When Are We Done with Games?

From an early point, games have been promoted as important challenges within the research field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recent developments in machine learning have allowed a few AI systems to win against top professionals in even the most challenging video games, including Dota 2 and StarCraft. It thus may seem that AI has now achieved all of the long-standing goals that were set forth by the research community. In this paper, we introduce a black box approach that provides a pragmatic way of evaluating the fairness of AI vs. human competitions, by only considering motoric and perceptual fairness on the competitors’ side. Additionally, we introduce the notion of extrinsic and intrinsic factors of a game competition and apply these to discuss and compare the competitions in relation to human vs. human competitions. We conclude that Dota 2 and StarCraft II are not yet mastered by AI as they so far only have been able to win against top professionals in limited competition structures in restricted variants of the games.