Games have been a core driving force for the revolution of AI which, in turn, has reframed our culture, and reshaped our society at large. While games have been assisting AI since its birth, it is only very recently that we experience a strong inverse relationship: AI nowadays designs exciting games for us to play and experience, and for AI to advance further. While games are arguably one of the last frontiers for AI, AI is also the next great leap forward for games. The talk will take us through a number of AI and Games projects currently running at the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta, and modl.ai.

1. @yannakakis
The AI and Games
Co-Revolution
© ennigmatic

3. Games
advancing
AI
advancing

4. Making computers able to do things which
currently only humans can do

5. Making computers able to do things which
currently only humans can do in games

6. What do humans do in games?

7. Play

8. Is the AI playing to win?
Is the AI taking the role of a human player?

12. Trivedi, Liapis and Yannakakis, Contrastive Learning of Generalized Game Representations,
IEEE Conference on Games, 2021

13. Trivedi, Liapis and
Yannakakis,
Contrastive Learning
of Generalized Game
Representations,
IEEE Conference on
Games, 2021

14. Design

16. Georgios N. Yannakakis, Antonios Liapis and Constantine Alexopoulos: "Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity," in
Proc. of the ACM Conference on Foundations of Digital Games, 2014.

17. Gravina, Liapis and Yannakakis: "Constrained Surprise Search for Content Generation," in
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG). 2016.

18. Karavolos, Liapis, and Yannakakis: “A Multi-Faceted Surrogate Model for Search-based Procedural
Content Generation," IEEE Transactions on Games, 2019

19. Experience

20. G. N. Yannakakis, P. Spronck, D. Loiacono and E. Andre, “Player Modeling,” in Togelius et al., (Eds.)
Dagstuhl Seminar on Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games, 2013.
AI/ML/Stats
Neutral

21. Arousal
X Y
Happier
Valence
Arousal
Yannakakis, Cowie, Busso, The Ordinal Nature of Emotions: An Emerging Approach, IEEE Transactions
on Affective Computing, 2018

22. The video says it all
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XfbFzdcfFiCKp3KG
FHSB854mpn40mPgO/view
Melhart, D., Azadvar, A., Canossa, A., Liapis, A., & Yannakakis, G. N. (2019). Your Gameplay Says it All: Modelling
Motivation in Tom Clancy's The Division. Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Games, 2019

23. Makantasis, Liapis and Yannakakis The Pixels and Sounds of Emotion: General-Purpose
Representations of Arousal in Games, IEEE Trans. On Affective Computing, 2021

24. Gravina, Melhart, Yannakakis Moment-to-moment Engagement
Prediction through the Eyes of the Observer: PUBG Streaming on
Twitch, In Proc. of FDG, 2020

25. AGAIN Dataset
Affect Game AnnotatIoN
arXiv:2104.02643
Currently
• 124 participants
• 1,100+ gameplays
• 37+ hours of annotated
videos
tamed-project.eu

26. General Models
Player Arousal Modelling
arXiv:2104.02643
100%
80%
50%
65%
TinyCars ApexSpeed
Solid
TopDown
Heist!
Endless
Shootout
Run’N’Gun
Pirates!
Game-Based Models (trained on 1 game)
Genre-Based Models (trained on 2 games)
General Models (trained on 8 games)
Melhart, Liapis and Yannakakis
Towards General Models of Player
Experience: A Study Within Genres,
IEEE Conference on Games, 2021

27. Beyond Games?

28. Liapis, Martínez, Togelius, and
Yannakakis: "Transforming Exploratory
Creativity with DeLeNoX," in
Proceedings of the Fourth International
Conference on Computational Creativity,
2013.

29. Liu, Snodgrass, Khalifa, Risi, Yannakakis, Togelius, “Deep learning for procedural content generation” Neural Computing
and Applications, 2020

30. Xylakis, Liapis and Yannakakis, Architectural Form and Affect: A Spatiotemporal Study of Arousal
(under review) 2021

31. Gravina, Khalifa, Liapis, Togelius, Yannakakis, “Procedural content generation through quality diversity”, IEEE
Conference on Games, 2019

32. Galanos, Liapis, Yannakakis, ARCH-
Elites: Quality-Diversity for Urban
Design, GECCO, 2021

33. A calm abstract painting
A happy genre painting
A happy sketch n study
An angry landscape
An angry portrait A depressed cityscape
A depressed abstract painting A calm still life
Semantic-driven affect-based painting generation

34. The Game-AI
Co-Revolution

35. Obstacle tower game
Deepmind’s stuff
THE CO-REVOLUTION SLIDE
S Risi, J Togelius. Increasing generality in machine
learning through procedural content generation,
Nature Machine Intelligence, 2020
Camilleri et al, Platformer Level Design for
Player Believability, IEEE CIG, 2016
Wang et al. Paired open-ended trailblazer (POET): Endlessly
generating increasingly complex and diverse learning environments
and their solutions, 2019.

36. Shu, Liu and Yannakakis, Experience-Driven PCG via Reinforcement
Learning: A Super Mario Bros Study, IEEE Conference on Games, 2021

37. Games... …the final frontier for
AI

38. AI... …the final frontier for
Games

39. Thank you!
gameaibook.org and school.gameaibook.org