Game Design for Classical AI

Reasoning using expressive symbolic representations is a central theme of AI research, yet there are surprisingly few deployed games, even within the AIIDE research community, that use this sort of “classical” AI. This is partly due to practical and methodological issues, but also due to fundamental mismatches between current game genres and classical AI systems. I will argue that if we want to build games that leverage high-end classical AI techniques like commonsense reasoning and natural language processing, we will also have to develop new game genres and mechanics that better exploit those capabilities. I will also present a design sketch of a game that explores potential game mechanics for classical AI.