Revolutionizing the Gaming Industry with Artificial Intelligence

By Ranga Jagannath, Senior Director, Agora

With the ever-growing gaming industry that stands at $200 billion today, looking for new engaging concepts for the players is a continuous process for the developers. Monitoring the marketplace and analyzing player behavior also stay on top of the list in this dynamic industry. Technological solutions have a considerable role as this job, when done manually, is heavily time-consuming. The technical solutions help recognize patterns and adapt to their environments, which lets the developers focus more on the creative aspects. The advent of AI has shown developers ways to create better in-game experiences and be more efficient in developing games. Users are continuously looking for ways that give them more immersive and realistic ways to feel connected and build a close-knit community within a game.

How AI is valuable to the gaming industry?
AI is widely used to deepen engagement, weave interactive stories and generate new content. The data collection helps the game developers understand what keeps users engaged or drives them away. In turn, this helps fine-tune and better monetization opportunities for the gameplay. Besides facilitating better pathfinding, AI improves gameplay, design realism, and avatar interactivity.

Role of Adaptive AI
Understanding a player’s style, strengths, or weaknesses are some of the many features provided by adaptive AI, which helps them provide personalized interactions. All players have different targets of playing aggressively and advancing as quickly as possible. Some want to play aggressively and be engrossed in the game, while others want to explore the game intently. AI helps explore adaptive playing styles. For example, AI can help ensure that no one player doesn’t end up with extraordinary powers like speed or strength than others.

Another feature that adaptive AI provides is providing insights to the developers for developing a new game. These insights help identify recent trends like play techniques and adaptations and analyze the competition. AI helps inform the methodology and approach of game development itself. Reinforcement learning and pattern recognition can guide and evolve character behavior by quickly analyzing their actions to keep players engaged. It further helps in developing in-game dialogues that ensure more player engagement.

The possibility of AI is limitless. It can make gaming safer by protecting their privacy and combating toxicity among players. The use of AI in online casinos is a case in point. Payments are processed with the help of SSI encryption, a form of AI, making it inaccessible to third parties. Additionally, AI helps detect cheating, which is crucial as real money is involved in casino games. It is an added assurance for the players.

Another growing concern in gaming is harassment, which has created a toxic culture. In a study by Anti-Defamation League, 83% of players between the ages of 18 and 45 experience harassment in multiplayer games, with 71% experiencing severe harassment like physical threats and stalking. So, it is safe to say that AI brings a strong sense of security and relief for the players and safeguards them against harassment.

Monitoring of unacceptable behavior, such as bullying and abusive language, is emphasized on every social media platform. AI and Machine learning models can do the same. The tools can report or ban the offenders and help identify the severity of their actions. Not relying entirely on human moderators, AI uses semantic understanding to provide a context to the language and tone used.

AI takes the burden off game developers by ensuring they do not have to be everywhere to monitor competition, in-game behavior, and how players interact. AI has the potential and has undoubtedly added value to gaming development strategies.