and video games will hold VR-and AR-based open-world video games which will provide an immersive gaming experience. The human players will be able to play whatever and however they wish in a world filled with AI NPC that act as real humans would in the real world. This is an optimistic very early take on the theory on which is based the critically-acclaimed HBO TV show, Westworld, showing that video games in general are an inspiration for many Art forms and other branches of the entertainment industry. (Harbing, 2017)
Credits: Netflix
According to the student in cinematography, Marie Olazabal, video games will serve more as an inspiration story-wise rather than technology-wise for the movie industry. In fact, she stated that 4D cinemas and movies (where the viewer’s sense of touch is used) were not looked upon favorably by the public as it is “expensive and unattractive”. Nevertheless, she admitted that video game’s quest for adaptability could change the movie industry if movies started implementing choices in each movie that the viewer could make to change the events in the movie, such as the movie Bandersnatch did.
Surprisingly, the help video game provided to the overall Artificial Intelligence field has proven to be helpful for the medical industry as well. Indeed, some neurological diseases, such as dementia, have been successfully tempered through virtual simulations. The immersive simulation, LookBack VR, has been used to help people by reawakening their childhood memory by tailoring the experience to each patient. This is very similar to reminiscence therapy. These therapeutic simulations could be even more useful if we implemented adaptive AI in the simulation, as the events and people in it would be even more believable. These simulations could also be used to help people bedridden at hospital who can’t enjoy the world, so we could bring the world to them virtually. (Velardo, 2019 March 29)