Intelligent Agents for Computer Games

In modern computer games — like action, adventure, role-playing, strategy, simulation and sports games — artificial intelligence (AI) techniques play an important role. However, the requirements of such games are very different from those of the games normally studied in AI. This article discusses which approaches and fields of research are relevant to achieve a sophisticated goal-directed behavior for modern computer games’ nonplayer characters. It also presents a classification of approaches for autonomous agents and gives an overview of a solution developed in the EXCALIBUR project.