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.

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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
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article

Pixels to Play: A Foundation Model for 3D Gameplay

Wenzhe Shi, Samuel Hunt, Yuguang Yue, Jonathan J. Hunt et al.
Digital Games and Media
article

Pixels to Play: A Foundation Model for 3D Gameplay

Wenzhe Shi, Samuel Hunt, Yuguang Yue, Jonathan J. Hunt, Irakli Salia, Chris Green
article en

Abstract

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.

Strayer University (US), PnP Innovations (United States) (US), Malayer University (IR)
Openalex Percentile: Top 72%
Digital Games and Media
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Pixels to Play: A Foundation Model for 3D Gameplay — Wenzhe Shi, Samuel Hunt, et al. · (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS