Pixels to Play: A Foundation Model for 3D Gameplay
We introduce Pixels2Play-0.1 (P2P0.1), a foundation model that learns to play a wide range of 3 D video games with recognizable human-like behavior. Motivated by emerging consumer and developer use cases-AI teammates, controllable NPCs, personalized live-streamers, assistive testers-we argue that an agent must rely on the same pixel stream available to players and generalize to new titles with minimal gamespecific engineering. P2P0.1 is trained end-to-end with behavior cloning: labeled demonstrations collected from instrumented human game-play are complemented by unlabeled public videos, to which we impute actions via an inverse-dynamics model. A decoder-only transformer with auto-regressive action output handles the large action space while remaining latency-friendly on a single consumer GPU. We report qualitative results showing competent play across simple Roblox and classic MS-DOS titles, ablations on unlabeled data, and outline the scaling and evaluation steps required to reach expert-level, text-conditioned control.
Authors
- Wenzhe Shi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9750-6379)
- Samuel Hunt
- Yuguang Yue (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9771-3557)
- Jonathan J. Hunt
- Irakli Salia
- Chris Green (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6620-4979)
Institutions
- Strayer University (US)
- PnP Innovations (United States) (US)
- Malayer University (IR)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2025-08-19
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1109/cog64752.2025.11114171
- Primary Topic
- Digital Games and Media
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00