game ai

A bot built by Robin Baumgarten plays Infinite Mario using A* path-finding, shown as a red planned path that updates as new obstacles appear. It won the Mario AI competitions and uses only on-screen information.

Modern Vintage Gamer looks at OpenLara, an open source Tomb Raider engine, running on the Game Boy Advance. The video explains how the port achieves playable speeds on the GBA's slow ARM CPU, with input from the developer XProger.

Stuart Ashen presents a talk at the 2017 Norwich Gaming Festival on Hareraiser, a notoriously bad video game tied to the Masquerade treasure hunt. He explores why it may be the worst game ever made.

Soren Johnson, a lead designer and AI programmer on Civilization games, discusses game AI design, including whether AI should cheat, behave like a human or be fun rather than strong. He uses the Civilization series as a case study.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms lays out a campaign to stop publishers from permanently shutting down games, using The Crew as the test case. He covers government initiatives and the legal options, and the stopkillinggames.com site.

FOSDEM 2020 talk from Collabora on pressure-vessel, an experimental mechanism that puts Steam games in containers on Linux. It covers using namespaces to give games their own runtime library stack independent of the host.

A demo of a Skyrim mod that uses Inworld AI to let players hold free-form conversations with NPCs. It previews LLM-driven characters in role-playing games.

The video argues that machine-learning-based aimbots, which read the screen and drive the controls externally, could make cheating in FPS games undetectable. It explains how conventional aimbots work, how the new approach differs, and speculates on possible detection.

Tom7 explains and demos software that learns to play NES games by finding score patterns in memory and then searching for inputs that raise it. It is the video companion to his SIGBOVIK paper.

ArtosisTV's commentary on Game 1 of DeepMind's AlphaStar (Protoss) against top Zerg player Serral at Blizzcon 2019. Artosis analyzes the match with beginner-friendly commentary.

Jonathan Blow talks at Gamelab 2018 about the design decisions behind Jai, the programming language he is building for game programmers. He covers low-friction development, quality of life and the effects of compile times.

A video essay arguing that the next major real-time strategy game will fail unless it gets the fundamentals right. It covers the playerbase and demographics, what older RTS games did well, and the roles of the engine, spectacle, development tools and player-generated content.

Jonathan Blow's first talk on designing a new programming language for games, which became Jai. He explains the problems with C++ and why Go, Rust and D do not fit game development.

Intro and gameplay footage of Rescue on Fractalus, the 1985 Lucasfilm Games title for Atari XL/XE, programmed by Loren Carpenter and David Fox. It shows the game's fractal-generated mountain terrain.

An Onion News Network parody of a 'hyper-realistic' modern warfare game whose gameplay consists of paperwork, waiting for orders and repairing trucks.

Tom Scott plays the Royal Game of Ur against British Museum curator Irving Finkel, who deciphered its rules from a cuneiform tablet. Finkel teaches the game and explains its history as the oldest playable board game.

A tool-assisted run of Brain Age by TASBot, shown at Awesome Games Done Quick 2016. The bot gives deliberately deranged answers while exploiting the game's error-prone recognition.

Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games explains at GDC 2016 how an indie developer survived eleven years without a hit by building a long tail of games and redefining success.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths explains single-pile Nim and the trick that wins it, using Dr NIM, a 1960s mechanical plastic computer that plays perfectly. He teaches the strategy so viewers can beat friends.

Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.

A videogamedunkey video essay on video game critics. It argues that a critic's taste and integrity matter as much as their score, and tries to explain why major outlets give such inflated ratings.

A 2017 GDC postmortem in which Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley tell how Civilization came together from board game design and sim game experience. They cover its development history and design decisions, including fairness and luck.

The final codec conversation from Metal Gear Solid 2, in which the AI 'Colonel' explains that the Patriots filter out junk information and curate truth for humanity. It plays as a dark meditation on information overload, manipulation and shared reality.

The first part of a series on programming in Jai, Jonathan Blow's in-development language. It covers compiling, writing hello world and using code from other files.

David Crane's 2011 GDC postmortem of Pitfall, the classic Atari 2600 game. He explains how he created the game under the severe hardware limits of the console.

Jonathan Blow's LambdaConf 2025 keynote demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains its design. It includes demos of metaprogramming and tools that visualize programs.

Two Minute Papers covers OpenAI's multi-agent hide-and-seek experiment, in which agents learned emergent tool use and found ways to break the game's rules. It summarizes the 'Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction' paper.

The climactic lesson scene from the 1983 film WarGames, in which the computer learns that the only winning move in nuclear war is not to play. It includes the character entering zero players and the famous closing line.

Joseph Anderson's long critique of Jonathan Blow's puzzle game The Witness, covering its gameplay, its hundreds of puzzles and its philosophical pretensions. He argues it is a great game that he nonetheless advises against playing.

Ryan Gordon (Icculus) gives a high-level overview of SDL 2.0 at Steam Dev Days 2014. He covers its features and how it eases building, porting and maintaining games, including Linux ports.

Demis Hassabis of DeepMind speaks at Google Zeitgeist, saying human-level AI is decades away but the debate should start now. He covers DeepMind's focus on game-playing agents.

IGN's 2010 trailer for Infinity Blade, an Unreal Engine fighting game for iPhone, iPad and iPod. It shows off gameplay and the visuals of the mobile game.

A two-hour complete longplay of the 1993 MS-DOS puzzle game The Incredible Machine, in which players assemble Rube Goldberg contraptions to complete simple tasks.

agadmator walks through a game in which DeepMind's AlphaZero beat Stockfish, ending in a famous zugzwang that leaves the engine helpless. He gives commentary on the moves.

Robert Miles explains instrumental convergence: why an AGI with almost any goal would tend to pursue sub-goals like self-preservation and resource acquisition. It builds on Omohundro's basic AI drives and his orthogonality thesis video.

Robert Miles gives a remastered introduction to AI safety, adapted from a talk in London. It lays out why advanced AI could go wrong and answers common objections.

Robert Miles examines whether the case for AI safety is a Pascal's mugging, a tiny probability of an enormous payoff. He argues it is not, because AI risk does not depend on vanishingly small probabilities.

DHH's opening keynote at Rails World 2024 in Toronto, where Rails 8 beta shipped. It covers built-in authentication, Propshaft, Solid Cache, Solid Queue, Solid Cable, Kamal 2 and Thruster, pitching the One Person Framework that needs no PaaS.

Simon Knowles, co-founder and CTO of Graphcore, talks about "intelligence processors", chips designed specifically for machine learning. The talk was given at the RAAIS 2017 summit and covers Graphcore's architecture.

OpenAI's 2021 live demo of Codex translating natural language into code, from Hello World to building a game and a Microsoft Word plugin.