Last year, I wrote about my Top 5 Trends and Predictions for 2008. Not only was it a fun article to write, but it also very popular! Now seems like a good time to go back over those five predictions and see how accurate they actually were. I’ll also add a few more trends of 2008 that I didn’t predict but turned out to be very important nonetheless…

As a conservative estimate, Game AI research is over 10 years behind its Animation counterpart, in terms of funding, respect from industry, and applications in modern games. Graphics research is probably further ahead by a few more years. You might be tempted to argue about the substance of modern AI research applied to games, but it’s becoming more of a presentation and perception problem than anything else.

Generally speaking, I’m very impressed with case-based reasoning (CBR) and the research that’s being done applying it to games. It’s arguably one of the most promising avenues of academic research I’ve seen in a while.

It’s been a while since I last wrote an editorial, but I personally feel this is one of the most important topics. In short, game AI in industry has really come of age recently in terms of technology, so it might be time to question our assumptions and see what else we can do to improve the field of game AI as a whole, as well as the community behind it.

Artificial intelligence has come a long way, but yet it’s still far off from meeting our expectations. This is most visible in modern video games, which suggests game AI is not an easy problem to solve either — regardless of whether we “cheat” or not!