Video games have served as useful benchmarks for the decision making community, but going beyond Atari games towards training agents in modern games has been prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of the research community. Recent progress in the research, development and open release of large vision models has the potential to amortize some of these costs across the community. However, it is currently unclear which of these models have learnt representations that retain information critical for sequential decision making. Towards enabling wider participation in the research of gameplaying agents in modern games, we present a systematic study of imitation learning with publicly available visual encoders compared to the typical, task-specific, end-to-end training approach in Minecraft, Minecraft Dungeons and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Figure 1: Representative screenshots of all games studied in this paper. However, video games do not only serve as benchmarks but also represent a vast entertainment industry where AI agents may eventually have applications in games development, including game testing or game design (Jacob et al., 2020; Gillberg et al., 2023). In the past, video game research often necessitated close integration with the games themselves to obtain game-specific information and establish a scalable interface for training agents. Work was conducted during an internship at Microsoft Research. To eliminate integration costs during training, we use behavior cloning to train agents entirely offline, utilising previously collected human gameplay data. Although prior research has explored encoding images into lower-dimensional representations for behavior cloning, these studies primarily targeted robotics applications (Nair et al., 2022), where images often resemble real-world scenes. Inspired by the challenges and potential applications in video games, we investigate the following research question: How can images be encoded for data-efficient imitation learning in modern video games? Towards our guiding research question, we compare both end-to-end trained visual encoders and pre-trained visual encoders in three modern video games: Minecraft, Minecraft Dungeons and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO).

Microsoft's long-awaited xCloud game-streaming service officially launches tomorrow with more than 150 games. One of those games is Minecraft Dungeons, and Microsoft has just announced that developers Mojang Studios and Double Eleven are making it easier to play the game on the go by optimizing it for touch controls. This means that you can play the game on your Android phone or tablet without needing to hook up an external controller. Pretty much all Xbox games that are part of xCloud were developed with the Xbox controller in mind, so Microsoft imagines most people will play them by clipping a controller to a smartphone. But in this case, Microsoft wanted the game to feel native to mobile, so it'll have not only touch controls but also a redesigned UI better suited to a small screen.

In the 1990s, before hitting at infinitely repeatable success with the action-adventure formula of the Lego Star Wars games, Lego used to put out a lot of videogames. Under the Lego Interactive banner, the company released a diverse slate of PC and console titles, in a variety of genres. If you were a kid with a PC in the late '90s, your first introduction to real-time strategy might not have been Starcraft but Lego Rock Raiders. These games were all aimed at kids, and at their best they made hardcore gaming more legible to kids by--and this is a terrible phrase, apologies in advance--leveraging the Lego brand. Lego aesthetics met fun, straightforward takes on interesting corners of the videogame universe.

When the idea to make a Minecraft spinoff was first batted around at Mojang Studios, a dungeon crawler game must have been one of the first suggestions. From Gauntlet to Diablo, this genre has always featured dank subterranean lairs, treasure chests and warrior skeletons – all beloved Minecraft components. The signature blocky visuals also work well, ensuring that Minecraft Dungeons will look familiar to fans as they hurtle through dioramas of hack-and-slash fun that rearrange themselves each time you play. The plot is paper thin: a vengeful loner discovers a treasure that turns him into a powerful mage and duly begins a reign of terror over the Minecraft kingdom. The game can be played alone, but it is most enjoyable to play its co-op mode, which can be enjoyed on a console or online.

A successor to the Xbox One might be revealed during E3 2019. Is an unveiling of the next Xbox on the horizon? Microsoft will host its annual briefing during the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles on Sunday, where we might see the future of the video game console on display. More proof zombies never seem to go out of style in video games. This time it's Forza Horizon 4, and an expansion that features Lego cars, called Lego Speed Champions, which is really amazing.