what is a good ai game?, i am going to build up to an account for what makes a good ai game :
a good ai game is a good game that makes use of ai
so, let’s break it down :
what is an ai game?
when i ask, what makes a good ai game, i first have to clarify what i mean by ai game
i am not talking about the type of game that has been generated with ai
those i would just call ai generated games, like ai generated images
what i am talking about are ai games :
an ai game is a game that makes use of ai in its core game loop
some people call them “ai native games”
i just call them ai games for the same reason i call cars primarily powered by electricity electric cars and not electric native cars
some people use the term “ai native” in an effort to distinglish ai things that have been build with ai in mind from things that ai was just thrown on top of later
i would propose to just call them ai things and things with ai (features)
so when i say an ai game is a game that makes use of ai in its core game loop
i have to further clarify what i mean when i say use of ai
a use of ai is a use case for ai
what is a use case for ai?
i explicitly do not ask for a good use case, because if it’s not a good use case it’s not a valid use case in the first place, if it would not be a good, it would be useless. in order for it to be useful it has to be good, you can not have one without the other
and the answer to that quesiton is :
a use case for ai is a problem with parameters that deals with a certain complexity that can be solved in more then one valid way
okay, so what does that mean?
let’s consider the example of the problem to get a gender based names for fictional persons
the shape of the problem is
function get_name(gender: "female" | "male"): stringwe see, we have an input parameter, thus we fulfill the condition that asks for parameters
where a valid name might be alice or bob or even elvira
we see, there are multiple valid answers, thus the condition that requires the problem to be solvable by more than one valid answer is met
is this a problem of a certain complexity though?
to answer this question we have to ask ourselves if this problem could be solved without ai as in a pre-ai world?
and yes indeed, one could just take a list of unique names of decent length and randomly pick one of them
no ai needed at all, a randomization algorithm is all it takes to get the job done
we see, this problem is not complex enough to utilize ai
(note that having this list of names in the first place is not the problem we are trying to solve here, the problem of generating a list of names might be a perfectly valid use of ai, but in context of this example we are just trying to get a name)
let’s consider another example, this time the problem is to get a joke about a dynamic topic
function get_joke(topic: string): stringsome valid examples might be :
we see, we have a parameter and we have multiple valid answers
what about complexity? well, can we solve this problem in a pre-ai era?
not really, it would require someone to write a joke for every possible input topic, one might be able to aggregates jokes for common words, but what if the topic is not a single word but instead something like “decaf coffee consume of retired plumbers”
we see, we have reached a point of certain complexity that makes this problem a valid use of ai
while obvious on paper in practice it not trivial to get right
i think this is because the majority of developers has spend most of their time tackling problems with algorithmic solutions (this includes me)
before ai got mainstream this was the de facto only way to do things
given this background, naturally the only path to solve a problem we see is the algorithmic one
because we have trained our intuition on a different set of problems and solutions we might not be able to always rely on our intuition here : we have to clearly categorize and realize the types of problems that should be solved with ai and the ones that shouldn’t to ultimatively build up a sense for it -> update our intuition
in contrast to usefulness, when we talk about games it actually makes sense to ask if they are good. here we do have a spectrum of how good the game is
the goodness of a game can be described with these attributes