The hard-thought race for intelligent gaming

Artificial intelligence is the holy grail for game designers, but just how smart are current methods and what's in the pipeline?

Gaming has a lot in common with everyone's favourite heiress, at least in the public consciousness: it's pretty, but dumb. And now that Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony have released their latest games consoles, that statement becomes all the more pertinent—next-gen games look great, but they play like something that could have been made a decade ago. While visual fidelity has advanced exponentially over time, the technology that governs how games play, react and adapt—the artificial intelligence, or AI—remains relatively rudimentary.

A handful of developers are striving to change this. The British designer Peter Molyneux, recently awarded an OBE, has spent his career trying to inject sentience and reactivity into games—and with his upcoming title, Fable 2, he thinks he's made significant progress. "AI is certainly the undiscovered country of games design," he says. "Any game genre—from hardcore shooters to the most story-driven adventure game—would be truly revolutionised by AI driving plot, characters and scenarios."

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