Games for Artificial Intelligence Research: A Review and Perspectives

This page provides the links to the source code of the game-based platforms for AI research, corresponding research papers, and competitions collected in our survey paper "Games for Artificial Intelligence Research: A Review and Perspectives".

Playing Games by AI (Section III)

Board Games (Section III.A)

• ColorShapeLinks: <ColorShapeLinks: A board game AI competition for educators and students> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by N. Fachada, 2021.

• Mjai: <Mjai: Game server for japanese mahjong AI> <Github Link>, 2014.

• Mjx: <Mjx: A framework for Mahjong AI research> <Github Link> by S. Koyamada, K. Habara, N. Goto, S. Okano, S. Nishimori, and S. Ishii, 2022.

• Blood Bowl: <Blood Bowl: A new board game challenge and competition for AI> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by N. Justesen, L. M. Uth, C. Jakobsen, P. D. Moore, J. Togelius, and S. Risi, 2019.

• Diplomacy: <Mastering the game of no-press diplomacy via human-regularized reinforcement learning and planning> <Github Link> by A. Bakhtin, D. J. Wu, A. Lerer, J. Gray, A. P. Jacob, G. Farina, A. H. Miller, and N. Brown, 2023.

Card Games (Section III.A)

• VGC: <VGC AI competition - A new model of meta-game balance AI competition> <Gitlab Link> <Competition Link> by S. Reis, L. P. Reis, and N. Lau, 2021.

• Tales of Tributes: <Introducing Tales of Tribute AI competition> <Github Link> by D. Budzki, D. Kowalik, and K. Polak, 2023.

• SabberStone: <Introducing the hearthstone-AI competition> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by A. Dockhorn and S. Mostaghim, 2019.

• Fireplace: <Github Link> <Competition Link> by Hearthsim, 2014.

• ben: <Github Link> <Competition Link> by L. Dali, 2022.

• Hanabi <The Hanabi challenge: A new frontier for AI research> <Github Link> by . Bard, J. N. Foerster, S. Chandar, N. Burch, M. Lanctot, H. F. Song, E. Parisotto, V. Dumoulin, S. Moitra, E. Hughes, I. Dunning, S. Mourad, H. Larochelle, M. G. Bellemare, and M. Bowling, 2020.

Social Games (Section III.A)

• The Chef's Hat <It's food fight! Introducing the chef's hat card game for affective-aware HRI> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by P. Barros, A. Sciutti, A. C. Bloem, I. M. Hootsmans, L. M. Opheij, R. H. Toebosch, and E. Barakova, 2021.

• AI wolf: <AI wolf contest—development of game AI using collective intelligence> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by F. Toriumi, H. Osawa, M. Inaba, D. Katagami, K. Shinoda, and H. Matsubara, 2016.

Text Games (Section III.A)

• Light: <Learning to speak and act in a fantasy text adventure game> <Github Link> by J. Urbanek, A. Fan, S. Karamcheti, S. Jain, S. Humeau, E. Dinan, T. Rocktäschel, D. Kiela, A. Szlam, and J. Weston, 2019.

Grid-based 2D Video Games (Section III.B.1)

• Snake AI: <Snakes AI competition 2020 and 2021 report> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by J. A. Brown, L. J. P. de Araujo, and A. Grichshenko, 2021.

• SimCity: <Using fractal neural networks to play SimCity 1 and conway’s game of life at bariable scales> <Github Link> by S. Earle, 2020.

• Nethack: <The NetHack learning environment> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by H. Küttler, N. Nardelli, A. Miller, R. Raileanu, M. Selvatici, E. Grefenstette, and T. Rocktäschel, 2020.

• Pommerman: <Pommerman: A multi-agent playground> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by C. Resnick, W. Eldridge, D. Ha, D. Britz, J. Foerster, J. Togelius, K. Cho, and J. Bruna, 2018.

• Neural MMO: <Neural MMO: A massively multiagent game environment for training and evaluating intelligent agents> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by J. Suarez, Y. Du, C. Zhu, I. Mordatch, and P. Isola, 2021.

• microRTS: <The first microRTS artificial intelligence competition> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by S. Ontañón, N. A. Barriga, C. R. Silva, R. O. Moraes, and L. H. Lelis, 2018.

• Tribe: <Tribes: A new turn-based strategy game for AI> <Github Link> by D. Perez-Liebana, Y.-J. Hsu, S. Emmanouilidis, B. Khaleque, and R. Gaina, 2020.

• Overcooked: <Overcooked! On the utility of learning about humans for human-AI coordination> <Github Link> by M. Carroll, R. Shah, M. K. Ho, T. L. Griffiths, S. A. Seshia, P. Abbeel, and A. Dragan, 2019.

• CuisineWorld: <MindAgent: Emergent gaming interaction> <Github Link> (waiting for updates from authors) by R. Gong, Q. Huang, X. Ma, H. Vo, Z. Durante, Y. Noda, Z. Zheng, S.-C. Zhu, D. Terzopoulos, L. Fei-Fei, and J. Gao, 2023.

Pixel-based 2D Video Games (Section III.B.2)

• Mario AI: <The Mario AI benchmark and competitions> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by S. Karakovskiy and J. Togelius, 2012.

• MsPacMan-vs-Ghosts: <Ms. pac-manversus ghost team cig 2016 competition,> <Github Link> by P. R. Williams, D. Perez-Liebana, and S. M. Lucas, , 2016.

• Geometry Friends: <Geometry friends game AI competition> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by R. Prada, P. Lopes, J. Catarino, J. Quitério, and F. S. Melo, 2015.

• AIGD2: <Game AI research with fast Planet Wars variants> <Github Link> S. M. Lucas, 2018.

• XFC: <[Explainable fuzzy AI challenage]> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by T. Arnett, K. Cohen, N. Ernest, Z. Phillips, L. Pickering, and S. King, 2021.

• FightingICE: <DareFightingICE competition: A fighting game sound design and AI competition> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by I. Khan, T. Van Nguyen, X. Dai, and R. Thawonmas, 2013.

• AIBIRDS: <AI meets angry birds> <Competition Link> by J. Renz, X. Ge, M. Stephenson, and P. Zhang, 2012.

• nsh: <[nsh: A simulated game environment for the commercial game justice online] <Github Link> by NeteaseFuXiRL, 2020.

• Honor of Kings Arena: <Honor of Kings Arena: An Environment for Generalization in Competitive Reinforcement Learning> <Github Link>by H. Wei, J. Chen, X. Ji, H. Qin, M. Deng, S. Li, L. Wang, W. Zhang, Y. Yu, L. Liu, L. Huang, D. Ye, Q. Fu, and W. Yang, 2022.

• Dota2: <Dota 2 with large scale deep reinforcement learning> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by C. Berner, G. Brockman, B. Chan, V. Cheung, P. D˛ebiak, C. Dennison, D. Farhi, Q. Fischer, S. Hashme, C. Hesse, R. Józefowicz, S. Gray, C. Olsson, J. Pachocki, M. Petrov, H. P. d.O. Pinto, J. Raiman, T. Salimans, J. Schlatter, J. Schneider, S. Sidor, I. Sutskever, J. Tang, F. Wolski, and S. Zhang, 2019.

• Dunk city dynasty,: <Github Link> by NeteaseFuXiRL, 2023.

• Starcraft II: <Starcraft II: A new challenge for reinforcement learning> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by O. Vinyals, I. Babuschkin, W. M. Czarnecki, M. M. and Andrew Dudzik, J. Chung, D. H. Choi, R. Powell, T. Ewalds, P. Georgiev, J. Oh, D. Horgan, M. Kroiss, I. Danihelka, A. Huang, L. Sifre, T. Cai, J. P. Agapiou, M. Jaderberg, A. S. Vezhnevets, R. Leblond, T. Pohlen, V. Dalibard, D. Budden, Y. Sulsky, J. Molloy, T. L. Paine, C. Gulcehre, Z. Wang, T. Pfaff, Y. Wu, R. Ring, D. Yogatama, D. Wünsch, K. McKinney, O. Smith, T. Schaul, T. Lillicrap, K. Kavukcuoglu, D. Hassabis, C. Apps, and D. Silver, 2017.

3D Video Games (Section III.B.3)

• MineRL: <MineRL Diamond challenge> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by W. H. Guss, B. Houghton, N. Topin, P. Wang, C. Codel, M. Veloso, and R. Salakhutdinov, 2019.

• MineDojo: <MineDojo: Building open-ended embodied agents with internet-scale knowledge> <Github Link> <Competition Link> L. Fan, G. Wang, Y. Jiang, A. Mandlekar, Y. Yang, H. Zhu, A. Tang, D.-A. Huang, Y. Zhu, and A. Anandkumar, 2022.

• Google Research Football: <Google Research Football: A novel reinforcement learning environment> <Github Link> by K. Kurach, A. Raichuk, P. Sta ́nczyk, M. Zaj ̨ac, O. Bachem, L. Espeholt, C. Riquelme, D. Vincent, M. Michalski, O. Bousquet et al., 2020.

• VizDoom: <ViZDoom: A Doom-based AI Research Platform for Visual Reinforcement Learning> <Competition Link> by M. Kempka, M. Wydmuch, G. Runc, J. Toczek, and W. Jaskowski, 2019.

• Hide and Seek: <Emergent tooL use from multi-agent AUTOCURRICULA> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by B. Baker, I. Kanitscheider, T. Markov, Y. Wu, G. Powell, B. McGrew, and I. Mordatch, 2020.

Platforms with Multiple Games (Section III.C)

• GGP: <General game playing: Overview of the AAAI competition> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by M. Genesereth, N. Love, and B. Pell, 2005.

• Botzone: <“Botzone: A competitive and interactive platform for game AI education> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by H. Zhou, Y. Zhou, H. Zhang, H. Huang, and W. Li, 2017.

• OpenSpiel: <OpenSpiel: A framework for reinforcement learning in games> <Github Link> by M. Lanctot, E. Lockhart, J.-B. Lespiau, V. Zambaldi, S. Upadhyay, J. Pérolat, S. Srinivasan, F. Timbers, K. Tuyls, S. Omidshafiei, D. Hennes, D. Morrill, P. Muller, T. Ewalds, R. Faulkner, J. Kramár, B. D. Vylder, B. Saeta, J. Bradbury, D. Ding, S. Borgeaud, M. Lai, J. Schrittwieser, T. Anthony, E. Hughes, I. Danihelka, and J. Ryan-Davis, 2020.

• TAG: <TAG: Tabletop games framework> <Github Link> by R. D. Gaina, M. Balla, A. Dockhorn, R. Montoliu, and D. PerezLiebana, 2020.

• Ludii: <Ludii as a competition platform> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by M. Stephenson, E. Piette, D. J. Soemers, and C. Browne, 2019.

• Pgx: <Pgx: Hardware-accelerated parallel hame simulators for reinforcement learning> <Github Link> by S. Koyamada, S. Okano, S. Nishimori, Y. Murata, K. Habara, H. Kita, and S. Ishii, 2023.

• Gym: <OpenAI Gym> <Github Link> by G. Brockman, V. Cheung, L. Pettersson, J. Schneider, J. Schulman, J. Tang, and W. Zaremba, 2016.

• PettingZoo: <PettingZoo: Gym for multi-agent reinforcement learning> <Github Link> by J. K. Terry, B. Black, A. Hari, L. S. Santos, C. Dieffendahl, N. L. Williams, Y. Lokesh, C. Horsch, and P. Ravi, 2020.

• GVGAI: <General video game AI: Competition, challenges and opportunities> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by D. Perez-Liebana, S. Samothrakis, J. Togelius, T. Schaul, and S. M. Lucas, 2016.

• GVGAI gym: <Deep reinforcement learning for general video game AI> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by R. R. Torrado, P. Bontrager, J. Togelius, J. Liu and D. Perez-Liebana, 2018.

• Minigrid: <Minimalistic gridworld environment for gymnasium> by M. Chevalier-Boisvert, L. Willems, and S. Pal, 2018.

• Melting Pot: <Scalable evaluation of multi-agent reinforcement learning with melting pot> <Github Link> by J. Z. Leibo, E. A. Dueñez-Guzman, A. Vezhnevets, J. P. Agapiou, P. Sunehag, R. Koster, J. Matyas, C. Beattie, I. Mordatch, and T. Graepel, 2021.

• STRATEGA: <STRATEGA: A general strategy games framework> <Github Link> by A. Dockhorn, J. H. Grueso, D. Jeurissen, and D. P. Liebana, 2020.

• Griddly: <Griddly: A platform for AI research in games> <Github Link> by C. Bamford, 2021.

• Retro: <Playing SNES in the retro learning environment> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by N. Bhonker, S. Rozenberg, and I. Hubara, 2016.

• Procgen: <Leveraging procedural generation to benchmark reinforcement learning> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by K. Cobbe, C. Hesse, J. Hilton, and J. Schulman, 2019.

• Olympics-Integrated: <AI olympics competition> <Competition Link> by H. Zhang and Y. Cui, 2022.

• DeepMind Lab: <DeepMind Lab> <Github Link> by C. Beattie, J. Z. Leibo, D. Teplyashin, T. Ward, M. Wainwright, H. Küttler, A. Lefrancq, S. Green, V. Valdés, A. Sadik, J. Schrittwieser, K. Anderson, S. York, M. Cant, A. Cain, A. Bolton, S. Gaffney, H. King, D. Hassabis, S. Legg, and S. Petersen, 2016.

• ML-agents: <Unity: A general platform for intelligent agents> <Github Link> by A. Juliani, V.-P. Berges, E. Teng, A. Cohen, J. Harper, C. Elion, C. Goy, Y. Gao, H. Henry, M. Mattar, and D. Lange, 2018.

• MiniWorld: <MiniWorld: Minimalistic 3D environment for RL & robotics research> by M. Chevalier-Boisvert, 2018.

Designing Games by AI (Section IV)

Game Tuning (Section IV.A)

• FightingICE: <Fighting game artificial intelligence competition platform> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by F. Lu, K. Yamamoto, L. H. Nomura, S. Mizuno, Y. Lee, R. R. Thawonmas, 2013.

• AIGD2: <Game AI research with fast Planet Wars variants> <Github Link> by S. M. Lucas, 2018.

• VGC: <VGC AI competition - A new model of meta-game balance AI competition> <Gitlab Link> <Competition Link> by S. Reis, L. P. Reis, and N. Lau, 2021.

• RaidEnv: <RaidEnv: Exploring new challenges in automated content balancing for boss raid games> <Githab Link> by H.-C. Jeon, I.-C. Baek, C.-m. Bae, T. Park, W. You, T. Ha, H. Jung, J. Noh, S. Oh, and K.-J. Kim, 2023.

Content Generation (Section IV.B)

2D Map/Level (Section IV.B.1)

• Science Birds: <A Search-based approach for generating Angry Birds levels> <Github Link> by L. Ferreira and C. Toledo, 2014.

• Mario AI: <The Mario AI benchmark and competitions> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by S. Karakovskiy and J. Togelius, 2012.

• Morai-Maker-Engine: <Friend, collaborator, student, manager: How design of an AI-driven game level editor affects creators> <Github Link> M. Guzdial, N. Liao, J. Chen, S.-Y. Chen, S. Shah, V. Shah, J. Reno, G. Smith, and M. O. Riedl, 2019.

• HOG2: <Hierarchical open graph 2> by N. Sturtevant, 2015.

• Procedural Zelda: <Procedural zelda: A PCG environment for player experience research> <Github Link> by N. Heijne and S. Bakkes, 2017.

• Talakat: <Talakat: Bullet hell generation through constrained MAP-Elites> <Github Link> by A. Khalifa, S. Lee, A. Nealen, and J. Togelius, 2018.

• Keiki: <Keiki: Towards realistic danmaku generation via sequential GANs> <Github Link> by Z. Wang, J. Liu, and G. N. Yannakakis, 2021.

• PCGRL gym: <PCGRL: Procedural content generation via reinforcement learning> <Github Link> by A. Khalifa, P. Bontrager, S. Earle, and J. Togelius, 2020.

• micro-rct: <Learning controllable content generators> <Github Link> by S. Earle, M. Edwards, A. Khalifa, P. Bontrager, and J. Togelius, 2021.

3D Map/Level (Section IV.B.2)

• GDMC: <The AI settlement generation challenge in Minecraft> <Github Link> <Competition Link> by C. Salge, M. C. Green, R. Canaan, F. Skwarski, R. Fritsch, A. Brightmoore, S. Ye, C. Cao, and J. Togelius, 2020.

• SimSim: <Say “Sul Sul!” to SimSim, A sims-inspired platform for sandbox game AI> <Github Link> by M. Charity, D. Rajesh, R. Ombok, and L. B. Soros, 2020.

Narrative (Section IV.B.3)

• Textworld: <Textworld: A learning environment for text-based games> <Github Link> by M.-A. Côté, A. Kádár, X. Yuan, B. Kybartas, T. Barnes, E. Fine, J. Moore, M. Hausknecht, L. El Asri, M. Adada et al, 2018.

• Evennia: <Bringing stories alive: Generating interactive fiction worlds> <Github Link> by P. Ammanabrolu, W. Cheung, D. Tu, W. Broniec, and M. Riedl, 2020.

Rhythm Chart (Section IV.B.4)

• StepMania: <StepMania> <Github Link>

• OSU! <OSU!> <Github Link>

Card (Section IV.B.5)

• XMage: <Latent predictor networks for code generation> <Github Link> by W. Ling, E. Grefenstette, K. M. Hermann, T. Kocisky, A. Senior, F. Wang, and P. Blunsom, 2016.

• Metastone: <Monte carlo tree search experiments in hearthstone> <Github Link> by A. Santos, P. A. Santos, and F. S. Melo, 2017.

Other

Code (Section IV.C)

• PhyDSL: <PhyDSL: A code-generation environment for 2D physics-based games> <Web page> by V. Guana and E. Stroulia, 2015.

Persona (Section IV.C)

• Minidungeons: <Evolving personas for player decision modeling> <Github Link> by C. Holmgård, A. Liapis, J. Togelius, and G. N. Yannakakis, 2014.

Data set (Section IV.C)

• VGLC: <VGLC : The video game level corpus> <Github Link> by A. J. Summerville, S. Snodgrass, M. Mateas, and S. Ontanon, 2016.

Interactive (Section IV.C)

• Baba is Y’all: <Baba is Y’all: Collaborative mixed-initiative level design> <Web page> by M. Charity, A. Khalifa, and J. Togelius, 2020.

• Lode Encoder: <Lode Encoder: AI-constrained co-creativity> <Web page> by D. Bhaumik, A. Khalifa, and J. Togelius, 2021.