AI is testing games to make sure they're fun enough
AI is taking another step to make the lives of game designers easier. AI agents could help evaluate how engaging a level in video games is.
wired.me
AI is testing games to make sure they’re fun enough
AI is taking another step to make the lives of game designers easier.
Illustration: Umang Sawkar/WIRED Middle East
If you are a video game enthusiast, you would be familiar with the situation where certain levels in a game are just boring. Now, game development is getting an AI turbo charge to ensure that games are fun enough.
A team consisting of researchers from the Queen Mary University of London and Kings College London developed AI agents, termed “exploratory agents“, in different game environments. The team introduced the concept of an exploratory agent as “a type of agent which traverses a level and explores it in accordance to its features. It surveys an environment to observe which features are available in the level, and moves in the direction towards the closest interesting target(s) or direction(s).” By analyzing how these AI agents move through the levels in games, the team can identify which areas are engaging and which are boring or difficult to navigate.
The method involves using two procedural content generators to create ten diverse game levels—five considered engaging and the other five unengaging. It uses various metrics to measure the coverage, novelty, and how unpredictable the agents’ exploration is. The agent’s behavior was analyzed based on key metrics like how much of the environment they covered, how many unique objects they checked out, a custom measure of novelty, the randomness of the agent’s path, and the average motivation the agent felt while navigating.
The results showed that these AI agents can tell the difference between the engaging and unengaging levels in the game. What’s more, they can figure out and quantify each level’s potential for exploration. These findings could provide game developers with some useful insights for enhancing procedurally generated content.
In the end, this work is a way to use AI to fine-tune game design by suggesting systematic ways to assess and improve game environments, making sure they meet the players’ exploration cravings. This way, game designers will be able to automatically test and improve their levels before human playtesters try them. Meanwhile, other AI-driven innovations in the gaming industry are transforming the way games are made. Experiments like Google’s Doom clone have offered us a glimpse into the future where games are not only tested by AI but might also be created by AI.
