Georgios N. Yannakakis – författare

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Games and Learning Alliance, GALA 2019, held in Athens, Greece, in November 2019.

The 38 regular papers presented together with 19 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 76 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: serious game design and pedagogical foundations; AI and technology for SG; gamification; applications and case studies; and posters.

The chapter "Cyber Chronix, Participatory Research Approach to Develop and Evaluate a Storytelling Game on Personal Data Protection Rights and Privacy Risks" is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

This book covers artificial intelligence methods applied to games, both in research and game development. It is aimed at graduate students, researchers, game developers, and readers with a technical background interested in the intersection of AI and games. The book covers a range of AI methods, from traditional search, planning, and optimization, to modern machine learning methods, including diffusion models and large language models. It discusses applications to playing games, generating content, and modeling players, including use cases such as level generation, game testing, intelligent non-player characters, player retention, player experience analysis, and game adaptation. It also covers the use of games, including video games, to test and benchmark AI algorithms. The book is informed by decades of research and practice in the field and combines insights into game design with deep technical knowledge from the authors, who have pioneered many of the methods and approaches used in the field.

This second edition of the 2018 textbook captures significant developments in AI and gaming over the past 7 years, incorporating advancements in computer vision, reinforcement learning, deep learning, and the emergence of transformer-based large language models and generative AI. The book has been reorganized to provide an updated overview of AI in games, with separate sections dedicated to AI’s core uses in playing and generating games, and modeling their players, along with a new chapter on ethical considerations. Aimed at readers with foundational AI knowledge, the book primarily targets three audiences: graduate or advanced undergraduate students pursuing careers in game AI, AI researchers and educators seeking teaching resources, and game programmers interested in creative AI applications. The text is complemented by a website featuring exercises, lecture slides, and additional educational materials suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses.

This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of game research, affective computing, human computer interaction, and artificial intelligence.

This is the first textbook dedicated to explaining how artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be used in and for games. After introductory chapters that explain the background and key techniques in AI and games, the authors explain how to use AI to play games, to generate content for games and to model players. 

The book will be suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in games, artificial intelligence, design, human-computer interaction, and computational intelligence, and also for self-study by industrial game developers and practitioners. The authors have developed a website (http://www.gameaibook.org) that complements the material covered in the book with up-to-date exercises, lecture slides and reading.