Don't think of AI in terms of operating just like a human player. No professional game AI programmer does. Think of AI in terms of just providing a fun experience for the player. If it takes some less than realistic code to do so then fine, it doesn't really matter. If you're making bots for games, going overboard trying to make them all operate on the same principles humans do will only bloat/slow your code and cripple your development. Leave that to academic researchers and concentrate on making a fun bot. There isn't a professional game AI programmer in the world that makes their AI for games operate so closely to human perception models. It's all about simulating human perception systems as simply and efficiently as possible within the requirements of the game. If it is more complicated perception systems that you want to experiment with then that's fine, but more often than not the simpler methods produce pretty much the same results, while the more complex methods eat more resources for little gain much of the time.
If you're interested you can play with my bot framework in several games to work on bot coding itself, rather than worrying about interfacing with the game.
http://www.omni-bot.com
My bot framework was essentially designed for people like you, that might not want to toy with interfacing with a game so much as they want to get right to the bot coding. You can override existing perception systems and all that as well if you wanted to experiment with different stuff than what it uses by default. Currently the game works with Quake 4, Enemy Territory, and HL2.
Ultimately it depends on your goals, whether they are more academic and researching in nature, or whether you are actually trying to make a fun and efficient bot AI.
My 2c