Gaming AI without AI

Abstract

War games have played an essential role in the development of military force structures, strategies, operational concepts, and more. Military organizations are currently confronting uncertainties over the ways in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) may affect warfare at nearly every level, from combat tactics to operational concepts to force structure to deterrence and national and international security. This paper explores how game designers and players can approach questions regarding how AI may be employed in alternative contexts allowing for insight into how emerging and imagined technologies may affect warfare at many different levels of analysis. It identifies six application areas of AI technologies that games should consider—(1) principal–agent relations, (2) organizational and operational complexity, (3) attention management, (4) exploratory analysis, (5) information exploitation and model validation, and (6) adaptive behavior in open-ended systems—and suggests conceptual and practical strategies for investigating them in games that can be played in the absence of real-world systems and algorithms that perform these functions.