I don't think its really that much to do with research and implementation and more about the goals of AI in games. Mostly its the illusion of intelligence while

I don't think its really that much to do with research and implementation and more about the goals of AI in games. Mostly its the illusion of intelligence while not actually being intelligent. I was reading about game AI again just yesterday and an exmaple of this is in this aigamedev.com article about things you can learn from Halo's AI, they say that "when you make the AI tougher (e.g. with more health points), the players believe they are smarter": http://aigamedev.com/open/review/halo-ai/ http://aigamedev.com/open/review/halo-ai/ Game AI is a careful balance between: 1. Providing a challenge 2. Not being too difficult to be frustrating 3. The *illusion* of intelligence Non of these really have much to do with "AI" as such and certainly don't need fancy implementations or research. For shooters, being a good shot and having fast reaction time (ie things that make a good player) make for frustratingly terrible AI (and is super easy to implement). What makes a shooter AI feel smart is advanced combat tactics: teamwork, flanking, tricks to flush their enemy out, whatever. A lot of this can be implemented as a mix between behaviour trees and pre-scripted events. But as the Halo guys say, if the enemies don't live long enough for this to be visible, then it doesn't actually matter. Having said that, I personally wish games had more of an A-Life simulation (agapos mentioned Stalker, a game whose AI I quite liked). Combat tactics is nice and all, but I want the games to feel alive when I'm not fighting the inhabitants. This, I believe, is where realistic interesting AI comes in.