Michael Cook

Welcome to the last part of Electric Dreams, a series about the many possibilities for tomorrow's games, and the technology that might make it happen. Over the course of the series we've talked about a lot of different futures for the games industry: an endless graphics race; an exciting world of research; promising experiments in the industry; and a demographic of dreamers. These futures aren't…

Electric Dreams is a five-part series about AI, academic research and video games, and how together they're shaping the industry. Part one on the lost future of AI is here.The more we play games, the more we forget how much time it took us to learn the mysterious toolbox of language and skills that they require. Mostly we think of this toolbox as being full…

Whether or not it's taken over the industry yet, artificial intelligence and other experimental ideas have been on the mind of people in games lately. So far in Electric Dreams we've focused on why it's so hard to get innovative and risky new ideas into games, but some games seem to manage to push the limits further than others. We're going to look at a…

"There's an undiscovered country of possibilities out there that we need to explore and create."It's Monday morning on the first day of Dagstuhl Seminar 15051: "Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games: Integration" and Michael Mateas is talking about impossible games. You might remember Mateas from the first Electric Dreams article - he was one of the scientific researchers behind Facade, a groundbreaking games experiment in…

In 2001 two scientific researchers, John Laird and Michael van Lent, wrote an article for AI Magazine titled ‘Human-Level AI’s Killer Application - Interactive Computer Games’. The magazine, published and distributed by the stern and serious American Association for Artificial Intelligence, went out to universities and laboratories around the world. In their piece, Laird and van Lent described a future for the games industry where…