  The space of Artificial Intelligence entities is dominated by conversational
bots. Some of them fit in our pockets and we take them everywhere we go, or
allow them to be a part of human homes. Siri, Alexa, they are recognised as
present in our world. But a lot of games research is restricted to existing in
the separate realm of software. We enter different worlds when playing games,
but those worlds cease to exist once we quit. Similarly, AI game-players are
run once on a game (or maybe for longer periods of time, in the case of
learning algorithms which need some, still limited, period for training), and
they cease to exist once the game ends. But what if they didn't? What if there
existed artificial game-players that continuously played games, learned from
their experiences and kept getting better? What if they interacted with the
real world and us, humans: live-streaming games, chatting with viewers,
accepting suggestions for strategies or games to play, forming opinions on
popular game titles? In this paper, we introduce the vision behind a new
project called Thyia, which focuses around creating a present, continuous,
`always-on', interactive game-player.
