Square enix AI academy: a seminar series for the introduction of digital game AI

In the game industry, the technologies of Game AI development have advanced in the last 15 years independently from academic AI research. Much knowledge had been enclosed within the game industry until 2000, but in game development conferences and books, some techniques have been made public to developers over the world. But even this was still limited to within the game industry. SQUARE ENIX AI Academy is a 5 session seminar series with lectures and workshops held by the SQUARE ENIX Advanced Technology Division in the summer and autumn of 2014. The purpose is to provide this industry knowledge to students, game developers, and teachers who want to learn game AI technologies used in the game industry. The seminar series registration is limited to 60 students.

Many techniques and knowledge developed in the game industry have been independent of each other as collections of simple techniques, but recently they have been integrated to be a whole unified theory as digital Game AI theory. In the SQUARE ENIX Academy, the Game AI theory is introduced to attendees in lectures and workshops; they can study the knowledge during the lecture and learn how to apply the knowledge in the workshop. In this paper, a sketch of the theoretical framework for digital game AI and the workshop design are introduced. The goal of the paper is share knowledge about how to teach game AI such that anyone can understand how to use it.