What real world problems do you have in mind? Games are convenient because they can be easily simulated, and you can compare the performance to expert humans.

What real world problems do you have in mind? Games are convenient because they can be easily simulated, and you can compare the performance to expert humans. The reinforcement learning they work on is extremely general and can be applied to many other types of problems. Particularly robot control, which is sort of the same sort of task as a video game.