Gamemakers Inject AI to Develop More Lifelike Characters

A truly kick-ass videogame combines clever code, gorgeous graphics, and artful animation—plus thousands of hours of hard work.

Researchers at Electronic Arts—the company behind FIFA, Madden, and other popular games—are testing recent advances in artificial intelligence as a way to speed the development process and make games more lifelike. And in a neat twist, the researchers are harnessing an AI technique that proved itself by playing some of the earliest console videogames.

A team from EA and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver is using a technique called reinforcement learning, which is loosely inspired by the way animals learn in response to positive and negative feedback, to automatically animate humanoid characters. “The results are very, very promising,” says Fabio Zinno, a senior software engineer at Electronic Arts.

Traditionally, characters in videogames and their actions are crafted manually. Sports games, such as FIFA, make use of motion capture, a technique that involves tracking a real person often using markers on their face or body, to render more lifelike actions in human characters. But the possibilities are limited by the actions that have been recorded, and code still needs to be written to animate the character.

By automating the animation process, as well as other elements of game design and development, AI could save game companies millions of dollars while making games more realistic and efficient, so that a complex game can run on a smartphone, for example.