Interactive fiction
As you have already seen, computer games are not only entertaining for humans, but also provide challenging problems for RL researchers due to the complicated observations and action spaces, long sequences of decisions to be made during the gameplay, and natural reward systems.
Arcade games like Atari 2600 are just one of many genres that the gaming industry has. From a historical perspective, the Atari 2600 platform peaked in popularity during the late 70s and early 80s. Then followed the era of Z80 and clones, which evolved into the period of the PC-compatible platforms and consoles we have now.
Over time, computer games continually become more complex, colorful, and detailed in terms of graphics, which inevitably increases hardware requirements. This trend makes it harder for RL researchers and practitioners to apply RL methods to the more recent games; for example, almost everybody can train an RL agent to solve an Atari game, but for StarCraft II, DeepMind...
