Entertainment Computing: Past, Present, and Future

Digital entertainment is strongly associated with digital marketing and a combination of industries and media, which all need to develop and exploit creativity and innovation in entertainment computing. The research field of entertainment computing addresses all aspects of creating, designing, building, and analyzing the usage of interactive devices like smartphones and tablets, not only for playing and entertainment. These aspects include human-machine interfaces, software applications, robots, artificial intelligence, interactive television, interdisciplinary studies on serious games, digital art, edutainment, entertainment ethics and sociology, and others. In this chapter, we focus on the history of the entertainment computing field, particularly in two crucial subfields, namely artificial intelligence and games and computers in art production. In the first case, entertaining applications, including artificial intelligence solutions, are developed to compete with humans and among themselves. In the second case, advanced interaction techniques are studied and developed