Artificial Intelligence and Game Development

It would be an understatement to say that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a popular topic at the moment and it is unlikely to become any less important in the future. More researchers than ever work on AI in some form and more non-researchers than ever are interested in the field. It would also be an understatement to say that games are a popular application area for AI research. While board games have been central to AI research since the inception of the field video games have during the last decade increasingly become the domain of choice for testing and showcasing new algorithms. At the same time video games themselves have become more diverse and sophisticated and some of them incorporate advances in AI for controlling non-player characters generating content or adapting to players. Game developers have increasingly realized the power of AI methods to analyze large volumes of player data and optimize game designs. And a small but growing community of researchers and designers experiment with ways of using AI to design and create complete games automatically or in dialog with humans. It is indeed an exciting time to be working on AI and games. As far as we know it is the first compre- hensive textbook covering the field. With comprehensive we mean that it features all the major application areas of AI methods within games: game-playing con- tent generation and player modeling.