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* Set Pattern — the computer actually makes no decisions; all enemies will make the same moves every time regardless of what the player does. Most of the enemies in ''[[Super Mario Bros. (video game)|Super Mario Bros]].'' fit this category.
* [[AI Roulette]] — again, the computer is not making decisions ''per se''; it is simply choosing a move at random. This type is often seen in turn-based [[Role -Playing Game|Roleplaying Games]].
* Analytical, or Responsive — the computer chooses a move based on the situation; the ghosts in ''[[Pac-Man]]'' fall into this category, which in 1980 was considered impressive.
It is in this third group that [['''Artificial Stupidity]]''' can be found. AS is when the AI can select a move for its character(s), and consistently chooses ones that are completely stupid. While it is very rarely included on purpose as a balancing factor, such as to balance out the fact that [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard]], Artificial Stupidity is often a result of [[Idiot Programming|poor programming]]; the programmers simply didn't program the AI not to make that move, and when the AI evaluates its choices, the poor move looks like the best one. (It's far more likely that [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard]] will be introduced to compensate for [['''Artificial Stupidity]]''' rather than the other way round.)
[['''Artificial Stupidity]]''' is particularly visible in [[Role Playing Games]], be they turn-based games like the majority of the ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' and ''[[Dragon Quest]]'' series, or strategy-based games like ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics]]'' and ''[[Disgaea]]'', simply because it is in these types of games that the decision-making process is the most important, and therefore, the most visible. It can potentially exist in any game involving an analytical or responsive AI, though, and the more analytical the game, the easier it is to get an AI that's, well, stupid. For instance, even good chess games can suffer from a version of this, called the "horizon effect".
Differs from [[AI Roulette]] because AI Roulette chooses moves randomly. [['''Artificial Stupidity]]''' puts some "thought" in its moves, making the most obvious stupidities less likely but creating more consistent general incompetence. See also [[AI Breaker]] for exploiting these.
[[Suicidal Overconfidence]] is a specific case of this that's usually less about bad programming or making the game easier than about allowing the player to have something to do.
The [[Escort Mission]] is often a variety of this.
The opposite of [['''Artificial Stupidity]]''' is [[Artificial Brilliance]], where the AI makes surprisingly good decisions that convincingly appear intelligent. See [[The Guards Must Be Crazy]] for this trope as relates to stealth games.
Note that, for the sake of argument, this trope typically only covers situations that a player can be reasonably expected to enter over the course of normal gameplay. It's hardly fair to blame the programmers, after all, if you use a cheat device to get special weapons ahead of time and the AI has no idea what's going on.
This trope is [[I Thought It Meant|not to be confused with]] with [[Obfuscating Stupidity|''Obfuscating Stupidity'' Stupidity]], though some games that [[Computers Are Fast|computers can inherently play well]] will use Artificial [[Obfuscating Stupidity]] to balance the difficulty.
{{examples}}
== Sub-Pages ==
* [[Artificial Stupidity/Adventure Game|Adventure Games]]
* [[Artificial Stupidity/Fighting|Fighting Games]]
** [[Artificial Stupidity/Beat'Em Up|Beat'Em Up]]
* [[Artificial Stupidity/Puzzle Game|Puzzle Games]]
* [[Artificial Stupidity/Racing Game|Racing Games]]
* [[Artificial Stupidity/Roleplay|Roleplaying Games]]
** [[Artificial Stupidity/Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games]]
* [[Artificial Stupidity/Strategy Game|Strategy Games]]
* [[Artificial Stupidity/Simulation Game|Simulation Games]]
== [[First-Person Shooter]] ==
* AI in ''Shadow Ops: Red Mercury'' weren't the brightest bulbs in the shed. Enemy AI would run right out into the open, even past the player's AI teammates, just to shoot at the player. Teammates fared no better as they would ignore said enemies completely.
* Your squad in ''[[Brothers in Arms]]'' tends to stand in the open a few feet from cover, apparently prefering to let jerry ventilate them.
* In ''[[Deus Ex]]'', and a number of similar games, the AI is usually pretty good...but will ignore the dead or unconscious body of an ally unless he was killed within sight of it.
** One of the designers of ''[[Deus Ex]]'' said the AI had to be reined in a bit because players were rounding corners and getting shot in the head by entrenched guards, which obviously put a damper on the fun.
** Another fun fact: enemies on patrol always turn left. Which, in essence, means you're up against the cloned army of a [[Mirror Universe]]'s [[Zoolander|Derek Zoolander]]
** People in this game do not take well to friendly fire. Normally, this is bad for you, because if you shoot a friend a few times they will turn on you and kill you. However, if you dodge between enemies, they will sometimes get overzealous and shoot each other! This can be hilariously exploited to [http://www.it-he.org/deus3.htm drive everyone in UNATCO insane] (2/3rds of the way down the page), or it can be used to get [http://dungeon-games.com/blog/?p=68 Nicolette to single-handedly kill a pair of MJ12 commandos.]
* The most viable way to avoid the enemies in ''[[System Shock 2]]'' wasn't sneaking but ... jumping on the nearest table or otherwise elevated position because the AI only checked the floor for targets. While this can be [[Hand Wave|handwaved]] with performance reasons considering all the objects on the tables this can be quite immersion breaking in a [[Survival Horror]] game with [[Breakable Weapons]] and scarce ammo.
* In ''[[Doom]] 3'', any monsters without a projectile attack (i.e. zombies, Pinkies, or Wraiths) had absolutely no idea what to do if the player jumped on a table out of their reach. So they'd just run in circles around the table while moaning their hearts out.
* The enemy soldiers in ''[[Crysis (series)|Crysis]]'' are completely unable to deal with your cloaking device, making the damn thing a [[Game Breaker]]. You can uncloak, shoot an enemy in the head, and recloak, and all the enemy's buddies will just stare blankly at the spot you were standing just a few seconds ago. The expansion pack ''Crysis Warhead'' fixes this by making the A.I. fire blindly and/or throw grenades at your last known position, although you can still [[Leet Speak|pwn]] everything in the game by simply moving a few feet to the left after recloaking.
** The artificial stupidity in ''[[Crysis (series)|Crysis]]'' does not end there. In some situations enemies will outright ignore you even if you stand right in front of them (like they were unable to change their plans in the mid of getting somewhere). Truck and boat pilots will outright ignore you even if you hop on their head. Enemies will sometimes kill themselves eg. by running to the middle of a minefield or drowning themselves. If two enemies are talking to each other, you can sometimes sneakily kill one from the distance, and the other will be blissfully ignorant about anything and keep going on like nothing had happened.
* In the original ''[[Half Life]]'', if you have a security guard following you during the segment with the trains, they will have absolutely no second thoughts about stepping onto an electrified rail line and instantly killing themselves if it is the only route to get to you on the opposite side of the tracks. And sometimes even if it's not.
** Revolutionary at the time was the ability of enemy soldiers to make informed use of cover and grenades, running around corners to escape explosions and throwing grenades into the player's cover. One other thing they could do was set grenades as traps while retreating; however, more often than not they would be distracted by the approaching player's gunfire ''while setting the trap'' and return in kind - immediately forgetting that they were standing above a live grenade...
* While most AI in ''[[Half Life|Half-Life 2]]'' is pretty damn good (on both sides), many of your allies don't seem to understand the concepts of "I'm blocking Freeman's way" or "maybe I shouldn't stand in the narrow hallway".
** And then there's [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0WqAmuSXEQ this.] "If I can't see you..."
*** There's a similar glitch in the Sentry AI in ''[[Team Fortress 2]]''. If there is an overhead obstruction and you can see the sentry's tripod, it won't see you unless you crouch to see the rest of it.
** Your squadmates don't seem to understand that stealth and evasion are sometimes important. They will run headlong into sniper fire every time without a moment's hesitation, and upon encountering a strider, the black guy you join up with toward the end of "Follow Freeman" started shooting at it with his ''submachine gun'', drawing its attention to both him and the equally ill-armed player.
** Oh, and in ''Episode One'' you have to escort several waves of them safely past increasingly thick Combine fire. If they were just smart enough to run full tilt along the predetermined path, they'd probably all make it, but it wouldn't be a proper [[Escort Mission]] without suicidal NPCs, would it...
** It is possible, through unusual circumstances, for an entire group of resistance fighters to kill themselves if you leave them in a bathroom alone, since they can ''trip over the bathtub and break their necks''.
* The AI survivors in ''[[Left 4 Dead]]'' can be like this. They usually wait a few seconds before actually deciding to catch up with the player and if you get attacked by any special infected other than a Tank, they may prioritize shooting regular zombies instead of trying to free you.
** Made worse in Survival and VS mode, where the modes have a melee attack cooldown effect and the computer keeps trying to melee zombies off them when they have to recharge. Most likely a programming oversight by Valve and has yet to be fixed.
** AI survivors also will sometimes fail to realize when you're lying on the ground right next to them, incapacitated, and just stand around and let you die if you are on ground that is slightly higher or lower than they are.
** Sometimes the special infected may not be stuck, but will try to attack you from a position where you will never get hit and will keep doing it if you don't move.
** On a more optimistic note: you ''can'' make the AI survivors act slightly less stupid if you use the macros to order them to advance. This doesn't fix anything else, but at least they aren't a room behind you all the time.
** ''[[Left 4 Dead]] 2'' seems to be much worse with survivor AI now compared to the first game. The AI will now usually leave you to die if you are strangled by a Smoker 2 feet away from them if there are common infected near them and even if you are perfectly several feet away from the AI in a straight line and are being pounded by a Charger, don't expect the AI to start shooting until they are at least in half the the range from them to you.
*** Also the same problem with Jockeys, but made worse since Jockeys can move you and Survivor AI seems to be incapable of doing more than one action at a time when they move. If you get ridden by a Jockey, Survivor bots will opt to shove the Jockey off when they are not close enough to do so instead of, you know, shooting it.
** Survivor AI also get easily confused when multiple players are incapacitated. The bots either go back and forth trying to decide who to revive or may ditch you to try and save someone else that is close to death, even if they are too far away to be saved in time.
** Survivor AI are bad in dealing with special infected in VS mode. It is possible for the AI to keep shoving you and then run off, never bothering to shoot you, or are too slow to notice that you are slashing at their backs.
*** There's a theory that nerfing the survivor A.I. was a way of increasing difficulty. The general consensus is that they [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqyNS7ZdY1A went a little bit too far]...
** AI survivors will blindly stare at a witch and slowly walk around her even though she is being aggroed. This can be extremely annoying in Hard Rain, where the entire level is filled with witches.
** They also will never LEARN the concept of "Fire = Hot" and will gladly attempt to run through a fire to get to you. Problem is, they do know to run back when damaged by a level hazard (such as fire or the spitter's goo) so they will just run back and forth into the fire until either it is gone or they got incapped if there's no other way around, instead of just waiting for the fire to disappear. They are also oblivious to a Spitter's acid pool and will stay in the puddle until they start taking damage instead of running out of it as soon as the acid begins to form on the ground or other surface. To see this in action, have the bots behind you and have a Spitter acid pool behind you too. The bots will charge blindly into the acid and then backpedal once they take damage from it.
** The Bots are actually quite intelligent when you're nearby, being practically aimbots. However, once you are a good distance away, they will forgo all other common sense and try to keep up with you, including but not limited to: Forgetting to Shoot, forgetting to use a bridge, forgetting they're being chased by a tank, and forgetting pounced/snagged comrades.
** On the other hand, AI infected are actually extremely intelligent. They will actively hide from your view until they've prepared to attack, Spitters will run and attempt to die in choke points, and will use a combination attack (such as a Charger plowing through people before a boomer comes and slimes everyone, or a Hunter will pounce and a spitter will spit on him to deal extra damage and deny others from simply punting the hunter off) against the Survivors.
*** The Special Infected do have a few quirks, though. For instance, while they often do hide, their hiding places don't always cover them all the way. You'll sometimes find a Hunter or Boomer trying to hide behind a lamp post. Another thing is, Hunters and Jockeys ''will'' pounce on survivors in the middle of a non-overwhelmed group, resulting in attacks that can be measured in hundredths of seconds before they're killed. Also, the Jockeys have no concept of ambush, [[Leeroy Jenkins|running straight into quadruple gunfire if it means getting closer to a human]].
** AI survivors also ''love'' to shoot through human teammates and throw off their aim, especially if said humans are trying to make precision shots with the hunting rifle or sniper rifle. The only positive here is that AI survivors are incapable of harming teammates.
** Bots will also shoot any Infected on their sight. Even if said infected is in front of hazards like a Crescendo Event that is triggered by shooting something or in worst cases, when an Infected is near ''a Witch''. Fortunately they can't anger Wandering Witches when they shoot them but good luck with normal Witches.
** On the other end of the spectrum, the Common Infected love climbing stuff. Even if it makes no sense whatsoever. If something is in front of them and the Survivors are near it, they'll probably try to climb it.
** Special Infected Bots also have no concept of fall damage. It's not uncommon to hear AI Boomers or Smokers leap to their deaths and explode behind you. It's even more hilarious when you see it for yourself.
* ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'' brought out AI bots after launch in an update patch. Originally some bot variants proved quite difficult, such as Heavies and Snipers, whose pinpoint accuracy and [[Computers Are Fast|wicked reflexes]] made them a [[Game Breaker]] in their own right. However, those issues were smoothed out to an extent, but there are still some fairly dumb AI moments.
** All of the bots have terrible pathing in Attack/Defend and Payload style matches, often resulting in you being the lone useful team member.
** Engineer bots are prone to some serious problems concerning placement issues for their gear and ''their own survival.'' This is most obvious when, for instance, an Engineer sets up his sentry overlooking an important area with its main arc facing a wall or pylon, obscuring a good 90 degrees of its targeting arc. Furthermore, some engineers will alternate between forgetting to wrench their machines to repair them, and forgetting to do anything ''but'' whack their sentry with the wrench. This ties back to their placement problem issue, in that they will often sandwich themselves between their sentry and their dispenser, [[Too Dumb to Live|leaving their sides wide open to enemies]]. This leads to scenarios where even the laziest sniper can simply peer across the map at them, line up the [[Laser Sight]], and hollow out that apparently already-empty hard hat. They also have an apparent blindness to spies, continuing to bash a sapped machine even after the sapper is removed, leaving their spines [[Back Stab|open for surgery]].
** Medic bots have a tendency to forget to turn their healing beam on their allies or forget to watch their backs, again, opening them up to knives, flames, and scatterguns. They will also pop an uber the moment their heal target takes any amount of damage, even if it's from a puny pistol shot and that Heavy has yet to lumber across the map to his destination. Finally, they have an odd tendency to forget that they have a syringe gun, even if they've used it previously, and will run from even critically wounded enemies who would go down in one or two syringes if they attacked instead of retreated. Many a bot arena round has been lost because the lone Medic ran from a 3-HP Scout... and committed suicide when back in the spawn room.
** Pyro bots wisely know to use the shotgun instead of merely acting like [[Leeroy Jenkins]] and charging with the flamethrower...but this is nullified somewhat by their apparent love of the [[Playing Tennis With the Boss|airblast]], where they will waste nearly a third of their ammo just bouncing a Heavy back before charging in to burn them--a Heavy that is still shredding them with [[More Dakka|more boolet.]]
** Scout bots will rely excessively on their pistols, sometimes hanging off at the edges of the battlefield and contributing small 8-point chips of damage, instead of going in close to use their extremely powerful [[Sawn Off Shotgun]]. This leads to instances where Scouts hanging out near their own rear lines are easily picked off by Snipers and Spies, two of the classes they counter best amongst human players.
** Heavy bots have an ammo management problem, in that they seem to forget how much they actually have. They will often stand on a point and hold down the trigger for two withering seconds and promptly run dry, leaving them to try and keep fighting with their much slower, less devastating shotgun, or scurry off for an ammo refill, no doubt feeling quite embarrassed. Some will keep firing for some seconds even though they're out of ammo, which seems to happen most often when ubered.
** Soldier bots, like Scout bots, will rely too much on their secondary weapon. Having exhausted all their rockets in their current clip, they will switch to the shotgun and empty it as well, then fumble reloads into the shotgun instead of the much more powerful rocket launcher which reloads faster than the shotgun.
** Demoman bots, alternatively, forget about their secondary weapon, the sticky bomb launcher, and fight primarily with the grenade launcher. While this is not necessarily bad, the sticky bomb launcher is incredibly versatile and the bots will drop them to retreat--a perfectly serviceable use, until you watch the bot forget about them entirely and come charging back at you. Through its own carpet of stickies. Stand just close enough, and Demoman bots will detonate their bombs as they approach, blowing themselves to kingdom come.
** Sniper bots are smart enough to know when to switch to their secondary weapon, and when to listen for sounds around them. However, they also seem to only think about line of sight, as opposed to cover, and quite a few Snipers will stand in fairly obvious places to take their shots. They will also try to take shots while sitting in the safety of the spawn room, when there is no way for their shot to hit anything but a wall or door. Sniper bots, if left alone, will sometimes sit in the spawn room the entire match, scoped in, staring at the door.
** Finally, Spy bots are... not entirely implemented, and rightly so, as they are the class with [[Difficult but Awesome|a difficulty curve so steep it counts as a cliff]] but [[Weak but Skilled|also extremely dangerous]]. They know how to sap, how to disguise, how to backstab, and how to use their revolver. In theory they should be able to operate loosely as their class profile dictates (the inability to cloak is of course an issue). In practice, Spies will sit in the spawn room as often as Snipers, if not more, wearing a mask but not actually moving. They also prone to spoiling their [[Paper-Thin Disguise]], but that is simply because being convincing is difficult when they cannot attack. They also have very odd backstab usage rules, in that they will sometimes skip an obvious stab in favor of shooting, and sometimes forget that they have a knife at all.
* The Dark Sims in ''[[Perfect Dark]]'' know exactly where you are and will usually hit you when you're moving. The Meat Sims in ''[[Perfect Dark]]'' are lucky if they hit you when you're standing still. Unfortunately, "always hit" and "shoot to miss" mean "with bullets that hit almost instantly": rockets are slower. This means you'll run ''away'' from the Dark Sims' shots and ''into'' the Meat Sims'.
** If you play a custom game against Meat Sims with at least one of the six weapon choices being explosive, then that team ''will'' have a negative score from all the suicides and team kills.
** And let's not forget Elvis in the Single Player Campaign. While he can be helpful at times and can always pinpoint cloaked enemies, if he gets himself killed then you have to start the entire level all over again. Can be especially bad on Attack Ship, where he simply stands out in the open and fires while the enemies fire back and charge at him. It can be a struggle to keep him alive for the entire level, sometimes you'll have to charge in ahead of him and take the enemies out before he gets too close. Luckily he isn't in too many missions.
* ''[[Far Cry]]'' Vengeance has some pretty bad enemy AI. You can run up behind them making lots of noise and they won't hear you. You can stand right in front of them and let them shoot you and their accuracy is so bad that it takes a long time for them to inflict enough damage to kill you. You can even THROW GRENADES AT THEIR BACK and they won't turn around.
** It can be bad in the original game as well. If you somehow manage to lure a merc into the water he'll just stand there, trying to fire his jammed gun ([[Good Bad Bugs|even if he's only knee-deep]]). You can pretty much keep throwing rocks at him until you get bored, and then leave him behind.
* ''Far Cry 2'''s AI has some interesting ideas about turrets and vehicles. When two [[A Is]] are in a boat or truck with a mounted gun, and you kill the gunner, the remaining AI will stay at the wheel and keep coming straight towards you (as if the gunner were still there) while ignoring cover, even though it is completely defenseless while doing so. In the rare case that it survives long enough to actually reach you, it often just sits there at the wheel and looks you straight in the eye, waiting to be killed. In general, the AI is a good case study showing why combat drones [[Real Life|IRL]] have human pilots.
** Another thing the AI does is to run into fires and burn to death, even those it started itself.
** It also tends to stand behind partial cover, then start shooting at you when it has a minuscule chance of hitting you. By the time it has completely emerged from cover, it will need to reload. While it reloads, it does not move.
** The AI controlling the wild animals you sometimes see isn't too bright either. If you park a car in just the right way, a fleeing gazelle will charge headlong into it and collapse, dead, upon making good friends with the stationary bumper.
* The ''[[Halo]]'' series has marines that are downright stupid at times. In the first game they had no concept of stealth, making otherwise very easy rooms of sleeping grunts annoying when they ran with guns a-blazing, waking up the aliens. [[It Got Worse]] in ''Halo 2'' and ''3'' games when the marines learned how to drive (or rather, how to drive like blindfolded drunks). AI drivers will run you smack into walls (leaving you completely vulnerable to tank fire), or careen straight off cliffs, or ensure completely avoidable rollovers happen... and gunners aren't much better, as they seem to be conserving ammo (on a turret with unlimited ammunition). So on single-player campaign mode, you have to drive for yourself, get out of the car, then gun for yourself unless you want to stick around a single map for half an hour.
** The dropships also seem to like dropping warthogs on players sometimes. Most infuriating.
** Despite the overall difficulty of ''Halo'' being quite high, the AI tends to be pretty stupid, relying more on numbers, superior weaponry, infinite ammo, vehicles, high damage resilience, improbably high accuracy, and level design in their favor to serve as a threat. Many enemies will not react at all to getting shot if you are not within a specific range or attack them from an area the developers probably didn't consider when programming the game. Most enemies don't react when their allies die near them (Grunts tend to be the exception, but their response is to run around in panic). On the other hand, they are often devastating once you walk into the programmed scenario they are waiting for.
** Conversely, the enemies exhibit [[Artificial Brilliance]] on Legendary difficulty, especially in the third game.
** It hasn't gotten any better in ''[[Halo: Reach]]''. Allies will still blow themselves up if given the rocket launcher, stand still right under enemy dropships, and charge straight at Hunters. The ODST "Bullfrogs" in the mission "Exodus" will even jump right off cliffs to their death. Certain enemies, like Elites, will sometimes stand still even as you're shooting them.
** Why single out the non-spartans in Reach? We're meant to assume that these soldiers, brought up from childhood in a military acadamy, can't drive any vehicle for cookies and their entire battlefield stratergy is to walk left and right while shooting unlimited ammo at an enemy. If they weren't invincible they would be dead in seconds.
** [[The Squadette|Kat]] in particular gets a special chance to demonstrate her idiocy in the third level of ''Reach'''s campaign. In a Warthog's driver's seat, she drives right into knife range of enemies wielding antivehicular weaponry and spends several minutes repeatedly making finicky three-point turns around plate-sized rocks; in the turret, she prioritizes shooting a Grunt who's half a mile away and behind cover over an Elite whose shields you just dropped and is currently meleeing the vehicle. On foot, Kat fares no better; she'll refuse to follow you to the next objective, charge in and alert enemies who you would otherwise have taken by surprise, and [[Gameplay and Story Segregation|ignore her own advice]] by entering into brutal hand-to-hand duels with ''[[Megaton Punch|Hunters.]]''
** Friendly Army AI, though slightly more useful due to the ability to give allied troopers weapons, is still impressively hell-bent on dying at the hands of its own stupidity. Troopers are unable to differentiate between area-of-effect and precision weapons; therefore, they'll fire round after round from a rocket launcher at groups of infantry that include ''you'', unload that Concussion Rifle into an enemy who's two inches from their face and kill themselves in the process, and charge into combat with enemies whom are currently being blasted to pieces by your tank. Their default response when stuck with plasma grenades is to scream and hurl their suddenly-explosive bodies at your feet. ''Reach'' introduced a "fireteam" mechanic where troopers who you meet up with are labeled on the map and get names, but more often than not it doesn't matter since they'll all be dead within seconds anyway.
* In the first ''[[Time Splitters]]'' game, AI had a nasty habit of running in circles till you shot it. Annoying when the enemy does it, downright infuriating when your team mates do it.
** In [[Time Splitters]] 2, there was a map that consisted of two bases with a gorge in between, joined only by bridges. In some game modes, bots (both friendly and unfriendly) would start running across a bridge, then pull a 90 degree turn and run off the edge for no discernible reason.
* ''[[Wolfenstein (2009 video game)|Wolfenstein]]'' (2009) has all the classic artificial stupidity bugs. Most notably, the enemy players will not react to you at all unless you are within a certain distance of them (at which point they will know where you are with unfailing accuracy) meaning that, once you've got the sniper scope, you can snipe groups from a distance and watch as the Germans show absolutely no reaction to their comrades' heads exploding.
* In the ''[[Star Wars Battlefront]]'' games, you will sometimes see such things as allied soldiers running directly into a wall ''repeatedly'', or shooting at one for no apparent reason. The reason behind this is that the AI is programmed to move or shoot directly at enemy [[A Is]], and seems to forget to account for intervening terrain. It gets worse on tiered battlefields, where your soldiers will cluster in an empty hallway because there's an enemy in the level directly beneath them.
** Also notable is the AI's tendency to spam grenades ''constantly,'' even if there are teammates around. Sometimes indoor hallways become completely impassible as both sides' AI units just stand there filling them with grenades, respawning, and doing it again.
*** An interesting experiment is to activate invulnerability and see how many enemies die by clustering around you and getting blown up by allied grenades.
*** A second enjoyable tactic is to get in one of the [[Nigh Invulnerable]] tanks, wait for enemies to cover it with sticky grenades, and then [[Oh Crap|charge them]], mowing down entire squads of foes with their own misplaced explosives.
*** The "hunt" gametype on Naboo has the [[The Scrappy|Gungan]] team armed ''only'' with grenades. It's absolutely possible–perhaps even recommended, so as to avoid the massive grenade slaughterfest that inevitably occurs–to sit back and let the enemy bots kill each other off because they simply ''cannot throw grenades with any reliable degree of accuracy''.
** The addition of space combat in the sequel also adds new chances for stupidity. The standard AI tactic to avoid being shot down by human players is to crash into their own capital ship, for instance.
*** In the case of space combat, AI seems to be programmed to take to ships first. If you invade the enemy ship to destroy their various components from the inside, your biggest threat is dodging bullets as the enemy AI makes its way to their ships.
** The main way of increasing difficulty levels in the first game is to deduct 50 points from your allies' IQs. Defending objectives? That's for squares! Although the funniest happens regardless of difficulty setting - if you are flying, say, a Republic Gunship and give the "everybody out" command before you land, your allies will cheerfully ''jump out of the gunship'', ignoring fine details like not possessing a parachute or jetpack, and the height being enough to break their necks. You then have kills deducted for every stupid clone you have thus weeded out.
** Another hilarious bit of idiocy in space battles. If you land a gunship in an enemy hangar with passengers on board, all except one will get out. If you disembark without taking off and landing again, the one remaining passenger will grab the pilot seat and promptly crash into the hangar wall.
*** Same with two-seater ships like TIE Bombers, but there's another example involving those. If you get out of a TIE Bomber your co-pilot might follow you, get back into the bomber and then take off and forget that the ship is capable of both braking and performing turns.
**** It is possible to overcome the gunship issue. After landing, as said before, all but one passenger will get out. If you take off and immediately land again, the last man will get out and none of the A.I will ever try and get back in unless you tell them too. Kinda weird, but at least alot of other players don't expect it.
*** A hilarious tactic in space battles goes like this: infiltrate the enemy's hangar, then proceed to use your free time to get in the enemy fighters. Don't leave the hangar, though; just get in long enough to turn the ship around, then immediately exit the fighter. The next time some AI schmuck comes along, he'll enter the ship and bravely fly forward...[[Hilarity Ensues|directly into the hangar walls.]] If you wanted to earn the points for that kill, keep your eye on the enemy's lightweight fighter (the A-Wing, in the Rebels' case), and simply plug a rocket into its backside every time someone goes to enter the fighter.
*** All enemy units are basically forced by the AI into a single, identical game-plan. The implications of this vary; usually it just means that the AI ignores things such as the Engineer's ability to supply health and ammo to himself and his comrades, and sometimes it means Han Solo is prone to taking a seat behind a turret at Mos Eisley, shouting "[[Never Tell Me the Odds]]" as you casually shoot him in the back.
** If you fly the Transport into an enemy ship in space battles and land it, you can respawn from it. Good luck, though, as an AI teammate will always spawn at it, and then get it and crash it into a wall. There goes your spawn point!
** The enemy AI in the game have no problem betraying their own teammates while they try to shoot you.
** If you are a Jedi or any class with rockets, you will end up betraying teammates because when you try to kill the enemy, the AI on your team will stand right beside them.
*** Similarly, if you are a clone commander, stay far away from allies. They are only too happy to wander in front of your chaingun and die.
** It bears mentioning that bots will virtually ''never'' try to lock on with a rocket launcher, instead firing blindly and sending rockets flying off across the map (or into their own troops). Tanks are virtually impermeable to all rocket-launcher-based attacks because of this, though they seem to have a little more accuracy shooting down snowspeeders. The one thing that they ''will'' attempt to lock onto are the (almost) invincible AT-TE and AT-ST command vehicles.
** Most of the bots seem to choose the human player as the primary target, regardless of whether you pose a direct threat, or if they are even within attacking distance. While sniping, it isn't uncommon to see an enemy stop dead in the middle of a firefight, draw their sidearm and begin taking potshots at your position. Even shooting an AT-AT walker with a pistol will sometimes cause it to stop in its tracks, and slowly turn towards you (sometimes a complete 180) just to return fire.
** It also bears mentioning that the entry for [[Artificial Stupidity]] on [[Star Wars Battlefront]] had all its examples removed and replaced with simply "a lot", because it was probably ''one-sixth'' of the page itself.
*** And that's not counting the (un-deleted) entries for other tropes that relate to [[Artificial Stupidity]], like [[Leeroy Jenkins]], [[Suicidal Overconfidence]], and [[Too Dumb to Live]]. Seriously, it wouldn't be ''[[Star Wars Battlefront|Battlefront]]'' without dumb AI.
** One of the most hilariously stupid AI actions in the game comes with the ability to perform evasive maneuvers in any flying vehicle. All too frequently, you'll see a [[Fragile Speedster|scout fighter]] make a flawless bombing run against a [[Nigh Invulnerable|capital starship]] while miraculously dodging huge amounts of [[Beam Spam|flak]], pull up and begin to fly away... then for no discernable reason, do a barrel roll and turn 180 degrees, sending themselves [[Hilarity Ensues|full throttle into the enemy ship.]] This is actually possible to exploit by firing a missile at a fighter flying directly ''away'' from its parent ship; the fighter will loop backwards to break the lock and power straight into the huge star cruiser right behind it.
** Another enjoyable space-related action is placing [[BFB|time bombs]] on ships just before they take off. Rather than taking the sensible course of action by getting out and ''running the hell away'', the pilots will happily zoom off into outer space, dying in a flaming ball of ship debris shortly after they leave the hanger.
** Judging by their habit of jumping in front of firing units, AI units believe themselves to be [[Friendly Fireproof]]. They aren't.
** Enemies don't understand range, accuracy, or covering fire, and will therefore react to you sniping them by standing out in the open and firing at you with a pistol, never advancing, flanking, or even ''trying'' to close the range to a manageable distance. "Native" enemies (such as the Wookiees on Kashyyyk) have unlimited reinforcements and their deaths don't detract from hostile reinforcement count. Proper abuse of this error can result in [[Beyond the Impossible|upwards of 250 points, 150 kills, and 50 headshots in one life.]]
* ''[[Painkiller]]'''s AI wasn't exactly what you'd call Mensa material to begin with, but the [[Obvious Beta]] expansion ''Painkiller Resurrection'' takes this trope [[Up to Eleven]], where enemies who can't deal with the erratic level design get hung up constantly on corners, curbs and other random bits of scenery as they try to charge the player.
* In ''[[Strife]]'', when you converse with the rebel soldiers while they stand around as NPCs, they sometimes warn you not to stand too close to the enemy's "Crusader" robots, due to said unit's short-range but highly damaging flamethrower. When these same rebels see active duty on certain levels, however, their AI causes them to attempt to close to melee range on their enemies, including Crusaders, resulting in many of them going to their fiery death like lambs to a slaughter. This is despite the fact that the rebel soldiers have no special melee attack; their only attack is to fire an assault rifle which works reasonably well from a distance.
* [[Metro 2033]] has the * worst* grenade throwers in the history of ever.
** [[Red vs. Blue|It's not their fault, someone put a wall in their way.]]
** Fascist soldiers have an excellent awareness of cover. They'll duck, hide, peek around before stepping out and will call to each other. Unfortunately this often happens ''on the wrong side'' of what they've chosen to hide 'behind'.
* Every Tom Clancy first person shooter game, such as [[Ghost Recon]] and [[Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (video game)|Rainbow Six]] has often required the player to pull his own weight in a firefight, since the squadmates were often incompetent. Rainbow Six Vegas and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 only made marginal improvements.
** In Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, a fireteam left in a corner under AI control will inevitably cover ''the wall'' instead of the wide open room around them.
** Also in Rainbow Six 3, a terrorist in an entirely different room is liable to hear your footsteps through the wall (bad enough already) and then proceed to throw a grenade. At the wall. Right next to them.
* In the eXtreme Paintbrawl games, if you send your team ahead of you, you will likely find them running into a wall next to a door. Unless they get eliminated in the first few seconds, which is also common.
* Your [[Redshirt Army]] allies in the ''[[Medal of Honor]]'' series tend to suffer from this, eg running blindly into the enemy's line of fire, not taking cover, or allowing themselves to be meleed to death. This frequently results in mission failure during [[Escort Mission|escort missions]].
* ''[[GoldenEye 007 (1997 video game)|Golden Eye 1997]]'' has decent enemy AI. However, enemies will only shoot at you if you are on the same elevation as you or close to it, so if you are a bit too low to them or too far up, they will move closer to you in order to get a better shot, even though there is nothing blocking their firing sight. This also gets worse if you park yourself on a stairwell since the AI will not even bother to shoot at you, even if you are less than a foot away. Because of this exploit, it can lead to an [[Anticlimax Boss]] against Xenia, where you can shoot parallel to the bridge as she crosses it and she won't attack until she gets across the bridge and you can kill her before that happens.
** The way AI works in this game is this: If the CPU can walk in a straight line towards you, it can see and shoot you. The inverse is also true. This can work to your advantage or to the CPU's, depending on the situation. If you stand just behind a rail, you can shoot holes in him and he'll have to come around to get you, but if there's a big hill that you can't even see over, they can shoot right through it and hit you.
** Another way in which they're stupid is if one comes after you, but doesn't see you after a few seconds, it will forget about you, stop chasing you and stand perfectly still indefinitely until you get his attention.
** Yet another way, there are some CPUs that are programmed never to move unless they see you. This means if you stand somewhere he can't see you (like behind a rail), you can shoot him all you want and he'll be oblivious to your presence.
* The ''[[First Encounter Assault Recon|F.E.A.R.]]'' series is generally very good when it comes to AI, however that do make some cracking blunders, such as killing themselves with their own grenades and blowing themselves up by targeting [[Exploding Barrels|flammable barrels]].
** One very common mistake (and often the only reason you're able to take them down in higher difficulty levels) is using cover from irregular-shaped objects or structures of the wrong size, which often leads to an entire squad of Replicas either with their bodies half-exposed or hitting their own cover while trying to shoot from their positions. And they don't always move when injured, meaning you can kill a Replica by gunning it from afar with the RPL, ''and he will not move to protect himself properly''. That's not to mention the fact that they don't take explosive props into account at all - a perfect strategy to deal with groups is to lure them into a place you've cleared and let a barrel/extinguisher/fuse box behind. When they come, shoot the prop. [[Total Party Kill|Instant squad kill]].
* Desert Combat, a popular mod for ''Battlefield1942'', rolled two of the original game's classes (medic and engineer) into one class, without updating the AI. This could be problematic when playing with bots. If the player's tank was injured, a helpful support-class bot would run up and begin covering the tank with anti-tank mines. If the tank moved an inch (and sometimes if it didn't) it would go up like a Roman candle. It gets worse, though. When the player's tank is hurt, the AI almost always spawns as support. Thirty seconds after the player was first trapped by his tank's thin coating of anti-tank mines, twenty more support bots would run up to festoon the tank further. When the mines ran out, the bots would pull out shotguns. When the shells ran out, they would melee it. A crowd of twenty bots, rhythmically beating a tank covered in landmines. The only bright side was that when you eventually did move, you'd take all those idiots with you.
** This was just one of a number of AI screw-ups in the game. The most prominent was when the AI--which was never programmed to fly a helicopter--tried to fly a helicopter. They would often fly straight up into the air as high as they could and then attempt to turn. Soon after, the helicopter would inevitably crash into the ground, often upside down. Any attempt at recovery looked like a drunk, epileptic three-year-old was at the stick and God help you if you were within 100 feet of it, because there was a good chance it would plow into you while dragging sideways along the ground.
* The enemy AI in ''[[Clive Barker's Jericho]]'' is very, very stupid. They generally do nothing more than charge you, and while for some enemies this is actually a good way to take out the Squad, for most it results in them dying before they get anywhere near you. The allied AI is also quite dim, as they don't quite understand the concepts of "retreating" or "taking cover" and will often melee the exploding enemies or dash up to enemies with ranged attacks and get slaughtered. Luckily, their death does not mean a game over unless everyone, including you, dies.
* In ''[[Soldier of Fortune]] II'', you have to escort Dr. Ivanovich near the end of the second level. He tends to follow you into the line of fire like a sheep to the slaughter, resulting in [[Game Over]] for you.
* [[Conker's Bad Fur Day]] had multiplayer AI that, although can be justifiably made stupid (the lowest level is "inbred"), other times can become this even on their highest levels ("Einstien"). Due to the lack of [[Friendly Fireproof|protection from any and all attacks fired]] (even your own), there are many cases [[A Is]] will take advantage of this ''even if they are part of your team''. Sometimes this comes from them not taking the time to see what's immediately in front of them before opening fire (such as firing at you because the enemy was directly behind you, as if they expected the bullets to fly through you into them. They don't.), and other times shooting any and every friggin thing that moves, including you (common when armed with sniper rifles and grenade launchers). Other times, <s> when they're not all the more happy to turn on each other</s>, there can be times the [[A Is]], both your friends and foes alike, will stand around doing nothing (besides jumping, perhaps) <s> often conveniently out of your line of sight just to give the illusion that they're off doing something important</s> or trapping themselves in a corner until you either shoot or kill one or both of them (this tends to be common the less [[A Is]] you have running around on the map). Depending on the mini-game, the [[A Is]] will also be focused more on shooting things (with actually ''aiming'' at anything being an afterthought) than the goal they're supposed to accomplish (such as how the weasels in Heist will focus more on killing each other than the money bags, and the only time the money matters is by making whoever's holding it Public Enemy Number 1, or how War!Colors will have the troops more focused on sniping at each other than either sides really caring to grab each other's flags). On the otherhand, it also works in your favor at times, where your foes can do the same thing to their own teammates, and even commit stupicide trying to kill you (the common scenario involving you being in an area you're invulnerable or not entirely in range of an attack, leading to your foe, armed with a grenade launcher or bomb to fire at you, only to obliterate themselves by being too close to their own blast, while, at worse, knock you up on the air and stun you for a while).
* ''[[Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45]]'' has AI combat engineers that set timed explosives in the middle of groups of frendlies, given the games realism, this tends to be messy
* In the first installment of ''[[Quake]]'', ogres always fire their greanades horizontally -- so if you stand on a ledge above them, they end up blowing up themselves.
* Psychos in ''[[Borderlands]]'' will often pull out and arm a grenade when low on health, charging at players [[For Massive Damage]]. They will even do so if there's no way that they'll actually reach the players before the grenade goes off.
== [[Action Game]] ==
* ''[[Enter the Matrix]]'' has three driving levels. If you play as Niobe, you get to be the driver while Ghost takes shots at the enemy vehicles, and if you're playing as Ghost you get to be the gunner while Niobe drives through the level. The problem? Apparently the AI-controlled Niobe completely flunked out of driving school, because she can't go five seconds without crashing into something and more than likely getting stuck (this is most aggravating in the final driving level, where you're trying to escape from the Twins, who are following after and shooting at you, and are also completely invincible.)
* In ''[[Saints Row|Saint's Row 2]]'', pedestrians will often jump to one side if they think they player will drive over them. However, at least as often as not, they throw themselves headlong onto the street, where they're likely to get run over by another NPC driver, or by the player if he was only barely on the sidewalk or if he was only taking a brief detour onto the sidewalk.
** There are also certain roads that cabs seem to have... trouble with. More specifically, they become, to borrow [[Zero Punctuation|Yahtzee's]] phrase, 'pants-on-head retarded'. The cabs tend to spawn at the end of a long, straight road... then turn around and start driving off in a random direction, taking the longest possible route to get to you. If they don't just explode. Or sometimes they'll spawn, but, for some reason, immediately shift into 'normal' [[NPC]] cabs which you can steal, rather than ride in. Also fits as a [[Good Bad Bugs|Good Bad Bug]].
** Airplane pilots seem to be a panicky lot in ''SR2'', too. Shoot them once (with any gun) on the runway (which is the only place to really find [[NPC]] airplanes), and they'll immediately veer off the runway and crash into the closest bit of scenery, usually exploding in a giant fireball.
*** When you attempt to steal a vehicle that is also on your junkyard list, not only will the cops psychically know and immediately pounce on you, but the driver of said car will invariably panic and veer off the road in a random direction. The chance that this mad dash across pedestrian zones and off cliffs ends with the car despawning, crashing into a semi or disappearing into the ocean is proportional to the length of time you had to wait for it to show up in the first place. Oh, and if he hits something black and white and blue then you get wanted stars. It seems the only way to steal a car on your junkyard list without dealing with this is by shooting the driver.
** Get a police car, drive on the rightmost lane and activate the siren. Cars in front of you will turn onto the sidewalk to avoid you. Cars in the middle lane will turn across your lane and stop there. For additional fun, try this on a highway bridge and watch the semis run the civilians off the road in their dash to get out of your way.
** The nuclear plant island should never be navigated by car. It is ''crammed'' with security vehicles that will do things like accelerate at high speed out of a side street and plow into you, rear-end you when you stop for a red light, or run over a pedestrian and proceed to chase you for manslaughter. It is virtually impossible to spend longer than a minute in this area at the wheel of a truck without getting wanted stars.
* Space Pirates, in the stealth section of ''[[Metroid]]: Zero Mission'', will raise an alarm and mercilessly chase you if they spot you. However, you can cause them to call off the alarm if you can keep them from spotting you for a short period of time (or going to a prescripted area to shake the heat). This is despite the fact that you are the one solely responsible for the destruction of their leader ''not three hours ago'' and you are now ''unarmored and vulnerable''. It's also worth noting that the shots they fire at you will kill each other if you can line them up right.
** In ''Metroid Fusion'', the SA-X is occasionally [http://www.metroid2002.com/fusion/other_stupid_sa-x_series.php unable to figure out how to shoot you] if you aren't running away full-tilt.
* In ''[[Castlevania]]: Dawn of Sorrow'', you eventually encounter a human boss who can use any power used against him, but it is automatically overridden by any new power. That's fine, and obviously the best way to beat him is to use a stupid power against him. The trouble is that he never clues into the fact that his new power is ridiculous (he does, after all, have a knife he could be using), such as lashing out with a Cave Troll's tongue attack that doesn't extend past his dramatically outstretched arm.
** Sadly, his Knife is even MORE puny then his new Tongue attack. His power could be a Game Breaker anyway if he had any actual control over it.
** Use the Student Witch attack on him, so that he spends the remainder of the battle trying to throw cats at you.
*** This is actually a bit of a [[Guide Dang It]], since the game never tells you about the trick outright (sure, he visibly steals his primary attack from a Malachi, but there's no indication it's ''automatic'') - and if you don't know it, the fight is tough. (It's also tough in Julius Mode - turns out that power works on ''subweapons'', too. Sure, you can give him Yoko's "power palm", but if you forget about it and hit him with an axe?)
* The enemy AI in the ''[[Armored Core]]'' games, especially on the [[PS 1]] and [[PlayStation 2]], are capable of truly staggering feats of incompetence. Choose to fight AC's in the right arena and they will:
{{quote|A) Attempt to get at you by futilely trying to phase through solid matter.
B) [[Department of Redundancy Department|Attempt to get at you by futilely trying to phase through solid matter]] while emptying all of their weapons into a 10 meter wide concrete wall.<br />
C) [[Department of Redundancy Department|Attempt to get at you by futilely trying to phase through solid matter while emptying all of their weapons into a 10 meter wide concrete wall]] and somehow killing themselves.<br />
D) All of the above }}
** They have also been witnessed boosting out of the combat area for no reason, giving the player the victory by default. As you can imagine, there are myriad ways of rapidly climbing the arena ranks by exploiting the stupidity of its inhabitants. But the real problems start when [[From Software]], rather than attempting to program better AI, decided to compensate for the computers' stupidity by giving the AI controlled ACs capabilities [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|that far exceed what is possible]], or [[Fake Difficulty|sane]], and in Armored Core 2 even equipped the AI with parts [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|that didn't exist]].
* In the stealth sections of ''[[Batman: Arkham Asylum]]'', the Mooks rarely ever bother to look up. It's a little bit more frequent in the harder difficulty levels, but still.
** And then there's also [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEZGQpbWJ0I this].
*** They also have no periphral vision whatsoever, except for the insane inmates who have a perfect line of sight.
*** If it wasn't for their constant conversations, you'd assume they were all deaf, too, given you can stick one of them in a Dragon Sleeper (complete with barely muffled groans) with their buddy none the wiser ten feet away.
* The guards in ''[[Assassin's Creed]]'' will sometimes throw you off a high ledge, then jump down after you. You can survive the resulting falling damage. They can't. In ''2'' you often lose thieves to the idiots trying to keep up with Ezio and jumping from too high or failing jumps.
** The Multiplayer Tutorial AI dummy in ''[[Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood|Assassin's Creed Brotherhood]]'' won't care if the player approaches him in an unusual manner, and will only jog away from the player if a chase is activated, never sprinting.
* ''[[Grand Theft Auto San Andreas]]'' features pretty solid AI in most cases, but it breaks down in some areas. On the freeway, the AI can't seem to handle the speed at which it drives, resulting in a lot of accidents, even with no player intervention. If the player stays put long enough, massive pileups and riots inevitably occur and don't end until the player leaves the area.
** Civilian drivers are actually dumb cars-on-rails until nudged, shot, or otherwise "awakened", at which point they become truly AI controlled and subject to proper physics (almost certainly for performance). In places, the map's "rails" seem to be set up wrong, and vehicles either accelerate or turn well beyond their actual capabilities, or outright spawn facing the wrong way then tween into place. Freeway pileups are usually a result of "rail" and "true" vehicles interacting badly.
*** A similar sort of thing seems to happen in areas with particularly steep hills, especially San Fierro. [[Good Bad Bugs|And it. Is. Hilarious.]]
*** Also, pretty much every car that needs to make a right turn, is going to do so from the left lane, and vice versa for left turns. And that seems to be the most basic rule for the game's driving AI, but apparently it wasn't. It seems like the only realistic thing the other drivers do in the game is to high-tail it out of there when if they hear gunshots.
** If you engage in a gang war, sometimes the enemy gang members will run down to the end of the block just to do a U-turn and run on the other side of the sidewalk. Sometimes this ranges to being miles away from the actual war zone but if the game is savvy enough, you're rewarded with the next wave or getting the area. Most of the time though you're stuck waiting around for them to come back because if you try to leave, the game pressures you to stay there.
** Cops who in no way can get to their original car, will usually run out onto the street and jack a civilian's car and drive off in that. Or more hilariously, a fellow officer's car.
** Dubbed the suicidal photographer, this fellow stands at the edge of a cliff taking pictures of the city nearby. After he's done he just walks in a straight line into the water and dies. This happens everytime.
** Emergency vehicles make no effort to avoid civilians and will usually run a lot of peds over just to save one. Aggrevating when it runs over a mission important NPC.
** Unlike the previous games, ''San Andreas'' averts [[Super Drowning Skills]], and CJ can swim. However, this isn't extended to anyone else, and if you have a Wanted level, there's no end to the line of cops that will jump in to get you and immediately drown.
** It is not just ''San Andreas'', either. Much of the ''[[Grand Theft Auto]]'' series has apparent [[Artificial Stupidity]], though at the same time, much of it's ambiguous whether it was a matter of programming or of deliberate portrayal. ''[[Grand Theft Auto II]]'' features fellow carjackers who drive into cars already on the verge of exploding, civilians who run around in circles when a tank is driving through an alley they are in, and cops in a vehicle running over cops who are pursuing you on foot. However, given [[Crosses the Line Twice|the nature of the GTA series]], one should not rule out the possibility that they are portraying people that way on purpose.
** Planes are also tied to 'rails'. This frequently makes them disregard tall buildings, trees, hills or other particuarly tall objects.
** NPCs who are falling into the water know how to escape their vehicle and swim, but fail to grasp the concept of finding a staircase or beach to exit the water. They mostly waddle uselessly next to a ledge.
** NPCs often crowd around scenes of carnage. This would happen even if the scene involves a flaming vehicle which might go off at any minute.
** NPCs on fire never have the ability to stop, drop and roll that the protoganist has. They often just run around until their health runs out and dies.
* In ''[[Metal Gear Solid]] 2: Sons of Liberty'', the guards provide a fairly solid challenge without going to brutal measures to catch the player (difficulty dependant of course). However, patrolling guards when not faced with a left turn, will ALWAYS turn to the right including when they are simply turning around. This effectivly means that the player can stand next to a patrolling guard and not be seen, providing he always stands on the guards left side.
** Which is far from the [[Conspicuously Selective Perception|worst]] or [[The Guards Must Be Crazy|only]] problem. For instance, you can shoot guards with tranquilizer guns, which mostly avert [[Instant Sedation]] except on Very Easy difficulty, but regardless of how long it takes, will cause the target to abruptly keel over with a grunt and start snoring. Other guards will find nothing unusual about this if they find a sleeping guard, and will simply kick them awake, ''even if they saw them keel over''. This is particularly silly when you hit a guard who regularly sends status reports by radio (or interrupt a guard with a radio), and a group of armed soldiers come to investigate. After kicking him awake, one of the soldiers will radio back to report that there was nothing wrong before they leave.
* In ''[[Dead Rising]]'', it's not uncommon for Frank to be escorting a couple of survivors and, even though you've given weapons to as many of them as you can, for them to stand there calling for help while they're being eaten alive by zombies and doing absolutely nothing to defend themselves. This can be especially frustrating if you're handling a survivor that can't carry a weapon or if you yourself are in the middle of being attacked. This is even MORE frustrating if you were attacked while trying to help the idiot and you all die because said idiot will not even push the zombies (all the survivors are capable of pushing).
** They also have no concept of retreat, and will stand there fighting off a horde of zombies, no matter how overwhelmed they get. Leading to the tactic of mashing the call button to make them move their sorry asses.
** Also, don't give them a gun. Unless you like getting caught in friendly crossfire.
* In ''[[Gears of War]]'', Locusts (the main enemy in the game) are supposed to dynamically move around and take cover in response to your team's position. However, nine times out of ten, they will, in a pitched firefight, leap over the cover to reach a better place, leaving them horribly open for an explosive headshot.
** In the sequel this was fixed, but the AI has even more pitiful failings; enemies will run straight into security lasers, clearly-visible proxy mines, a sentry turret's line of sight, etc.
** When given an explosive weapon [[A Is]] will choose to destroy themselves. But only if you are not within range.
* In ''[[Grand Theft Auto]] 3'', random emergency vehicles will sometimes speed up the drive to the mafia don's house, slam headfirst into his garage door and continue to grind against it until their vehicles explode.
** Everyone in Liberty City (apart from Claude) seems absolutely incapable of aiming a rocket launcher in any direction but ''down''. And they actually seem to be aware of this, since if a pedestrian were to have a rocket launcher on them, they would run up to their target, and fire the rocket at the ground, killing both the target and themselves in the process. By ''San Andreas'', this has been corrected so that pedestrians can fire rocket launchers at what is in front of them. *[[Oh Crap|gulp]]*
* In ''[[Transformers (film)|Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen]]: The Game'', the enemies often have Ungodly Dodge abilities. However, this is often counteracted by their tendency to stand near gas tanks and then blow them up.
** And that's not the end of it: in the rare occasion that you have backup with you, it will blindly charge into battle and be destroyed, thus leaving you to complete the mission by yourself, one hundred times more efficiently than if they were around to help.
* ''[[Resident Evil 5]]'' shows that we may have reached [[The Singularity]]. Its [[AI Is a Crapshoot]]. Sometimes it's great, picking off enemies with relative efficiency with reasonable choices in weapons. Other times, if you're laying claymore mines to set up a dastardly trap while fighting a big boss, the AI will quietly follow in your footsteps picking them up.
** Sheva's AI reaches the pinnacle of stupidity in the first battle with Wesker. First she stands still and gets badly injured (or ''killed'' on the higher difficulties), then runs off to hide, then TRIES TO FIGHT {{spoiler|Jill}} ALONE and, as a result, dies. If she's lucky enough to survive, then she'll ''try to link up with you'', leaving her side of the fight unfinished and bringing a very dangerous combatant with her to help Wesker. You ''cannot'' complete this fight solo without hiding.
** It's pretty much concluded that this was a lot nastier than just bad programming, that they intentionally made Sheva's AI unbelievably stupid to make the game practically unwinnable without a second player, which often requires a second copy of the game, second system, and online accounts.
** In the very beginning of its predecessor, ''[[Resident Evil 4]]'', there is a section of tripwire that will detonate upon contact with either the player or enemies. The pissed-off villagers apparently forgot who set the explosives in the first place, because they will run right into it and kill themselves if you position yourself right.
** Also involving dynamite. On some occasions, if you get close to dynamite-throwing Ganados, they may rush at you and try to grab you. They may or may not have lit the fuse to said dynamite. They might also gesture and shout orders/alerts to their comrades, often standing among them with a sparking stick of dynamite. [[Fridge Brilliance|Of course, this and the above example make a bit more sense when you realize the Las Plagas is likely turning their higher reasoning capabilities into Swiss cheese]].
* ''The Mummy Returns'' is hardly a [[So Bad It's Good|pinnacle of gaming history]], and the AI Medjai shooting at you will often miss at super-close range if you run back and forth a lot, but the best is the boss fight against Ardeth Bay for Imhotep in Cairo, the second mission. After killing all of his Medjai guards, you can simply back him into a corner and mash the kick button, resulting in a never-ending stream of kicks to the head that Ardeth can never get past or block. Since you can't kill him and just have to hold him back until your train leaves, this makes the boss fight less of an issue than the health-draining [[Goddamn Bats|cats]].
* ''Driver 2 Advanced'' really did stretch the bar at the time for the Game Boy Advanced. It was remarkably fluid despite the pixel count being lower than fifteen for particular sprites. The control scheme and driving performed decently for the extremely limited physics engine it was rooted to. But the catch here is, a felony can be really unpredictable unless you try and figure out how to piss off the police and blinking pedestrian sprites. Why is this stupid on the A.I.'s end? Particular illegal crimes such as driving on the sidewalk and stealing cars would occasionally become "legal" and no authorities will pursue.
* In ''[[The Godfather (video game)|The Godfather]]'', expect that pedestrians will somehow, in an attempt to jump out of the way of your car, instead fling themselves into your path. Especially annoying, when you consider that any contact between a moving car and a civilian, at any speed, is almost universally a [[One-Hit Kill]].
* In ''The Uncanny X-Men'' for the NES, one-player mode would saddle the player with a computer-controlled ally so unfathomably stupid that players found it most convenient to get the enemies to put it out of its misery.
{{quote|'''[[The Angry Video Game Nerd]]''': You could do better if you played the game blindfolded. That's no exaggeration.}}
* In ''[[Grand Theft Auto IV]]'', enemies will attempt to use the cover system just as much as you do. While most of the time, enemies will use this cover effectively, they do on occasion take cover behind objects that are not very good at deflecting bullets or won't cover them effectively. So, you may spy a supposedly highly-trained [[Fun with Acronyms|N.O.O.S.E]] agent take cover behind a stack of cardboard boxes or a fire hydrant.
** The AI used in the street races drives like a blind moron on drugs. It usually ends up overshooting corners because it doesn't slow down in time, plows right into other cars instead of trying to dodge and occasionally even manages to veer off a straight road.
** Fly up in a helicopter with a high wanted level. Hover over a body of water (the ocean next to Francis International is a good example), and watch as the police attempt to pursue you. They seem to not understand the concept that they can not drive their car up to you, or that there is an ocean in the way. After a few minutes, half the local precinct will probably be bobbing about in the water like corks.
* In the first ''[[Tenchu]]'' game, you can swim but your enemies have [[Super Drowning Skills]]. They apparently don't know this, because if you are spotted by an enemy you can simply jump into water and watch them follow you in to drown.
== [[Sports Game]] ==
* In ''Super Swing Golf [[Pangya]]'', lower-tier opponents will make the most blatantly idiotic shots.
* A discussion of the AI stupidity in ''[[Madden NFL]]'' would take all night, but one that deserves mention is that the AI has serious trouble with quarterbacks doing rollouts. If the AI is tasked with guarding the receiver and the QB rolls to his side, the AI defender will often come up to play the QB and then get indecisive, leaving both the pass ''and'' the run wide open.
* In ''[[Backyard Sports|Backyard Baseball]]'', if there is a person on third base, the fielders automatically throw to home. Usually it is an outfielder that does this, and almost always a run is still scored.
* For some reason the AI in ''FIFA 2000'' (and its spin-off, ''The FA Premier League Stars'') was ''totally'' incapable of dealing with set-pieces correctly. This meant that whenever you got a free kick, half of the time the computer team didn't even bother setting up the wall, and when it did the wall tended to be completely out of position. Corner-kicks were even worse, as your own players weren't marked correctly and the opposing goalkeeper was far too slow to react, meaning that so long that you were able to get plenty of corners, you could ratchet up huge scorelines even on the hardest difficulty settings.
* ''Mario Basketball 3-on-3''. You control one character at a time. Your two teammates do nothing while you desparately try to avoid getting the ball stolen. The ball falls right next to them? They ''still'' do nothing.
* In Pro Cycling Manager 2011, when a breakaway occurs, a team start chasing a group containing their own riders like it was one of their worst rivals. Pack takes them back in. New breakaway, some different riders, one from before mentioned team is in. Same team takes up the chase and wins. New breakaway, same teams, minus the one chasing before takes part. The team chasing before has stopped, because they weren't destroying it for their own team anymore.
== [[Party Game]] ==
* ''[[Mario Party]] 8'' has King Boo's Haunted Hideaway, which is a randomly-generated map that changes each time you play it. The AI seems to not plan ahead at path forks, and it will choose a path even if it knows the next fork on that side has one path leading to a dead end and a Whomp blocking the other, and that it doesn't have enough coins to pay the Whomp's toll.
** Basically, when the computer in ''[[Mario Party]]'' isn't being [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|a cheating bastard]], they have an IQ of -8. They will buy items for easy access to the Star, even if the cost of the item puts them below the coins needed for the Star. All the freakin' time.
** It gets worse on the investment boards like Windmillville and Koopa's Tycoon Town. Most of the time, they will invest ''every single coin they have'', even if it's not necessary. It makes it impossible for computers to invest on the building that is right next to it, unless they keep getting low rolls and winning minigames.
** The computer will also use items to roll multiple dice blocks to get to the star when they don't have enough coins to buy a star.
** One particular case of the HARD AI in the first game being incompetent is pointed out by [[Proton Jon|The]] [[Chuggaaconroy|Runaway]] [[Nintendo Capri Sun|Guys]] when Peach, otherwise a luck-manipulating bastard on Hard, proceeds to get the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krC7HTp-H80&t=4m33s Ground Pound Coin Minigame] and use a total of 9 ground pounds to find the 5 "correct" posts.<ref>For those unable to watch the video, this is out of 12 posts, and all 12 of them were plainly revealed at the beginning of the minigame.</ref>
** The Easy AI is this on purpose -- it's possible to win several Mario Party 2 minigames against Easy bots ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6PxRwgjzZw without even doing anything].''
*** 7 games later and they [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=l9eeX2Lx1pE still haven't fixed this].
== [[Wide Open Sandbox]] ==
* The tournament AI in ''[[Mount & Blade]]'' apparently decides that the best way to win is to drive into a wall. And then get fenced in by dismounted horses.
* One of the chief reasons why it's practically impossible to not kill any civilians by accident while ''actively avoiding'' contact in a ground vehicle in ''[[Prototype (video game)|Prototype]]''. It seems like once you induced panic in them, they'll abandon almost all of their reliance on their senses. That's also assuming you aren't convinced of their intention to commit suicide in the face of the game's setting.
** Oh, ''Prototype''. Thou art a shining example of this trope. Where civilians show absolutely no regard for their own safety, the most dangerous thing a Marine can face is another Marine and where highly-trained military personnel can TD Dance off of a platform to their deaths. It makes you a bit less guilty for killing them, because they genuinely come across as [[Too Dumb to Live]]
*** The slightest disruption in traffic flow can cause huge pile ups. Tanks will just drive over anything in the way.
* [[Mercenaries]] 2: World in Flames is a crowning achievement in [[Artificial Stupidity]]. Frequently, enemy soldiers will run in front of vehicles, throw grenades at their own vehicles, crash said vehicles when at even the slightest deviation, attempt to plow their vehicles under your tank causing the game to assume the tank has run them over, drown themselves, run off of building ledges and generally kill themselves in a variety of amusing ways. This can be frustrating for numerous reasons, chief among them that Chinese RPG soldiers fire thermobaric rockets that do massive damage to you and the scenery. In fact, it is generally impossible to capture all the HVT's alive, because they will kill themselves or die at the hands of their subordinate troops.
** The original was as bad, if not worse. Civilian vehicles would instant swerve ''into'' you even though you were in the other lane and in no way a threat (as far as they knew). Combatants would drive their jeeps into your tank, which was about as effective as you'd expect, and AI drivers would often run into the adamantium walls known as trees.
* ''[[Dead Rising]]'''s survivors were, to put it bluntly, idiots. Half the time, they never followed you or would run off on their own, and giving them a weapon would sometimes ''result in them attacking you by accident''. The sequel [[Artificial Brilliance|improved the AI significantly]].
* In the ''[[X (video game)|X]]-Universe'' (especially Terran Conflict) series of games, the Autopilot on all the ships ''loves'' to smash itself into the nearest asteroid at max speed, or veer into the path of 4 km long destroyers. Then you turn on the Time accelerator to make the slow autopilot dock faster. ''[[It Got Worse]].'' X fans frequently refer to the autopilot as the "auto-pillock", and [http://apricotmappingservice.com/autopillok.html some believe it consists of a gerbil (or lemming) in a box, with a rough sketch of the sector.].
** Player owned capital ships will gleefully jump at exactly the same time to the exact same warpgate - [[Tele Frag|into each other]].
== Other games ==
* Video games for ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]!'' have a particularly poor track record in this area. While some of the games' [[What an Idiot!|idiotic]] moves can be justified by the fact that the AI couldn't possibly know the identity of your facedown cards, and that the kind of analysis that would allow a player to even make the right guesses can be really difficult even for human players, some of the cases are a little more obviously [[Artificial Stupidity]].
** Then you have Mokuba, for whom this trope is invoked ''intentionally''. [[Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series|What a digital dummy!]]
*** To give you the idea of how dumb he is, his second strongest monster is [[Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage|Kanan The Swordmistress]], a normal monster with 1400 ATK and 1400 DEF. He summons none of his monsters in defense mode, letting you just keep knocking them down. His entire strategy is to draw ''one'' monster, Cyber Stein, which has the ability to summon a fusion monster. This is the only way you can lose to him, cause if he does this, he'll summon ''Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon''.
** In many of the earlier games, such as ''Eternal Duelist Soul'', at harder levels, the AI essentially knew the ATK and DEF of any of your facedown monsters, and would make its decisions whether or not to attack based on that. Some of the "good" duelists like Yami Yugi go at you with cards that technically can destroy yours in battle...and then leaves them right open to a strong counterattack when the player is able to capitalize on the fact that they left a monster with 1000-1100 ATK in attack mode at the end of their turn. [[Attack! Attack! Attack!]] meets [[Artificial Stupidity]] here.
** The AI in ''Tag Force 2'' is considered one of the worst examples of this in a ''Yu-Gi-Oh'' game, to the point where it seems like the game [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|is actively trying to sabotage your efforts]] when you play a tag duel.
*** For instance you might have a monster that can't be destroyed in battle while it's in attack position, and a trap that stops all damage you take as long as you have a monster out, effectively making you invincible while that trap is out, as long as you ''don't'' switch that one monster to defense position. Your partner will switch her to defense position as soon as your opponent plays a monster with more attack then her.
*** The best example came from a ''Tag Force 4'' [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PshGl7E2NG0 video], when the AI used [http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Prideful_Roar Prideful Roar] against [http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Clear_Vice_Dragon Clear Vice Dragon]. The AI paid 2800 Life, took more than double that in damage, and promptly lost.
*** While the AI is occasionally competent during duels, it gets really bad during the minigames. For instance, Tag Force 2 features a 'dodgeball' minigame, it's basically a matter of using different forms of ammo to KO 2 AI opponents. Unfortunately, several characters are prone to standing directly behind your character and throwing a bowling ball (1 hit KO)
** In ''Dark Duel Stories'', the [[A Is]] have a bad habit of offering high-ATK monsters as tributes to summon something just as strong or even weaker, example: Offering "Jirai Gumo"(2200ATK/100DEF; it is interesting to note that this is the strongest [[LV 4]] monster in the game, plus he is stripped of his detrimental effect) as a tribute to Tribute Summon "Catapult Turtle" (1000ATK/2000DEF). Might I also add the AI will also tribute monsters which have been equipped with two spell cards without hesitating, so if he powered up his "Tripwire Beast" to 2200ATK/2300DEF and also had Mountain activated, increasing the original ATK/DEF by 30% to a grand total of 2560ATK/2690DEF, it's not unsurprising for the AI to tribute it for a weaker monster such as "Morinphen", a [[LV 5]] monster with poor stats (1550ATK/1300DEF).
*** The AI also likes to use monsters who have lower ATK than DEF to attack, as long as the ATK is at least half the DEF. Sometimes, Yami Yugi will use "Megamorph" (which acts like a universal Equip card, increasing a monster's ATK and DEF by 500) on Mystical Elf just so that he can attack... with 1300 ATK.
** It's important to note that the AI in most ''Yu-Gi-Oh'' games varies from Cheap to downright stupid. When they're cheap, they're somehow able to see your hand and somehow draw the ''exact'' right card(s) to counter it...
*** Also, dueling the anime/manga characters, they can somehow see the defense of a face-down monster before it's flipped and will decide whether or not to attack it based on a stat it shouldn't know yet (of course, it'll sometimes wait a turn, summon another monster and then attack with the same weak monster they hesitated with anyway).
*** Another thing the AI will do, which can be called the "fake out dance" is to know a monster's high defense before it's flipped, but keep summoning monsters too weak to destroy it and apparently fake it out. Not too horrible, until they'll do this even if you have stronger offense monsters out. And they'll keep doing this until they lose.
** There's also its inability to judge the worth of cards in its hands, meaning that it discards randomly whenever an effect makes them do so, which can often make them cripple their entire strategy by eliminating their most important card.
*** To wit: The AI has three cards, which consist of a weak monster, a strong monster whose level is too high to be summoned, and a spell which makes the user discard a card but would let him summon the stronger monster. The AI will, 50% of the time, activate the spell, discard the stronger monster, and then summon the weaker monster which wouldn't need the spell in the first place.
*** However, it's averted in later games, where the smarter computers will only throw out a strong card if they have something to revive it. If they have this strategy, they ''will'' use it.
** Yu-Gi-Oh 5D's Duel Transer/Master of the Cards is also not immune. The AI Computer opponent you have unlocked initially has a few decks that are easy to overcome, but for some reason it likes to set off a combo of Waboku and Hallowed Life Barrier. I'll break it down: Waboku stops you taking damage that turn and stops your monsters from being killed, Hallowed Life Barrier is basically the same, except you need to discard a card to activate it, and all it does is nullify battle and effect damage, not protect monsters. I can see why it can help to prevent taking effect damage, but it's still a pretty stupid combination.
** The AI is incapable of deciding whether or not using particular traps is a good idea or not. If your opponent has Torrential Tribute set (a trap which wipes all monsters on the field when activated), they'll use it even if the monster they already have on the field is stronger than the one you just summoned (of course if you're doing this, they might foresee your equipping it with something). Then again, they'll often wipe the whole field even if they have a ''much'' stronger monster out. Opponents using Torrential Tribute to destroy the whole field when they have a 2500+ ATK ritual monster out when all you did was summon a relatively weak monster is common enough to count as a strategy to get rid of their monsters.
** Despite being the main character, Yugi will often make the baffling decision to keep summoning Sinister Serpent, an effect monster with 300 ATK and 250 DEF. It's effect is to keep showing up in his hand if it's destroyed. Good if you plan on sacrificing it, but he never does this. He keeps it out until you vaporize it with a much stronger monster, and then keep summoning it just because.
** Total Defence Shogun is particularly weak in the hands of the AI. It has 1550 ATK, 2500 DEF, and ''it can attack while in defence mode''. Whenever they play/use/control one however, they will always switch it to attack mode. So, basically, the AI weakens the monster by 950 points, AND opens themselves up to Life Point damage voluntarilly.
** The AI will sometimes use Premature Burial or Call of the Haunted to summon Gearfried the Iron Knight. For those who are unaware, either of those cards can be used to summon a monster from the Graveyard, but the card is then equipped to the monster; if the card is destroyed, so is the monster it summoned. Gearfried destroys any card that is equipped to it automatically. Yeah...
*** Even more humorous because Premature Burial costs 800 life points to use.
** The AI has also been known to do things like take control of your monster using a card like Change Of Heart, which takes yours for one turn, but then boost its stats with a permanent equip spell. So at the end of your turn, you get your monster back, only the AI has actually helped you.
** There's a similar problem with the 1997 ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]: Duels of the Planeswalkers''. Sometimes, the computer can come up with masterful combos and expert tactical plans. Other times: they sacrifice their last point of life to [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=371 Pestilence] in order to kill some [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=189878 Llanowar Elves], and summoning a [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=193868 Lord of the Pit] and then doing nothing with it, meaning it eats all the computer's monsters and starts on the computer's life total. In particular, it will only attack if the creature is guaranteed to survive the creatures you have out or it has enough monsters to zerg you to death. This means that it doesn't, for example, fling expendable creatures at you to whittle down your forces, even if those creatures have a significant upkeep like sacrificing a creature.
** In Yugioh: Dungeon Dice Monsters, any character not found in the anime will just summon around their Heart Points and will eventually use up all their summons. They will then be unable to do anything, allowing you to have a many rolls as you need to summon anything. The Exodia pieces can be summoned this way, and by summoning then all, you get an instant win, and the AI is powerless to stop you.
*** You can beat ''anyone'' in the game with an equally inane strategy. There are summonable "items" in the game which take the form of chests. Only the summoner knows what's in the chest, and it activates when a monster passes over it. The AI will ''never'' run over your chests, in the expectation that it might be a trap (and, to be fair, it might). However, it is possible, by spamming cheap summons, to block your opponent so that the only path to your heart points is through the chest. At which point, the AI will helpfully sit around, waiting for you to kill them.
* The final boss of ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]: Battlegrounds'' has the ability to cast any spell in the game, any time he likes. Theoretically this means he should be able to spam you with giant monsters while countering any spell that you try to cast. Instead, he just sort of hangs around not doing much, and can be trapped in a loop by summoning the same low-level Mook over and over again. Possibly intentional on the part of the developers, since if the boss used his powers in a sensible fashion then he would be completely unbeatable.
* This has plagued computerised Go engines (especially when compared with computerised Chess engines), with them being trounced by professional Go players even when given 25 stone advantages... The latest Go AI can win with a 9 stone advantage, and has been stated that it's up to good amateur levels.
** In Go the problem space is much larger. While both go and chess have a finite number of moves per turn, determining the possible moves in chess is a matter of thinking of each piece and seeing where they can land and if it's open, whereas in go it's not a matter of "which of these 32 pieces can move where?" so much as "which of these 300-odd spots ''should'' pieces go on?", which doesn't just make calculation slower and more memory intensive, but also makes the heuristics harder to work on, too.
* A classic computer game that has gone by many names over the years ''relies'' on this trope. In the original version, you had to run from robots, although modern versions have used zombies, vampires, [[Eldritch Abomination|Eldritch Abominations]]... basically, whatever. Anyway, you and the robots both move one square per turn (like a chess king), and robots will chase you down. You have no weapon, but the robots will attack and annihilate ''each other'' before they ever turn on you! Thus, you have to rely on robots' tendency to kill each other before they kill you.
** It's even been done with [[Doctor Who|Daleks]].
* The Windows program ''Mission Maker'' has extremely primitive AI. Make a character 'Seek and Destroy' the player, then get another character between them. The hostile character, instead of moving around, will ''kill the other character to get to the player''.
* The classic arcade game ''[[Berzerk]]'' allows you to make enemies [[Collision Damage|crash into each other to kill each other]]. Or if you're lucky and clever, into the edges of walls.
* Exploiting the [[Artificial Stupidity]] of the guards in ''[[Lode Runner]]'' is very useful, with some levels relying on it. For instance, you can position yourself on a ladder so they climb upwards when you're directly below them.
* ''[[Golden Axe]]''. Good game, [http://epicgoldenaxe.ytmnd.com/ comically bad AI]. Enemies will often suicide themselves without your "help". The most effective way to beat Duel is to get 2 enemies on opposite ends of the screen and keep fly kicking off them, like a pendulum swinging left and right. Mario enemies are smarter than this.
* In ''[[Splinter Cell]] Conviction'', at one point you are confronted with an enemy helicopter gunship. It always shoots in front of Sam and never thinks to try and flank him.
* The usual method to beat the last boss in ''[[Guitar Hero]] III'' invokes this. Basically, there's a certain point where a Whammy attack will kill him in one hit. Why is this? In that particular section, instead of using the whammy bar to recover, he just hammers the STRUM BAR until he kills himself. One critical flaw in an otherwise complete bastard.
* Computer controlled helpers in ''[[Kirby]] Super Star'' have their uses, but don't expect them to live very long. Fortunately they're easy to replace.
** Similarly, your AI allies in ''[[Kirby]] and the Amazing Mirror'' can be counted on for jack squat. They'll mill around in random areas, getting random abilities [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|(including abilities not in their current area)]], and if you call them to your side...well, it's usually for one of three reasons: a boss fight, the fact that they bring health-restoring food with them, or one of them somehow snagged the [[Game Breaker|Smash]] ability and you're just waiting for them to screw up so you can use it yourself.
* If you've ever played a video game adaptation of a game show, you've probably encountered computer contestants that couldn't answer simple questions correctly. ''[[Press Your Luck]]'' for the Wii is one of the [[Egregious]] examples, with computer opponents answering questions such as "What animal do we get milk from?", "What is 36 divided by 6?", or "How many months are in a year?" wrong.
** Old versions of Jeopardy! for PC in the early 1990's had the AI contestants buzz in and answer in complete gibberish. The answer pool was so small that pulling a wrong answer from that could clue the player in another time.
*** The above is true for the NES versions as well (save for Super Jeopardy!). However, the gibberish is the exact same length as the correct response, and often shows some letters in the response as well. For example, if a correct response is [[TV Tropes]], the AI would show something like *V@r#pes.
* ''[[Demigod]]'', a Defence of the Ancients type game tends to inflict this on players when they go against the bots on higher difficulty levels. The opposing team will specialise in hit-and-run tactics, prioritise game-changers like Reinforcement Flags, and just generally give you a run for your money. Your allies, on the other hand, will position themselves directly between two enemy gun posts and pick on irrelevant minions, while being whaled on by the enemy, thus feeding your opponents both gold and experience. Since your opponents are now relatively stronger, and can afford to upgrade their defensive structures, this process becomes streamlined, resulting in ally deaths roughly every few minutes.
* [[Star Fox (series)|Star FOX]] series has wingmen's "calling for a help" as a fixed pattern in every side scrolling stages. They can't help themselves and will go down if you don't help them. All Range Mode, however, turns their stupidity up to eleven.
** One particularly notable example of how bad the wingmen's AI is in All Range Mode is in the Star Wolf dogfights in [[Star Fox 64]]. Each Star Wolf pilot is programmed to target a specific member of your squadron. Each wingman will constantly plead for you to help him by shooting down the Star Wolf member who's on his tail. Once you do, he will blissfully fly around in a circle minding his own business and make no effort to help you as the remaining Star Wolf members continue to rip you and your other wingmen to shreds.
** To be fair on that one, your wingmen destroying one of the Star Wolf pilots would screw you out of fair chunk of points, since things they destroy aren't counted toward the point total. Why they couldn't just let the things they do count isn't totally clear, but it's still better to have them do nothing than do something that hurts you.
* The buses in ''[[The Simpsons Road Rage]]'' constantly crash into anything in sight without any provoking them, typically you.
* {{spoiler|Wheatley, also known as the Intelligence Dampening Sphere}} in ''[[Portal 2]]'' is a deliberate [[In-Universe]] example, described by GLaDOS as "the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived", and "the moron they built to make me an idiot".
* ''Pokemon Card GB2'' acts stupid in a lot of ways:
** The AI will use cards such as Professor Oak and Bill a lot, and nearly always use attacks and other stuff to just draw more cards. And then run out of cards and they complain of losing...
** They tend to play better at attack than defense and nearly always choose to attack even when it is not beneficial to do so (probably in a misguided attempt to pick up more side cards and win the game faster). Including the use of Defender at times when it actually helps his opponent.
** Also using Gust of Wind to cheaply knock out your cards, which is usually a waste and just gives you a free switch (although occasionally this is the correct play with Gust of Wind, it usually isn't), rather than us
** They also seem to completely disregard your ability to damage their bench pokemon cards, or the possibility that their resistance to your cards might actually help you (which, if you can damage their bench pokemon cards, can happen a lot).
** There is other dumb stuff too which is difficult to know why it even comes up with such things, as damage swapping to one of their bench pokemon cards the same as their active one and then retreating to that damaged benched one, and then doing the same on the next turn...what???
== Real Life ==
* In the first annual Loebner Prize contest to find the most humanlike chatbot, the winner won in part because it could imitate human typing errors. One runner-up also got its high score by pretending to be a paranoid autistic seven-year-old. ''The Economist'''s use of the term "artificial stupidity" to describe the winner's technique may be the [[Trope Namer]].
* Sometimes, it only takes a small bit of pushing to get an otherwise sane and normal IRC chatbot to go get itself killed. Repeatedly. By the same action. [http://irc.digibase.ca/qdb/?16 Bonus points for the bot in question acknowledging the action].
* In [[Epic Games]]'s [http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/AIOverview.html documentation] of the ''Unreal Development Kit'''s AI, they state that, in their games, (the [[Unreal]] series and [[Gears of War]]) they have to balance artificial stupidity and artificial intelligence to make their bots feel human; too much intelligence and it's obvious you're playing against a flawless machine ("Perfect aim is easy, but missing like a human player is hard."), too much stupidity, even if it would be realistic for a human player, and people think the AI is just dumb. They said that, during the playtesting for ''[[Unreal Tournament 3|Unreal Tournament III]]'', one of their designers complained about how poorly the AI was faring on a particular map, not realising he'd been facing humans.
* [[Played for Laughs]] by the annual Baca Robo Contest [http://io9.com/5685852/heres-a-highlight-reel-from-the-worlds-stupidest-robot-competition that in 2010 took place in Budapest]. The goal for the participants is to create the most ridiculous robotic creation possible, and the one that gets the most laughs from the audience wins a €2,000 prize. Of course, here the Artificial Stupidity is quite intentional.
* Norton Antivirus. Which, according to the [[Idiot Programming]] page, has been known to classify ''itself'' as a virus. [[Hilarity Ensues|Hilarity, and digital suicide, ensues]].
* Probably the worst [[Epic Fail]] in the history of computer chess occurred in the game played by COKO III against GENIE in the 1971 ACM North American Computer Chess Championship. COKO had captured all the Black pieces, trapped the Black king and was all set to checkmate. But COKO overlooked mate in one for seven moves in a row, instead shuffling the White king back and forth. GENIE's response to this indecisiveness was to push its Black pawns until one became a queen, which it exchanged for all the White pieces and a couple of pawns. By the time Black was about to queen another pawn, COKO's programmers resigned.
* The Grammar checker in Microsoft Word is always drawing green lines under your sentences, but the suggestions it makes (if any) to resolve the problem almost never make any kind of sense in context or scan in a way that would sound right to a native English speaker. And then there's [[Stop Helping Me!|Clippy]]... Oh [[The Scrappy|Clippy]]...
** Most of the time, the grammar error given is "Fragment (consider revising)", which doesn't really explain much (it basically means that the sentence isn't a complete one, but it's very picky about what it considers a complete sentence). As for Clippy, the sentence "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like some help?" is almost memetic in how much anyone trying to write anything in Word will get irritated upon seeing it. Thankfully you can disable the Office Assistant (of which Clippy is one of many), which many people do, to the point that later editions of Microsoft Word no longer included them.
** On occasions, the grammar checker will identify a sentence as a grammar error, then after correcting, ''identify the corrected sentence as a grammar error''.
* Non-electronic example! [http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/23630/ The Amazing Dr Nim] is basically a marble track with a number of gates which can either allow marbles to pass or block them. This allows it to play a perfect game of [[wikipedia:Nim|Nim]]. In order for it to be beatable, it includes an 'equaliser' gate. When set to on, this causes it to make a single non-optimal play over the course of the game, allowing a perfect human player to win an otherwise unwinnable game.
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