The State of Play for AI in Video Games | AI and Games Newsletter

This weeks newsletter brings my LDC talk to your inbox!

Hello all, welcome to this weeks edition of the AI and Games newsletter. This week, I’m revisiting my presentation made to the London Developer’s Conference. In which I given you an insight into the state of artificial intelligence for video games in around 20 minutes.

But before we get into that, let’s cover some announcements!

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Weekly Announcements

Here’s everything else happening around AI and Games this week that you need to catch up on!

• A big thank you to Melissa Phillips of Games Leadership for joining me on this weeks episode of the Branching Factor podcast. We dive deep into the challenges faced in leading teams in game development, and the value that Mel and their team is bringing to support the industry.

Musings on Games Leadership with Melissa Phillips | Branching Factor #018

• Last week Hugging Face launched a new update for their ‘Machine Learning for Games’ course, and it includes a bonus unit on ‘Classical AI for Games’, which includes written introductions by yours truly for many of the episodes of my AI 101 video series. Special thanks to Thomas Simonini for reaching out and enabling this collaboration.

• I’ll be out and about once again in London for the Harbottle & Lewis and Barclays - State of Play: The UK Games Industry event at Eagle Labs and will be participating on a panel on generative AI for video games. Find out more and register for the event here.

No without further ado, let’s get into this weeks main event…

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The State of Play [2024 Edition]

Regular readers will know I was an invited speaker to the London Developer’s Conference held last week. A big thanks once again to

George Osborn

and the rest of the organisational team for having me come down to present. Plus a very special thanks to my panellists as well: Yuqian Sun, Simon Barrett, Florence Smith Nicholls and Matthew Jack.

While I can’t bring the full experience of the London Developer Conference to you, the one thing I can provide is my presentation. It’s a 15-minute overview of the current state of the field, and if you’re new to AI for video games as a whole, this is a useful primer to understanding a few key aspects, notably:

• The intrinsic relationship between AI and video games since the inception of both fields.

• The gradual introduction of various forms of AI into sector

• The ‘silent revolution’ of deep learning in games during the 2010s

• The stalemate that exists across the sector with regards to use of generative AI

• The factors you, as a game developer need to be aware of with generative AI

If you watched this and want to learn more about the main ‘AI for Games’ infographic, be sure to check out this episode of AI 101 from earlier in 2024:

I hope this all proves interesting, and feel free to leave a comment or get in touch if you have any follow-up questions. I’ll be back next week with a deep dive into how Stability AI’s recent financial woes are a reflection of the games industry’s concerns with generative AI.