Effective cooperation between humans and technologies powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) is decisive to fully exploit AI’s economic and social potentials. However, the adoption of AI is often opposed by a lack of humans’ trust in AI systems and a dearth of interest in working with them. Turning to games for getting inspiration on how to optimize human-AI cooperation seems promising, since games engage humans almost effortlessly in interacting and cooperating with artificial non-player characters (NPCs). However, a structured overview on how game design can optimize human-AI cooperation is missing in existing gamification research. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic review of NPC design patterns and elaborates on what developers of AI systems can learn from game design. Guided by a thematic analysis, we present a structured overview of relevant design patterns clustered along six focus fields - namely I) NPC responsiveness, (II) appearance of NPCs, (III) NPC communication patterns, (IV) emotional aspects, (V) behavioral characteristics, and (VI) player-NPC and NPC-NPC team structures – which advance our understanding of designing and investigating cooperation between humans and NPCs. The insights of this paper can guide practitioners and future research regarding the design of more effective AI systems, the gamification of human-AI cooperation, and the development of innovative NPC approaches.