# Large Language Models and Games: A Survey and Roadmap

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18659 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18659/

## Key facts

- Cited by 93 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 91 of its 191 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 91)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08896/) (2023)
- [A Generalist Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06175/) (2022)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [TinyLlama: An Open-Source Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02385/) (2024)
- [ERNIE: Enhanced Language Representation with Informative Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07129/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06196/) (2024)
- [Jailbreaking ChatGPT via Prompt Engineering: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13860/) (2023)
- [Emergent World Representations: Exploring a Sequence Model Trained on a Synthetic Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13382/) (2022)
- [Trustworthy LLMs: a Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models' Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05374/) (2023)
- [Behavior Transformers: Cloning k modes with one stone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11251/) (2022)
- [Role-Play with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16367/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03393/) (2023)
- [Mathematical Capabilities of ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13867/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 93)

- [A Survey on Large Language Model-Based Game Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02039/) (2024)
- [A Review of Prominent Paradigms for LLM-Based Agents: Tool Use (Including RAG), Planning, and Feedback Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05804/) (2024)
- [MedAgent-Pro: Towards Evidence-based Multi-modal Medical Diagnosis via Reasoning Agentic Workflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18968/) (2025)
- [GameDevBench: Evaluating Agentic Capabilities Through Game Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11103/) (2026)
- [Game Generation via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08706/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models with Grid-Based Game Competitions: An Extensible LLM Benchmark and Leaderboard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07796/) (2024)
- [Agents of Change: Self-Evolving LLM Agents for Strategic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04651/) (2025)
- [Surveying the MLLM Landscape: A Meta-Review of Current Surveys](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18991/) (2024)
- [Word2World: Generating Stories and Worlds through Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06686/) (2024)
- [OpenGame: Open Agentic Coding for Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18394/) (2026)
- [GUI Agents for Continual Game Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28258/) (2026)
- [Robust LLM Training Infrastructure at ByteDance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16293/) (2025)
- [Unbounded: A Generative Infinite Game of Character Life Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18975/) (2024)
- [VideoGameBunny: Towards vision assistants for video games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15295/) (2024)
- [GameGen-Verifier: Parallel Keypoint-Based Verification for LLM-Generated Games via Runtime State Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07442/) (2026)
- [CharacterGPT: A Persona Reconstruction Framework for Role-Playing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19778/) (2024)
- [DreamGarden: A Designer Assistant for Growing Games from a Single Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01791/) (2024)
- [GPT for Games: An Updated Scoping Review (2020-2024)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00308/) (2024)
- [Gatekeeper: Improving Model Cascades Through Confidence Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19335/) (2025)
- [Agents Play Thousands of 3D Video Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13356/) (2025)
- [GVGAI-LLM: Evaluating Large Language Model Agents with Infinite Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08501/) (2025)
- [Open-Ended Wargames with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11446/) (2024)
- [Atari-GPT: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models as Low-Level Policies in Atari Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15950/) (2024)
- [Multi-Actor Generative Artificial Intelligence as a Game Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08892/) (2025)
- [GRASP: A Grid-Based Benchmark for Evaluating Commonsense Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01892/) (2024)
- [Grammar-based Game Description Generation using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17404/) (2024)
- [The Procedural Content Generation Benchmark: An Open-source Testbed for Generative Challenges in Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21474/) (2025)
- [Using LLMs to Advance the Cognitive Science of Collectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00052/) (2025)
- [Measuring Diversity of Game Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15192/) (2024)
- [LLMs May Not Be Human-Level Players, But They Can Be Testers: Measuring Game Difficulty with LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02829/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have seen an explosive increase in research on large language models (LLMs), and accompanying public engagement on the topic. While starting as a niche area within natural language processing, LLMs have shown remarkable potential across a broad range of applications and domains, including games. This paper surveys the current state of the art across the various applications of LLMs in and for games, and identifies the different roles LLMs can take within a game. Importantly, we discuss underexplored areas and promising directions for future uses of LLMs in games and we reconcile the potential and limitations of LLMs within the games domain. As the first comprehensive survey and roadmap at the intersection of LLMs and games, we are hopeful that this paper will serve as the basis for groundbreaking research and innovation in this exciting new field.