The Development of Decision Support Systems in the 1960s as Antecedent of “AI-Rationality”

Abstract

The decision making process in a given game is usually organized in binary form and oriented toward a final and finite set of goals. This determinative action shapes the game on both formal and ludological levels. At the same time, however, the computer (or better, the algorithm) is also a decision making machine: the deeply logical calculus of the code and the program do not seem to know any 'perhaps'—the system works (literally) according to the logic of 'or', which represents one of the central elements of digital computing. The decision rationality of computers (at the heart of computer games) is characterized by simplification, reduction, symbolic coding, and also by a dynamic of action and reaction (in the sense of decision and consequence). Such observations about the consequential logic of game-based AI inevitably lead to one grand question: Who is the primary decision maker in games—the player or the machine?