MotorStorm is also an interesting example for this – it shares Burnout’s love of cinematic vehicle carnage, often using its AI to contrive collisions directly in the player’s view. However, it also attempts to personify your opponents in ways that allow you to appreciate precisely what the AI is attempting and why. Offensive gesticulations are one of the more brazen examples of how the AI states its aggression towards another racer. Drive up behind a motorcycle in a heavy vehicle, however, and it will look over its shoulder, its appearance of nervousness signaling that it is now more likely to make a mistake and crash.

“One of the most important things required to write a good AI for any game is to make sure that there is some way for users to know what the AI is trying to do,” says Nathan Sturtevant, creator of ’90s tank game Dome Wars and now a PhD lecturer in AI at the University of Alberta.

moscallout“When I can predict what the enemy is going to do, I can both appreciate its intelligence and begin to defeat it”/moscallout“If the user has no ability to perceive what the AI is planning or attempting, users will be frustrated. If the AI is too strong, it will probably be perceived as cheating, and if it is too weak, it will be perceived as stupid. In FEAR, if the AI couldn’t get in through a door, it would try a window. This makes the enemy more predictable, and when I can predict what the enemy is going to do, I can both appreciate its intelligence and begin to defeat it. I may have the most intelligent AI system in the world, but if there is no way for a player to perceive what the AI is trying to do, it will end up looking stupid.”

A large part of this is consistency – in fact when we complain about stupid AI, and toss the controller across the floor in disgust, we are more often than not referring to anomalies in its behavior rather than an actual lack of intelligence. When an eagle-eyed enemy improbably spots you while you believe yourself to be adequately hidden, or when opponents manage to track you down with the insistence of a psychic beagle – these are the things that jar with the player’s understanding of the world and drag him or her out of it.

“I think pathfinding is an area that used to cause designers a lot of problems,” says Sturtevant. “If your henchman got stuck in Neverwinter Nights or even just fell too far behind, he would just teleport to catch up. I worked on the pathfinding system for Dragon Age, and I hope and expect that there won’t be such a problem there. Last year I got to hear Quinn Dunki [senior AI programmer at Pandemic Studios] talk about the pathfinding design in Saboteur, and they have a variety of animations they will play when an AI gets stuck, culminating with one of angry frustration. If your AI does get stuck, the human player will probably be much more forgiving if they can see that the AI knows it’s stuck.”

With inconsistent or inscrutable behavior currently anathema, it seems like current design paradigms naturally limit the kind of dynamism you can squeeze from an AI. As Polge says, “AI NPCs are still not as innovative as human players. Improving in this area, with the goal of really surprising players without frustrating them, is challenging, and less straightforward than the improvements we’ve made so far.”

In fact, rather than seeing future AI research feed into the genres of today, Young foresees that it will add an entirely new branch to the games that get made: “Games generally are better if the game designer can shape and direct the experience. Many of these research directions are therefore tangential to requirements of games for now. My view is that new types of AI will ultimately lead to new types of game rather than games using more and more of the research piecemeal.”

Polge throws out one suggestion of how emerging AI research might shape game design: “A game with a solid implementation of a robust speech recognition and synthesis system as an interface, and a compelling personality and motivation model for NPCs could have gameplay focused on determining the motivations of allies and opponents.”

Even then, credible stupidity will be key to emulating human interaction. The Turing Test, which demands that an AI must be indistinguishable from a human in conversation, isn’t simply a matter of increasing an AI’s knowledge. It will only be passed when an AI can intuit questions a human would answer, such as ‘What color is grass?’ and which they would not, such as ‘What is the square root of Pi?’ It seems like an AI’s stupidity might prove to be the cleverest thing about it.