Fifa: how artificial intelligence made the game almost perfect

AI is also "in the game", as the EA Sports label slogan claimed until recently.

Caught up in your fierce matches, more realistic and intense than ever, you never think about it when you play Fifa.

And yet, each time it is a small technological feat that occurs before your eyes, an endlessly renewed performance of the computer, capable of performing hundreds of algorithmic calculations in a handful of milliseconds ... to enable you to miss a face-to-face with the goalkeeper.

Because yes, in the background, a game of the famous Electronic Arts game is more of a thesis in artificial intelligence than the tactics deployed by a team of PHR on a Sunday morning.

Since its very first version "Fifa International Soccer" in 1993, the Fifa franchise has evolved into an increasingly successful simulation game requiring game algorithms to reproduce in the most real and immersive way possible the world of football. football and the sensations of an exciting match.

Without overly scripting the parts.

AI, first an adversary

Video games and artificial intelligence are old roommates who have grown up together since the 90s. From the famous Pac-man, it was necessary to oppose the human player a virtual adversity: the non-player character (NPC), whose behavior is controlled by the computer.

Clearly, the system must make a rational decision and react as well as possible to the action of a human with his controller in hand.

While maintaining, in the case of the Fifa franchise, a consistent game setting on the lawn and in the stands to spare us the bugs, such as the player who gets stuck in the railings or the ball that remains in touch for eternity .

“This artificial intelligence is embedded in the engine of the game of Fifa and each virtual player controlled by the computer has in addition a small dedicated AI to fix his position on the field and adapt it according to the trajectory of the ball or movements of the human player, ”explains Axel Buendia, professor at the CNAM (National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts) and doctor of artificial intelligence specializing in video games.

Passing a ball diagonally is already advanced geometry, but implementing interception or bad dosage scenarios in the game is another story of advanced calculations.

In theory, the computer knows the game so well that it could beat the human effortlessly, but Electronic Arts would have trouble selling hundreds of millions of copies like with the last Fifa 21. This is where a Tactical AI enters the field to (discreetly) adapt the level of difficulty of the game to the player and in particular to improve the virtual assistance for passing and shooting.

Optimized comments

Another contribution of the AI ​​is the constant improvement of match comments which must accompany the player's emotions and generate an adrenaline rush.

How do you trigger the right tirade with the best intonation at the right time?

Easy for a human who has racked up hundreds of televised games, more complicated than it sounds for the logical reasoning of a computer juggling game settings and different scenarios.

It is therefore each time a series of calculations per second that are necessary to comment more spontaneously on a simple counter-attack, for example.

“We need to take into account several data like the position of the player on the pitch, if he is about to lose the ball, how many defenders are behind the ball or if the counterattack is aborted by a loss of ball and obviously the time and the score, ”explains Andrew Vance, the main audio designer of the game at Electronic Arts.

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"It is only one of the thousands of contexts that we have to manage in Fifa and which must work together in a harmonious way in order to obtain a complete and not predetermined game system", assures this producer based in Vancouver (Canada) where the video game is designed, with the reinforcement of teams in Madrid and Romania.

There are still technical limits before AI breaks free from human contributions, such as the announcement of player names which is far from automated.

You may have wondered why the commentators knew about this Brazilian nugget out of nowhere or this solid Romanian defender who passed by your training center?

No, the game is not yet digging into its databases to merge several names between them or to invent new ones with a vocal collage.

"We do not record syllables either to reconstruct names or pieces of sentences with holes", specifies Hervé Mathoux, official commentator of the game since Fifa 07. "We receive scripts with lists of names and we study the best pronunciation possible because it is a consecration for a player to integrate the game and it would be horrible for him to scratch his name, ”underlines the presenter of Canal + which connects up to 30 days of recording of comments per year.

Not yet creative

Another limit in the gaming experience, the AI ​​is not yet able to innovate by itself on technical gestures.

The Fifa game was built on the recording, for almost 30 years, of the movements and actions of real footballers which were then simulated by computer.

Objective: stick as much as possible to the natural reality of football.

“The most recent artificial intelligences use a learning system which is inspired by this huge database so that the game achieves the right bicycle or a variation of shooting,” recalls the expert Axel Buendia.

On the other hand, algorithms do not know how to create movements that come out of nowhere.

"

This is the last frontier for AI applied to the best-selling video game in France.

But Canadian researchers associated with EA are already working on procedural animation to make the actions of virtual players even more realistic without the video game developers needing to code everything in advance.

And so that at the end of the day, the machine can play football as intuitively as a human being.