Mixing Concepts

The biggest surprise I have found on this subject is this strange entanglement of ideas between "AI designed to kill the player" ("Military" AI), and "AI designed to make the game fun ("Game" AI). This is like comparing a F-22 stealth fighter to a 747 commercial airliner -- sure, both are technically "jets", but they serve completely different functions.

The only AI we should be talking about here is AI designed to make a game more engaging and enjoyable for the player. That may include emulating a tiny bit of behavior that resembles military tactics, but only where games use that as a topical facade -- unless you play The Sims waaaay differently than I do.

Easy Mode

There are several posts here where people assert that "they don't want a game to be hard, that would be bad". As a counterexample, I would invite these individuals to view the awards, testimonials, and revenue from the ["Souls"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souls_(series)) series (Demon's Souls / Dark Souls). I have spoken to psychology experts at game development conferences, as well as professors that explicitly study psychology in games -- and they are still struggling to define and quantify the exact elements that came together to make this series such a hit. But there is no denying that it is an absolute favorite, with a huge following, and tremendous profits to prove the efficacy of the model.

Obviously, I'm not advocating that "every game should have a Souls-style difficulty curve". That series caters to a specific audience -- and there are an ocean of subtle differences between fans of the series. The point is: broad statements like that go directly against a mountain of evidence. We need to think about this issue with its full (tremendous!) complexity, and how to leverage some immense computing power to address it. Speaking of which...

Based on your Purchase History...

Right now, companies like Amazon and Google are mashing up the entire history of everything you've purchased, every web page you've ever visited, along with demographic and social media data about you. They can then deliver a product recommendation / advertisement / etc. within milliseconds that targets your specific needs, even for things you didn't realize you wanted / needed yet.

If that can be done in milliseconds, then the same principles can be applied to tweaking the difficulty for players in real time. You don't even need to maintain a hot internet connection to constantly feed some huge cloud implementation at all times -- some local processing combined with daily or weekly micro-updates can do the trick. For a perfect example of local / cloud balance, check out SnapChat -- that thing uses the local computing power on your phone to identify your face, and then attach various 3D objects and effects to it in real time. That's done at 20-30 FPS on a smartphone without any special dots or markers to help "anchor" the models. That's amazing. And it's all possible because the [Convolutional Neural Network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolutional_neural_network) models that make that possible get trained on the cloud and downloaded every now and then.

So, yes -- you can code a game to dynamically customize itself for every single player. This is the [exact point of my video series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTDSGU2vAow) about this subject. Thus far I've made over a half-dozen Skyrim mods that demonstrate some of these concepts, and our team is expanding into other games that are finally opening up their engines to 3rd parties. If folks would like to talk about the nitty-gritty of all that, I'm happy to chat.