It's true that game AI is surprisingly under-developped compared to what you see in academia on other topics... but it is not always that basic. What you descr

It's true that game AI is surprisingly under-developped compared to what you see in academia on other topics... but it is not always that basic. What you describe in your football example is often called "Behavior Tree", and there are ways to learn those using machine learning (usually by reinforcement learning, using neural networks and/or genetic programming). There was a popular video showing this applied on Mario [1] ... and a paper published 7 years before that video doing the same thing [2] (more context about this in [3]). I remember seeing something on Gamasutra saying that similar methods are used in some AAA games. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44 [2] http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2009Super.pdf http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2009Super.pdf [3] http://togelius.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/the-differences-between-tinkering-and.html http://togelius.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/the-differences-betwe...