Generative gameplay requires more than immediate responses to player actions.Actions should have persistent consequences, while the generated world should act according to its own state and rules, shaping the player's situation and subsequent choices. Video generation captures local dynamics, but limited history, partially observed game state, and the need for contextual behavior decisions make such interactions difficult to sustain through audiovisual prediction alone. We introduce \rig (Reciprocally Interactive Generation), a framework for reciprocal interaction in generative gameplay. \rig combines persistent state and configurable rules, contextual interaction reasoning, and action-conditioned audiovisual generation. Together, these components make interaction consequences and actor behavior jointly determine generated content while maintaining consistency between game state and visible outcomes. We construct a Xonotic gameplay dataset to train an audiovisual generator for learning dynamics and interactions. Further post-training enables \rigarena, an interactive generative first-person shooter (FPS) prototype. Experiments demonstrate more reliable combat outcomes and reciprocal interaction between the player and the generated world. Project page: https://murphylmf.github.io/RIGen/.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Reciprocal interaction in RIGen. Players affect the generated world, whose rules, persistent state, and characters in turn shape gameplay. (a) Attacks have state-dependent consequences. (b) Enemy actions, resource constraints, and respawn rules shape the player’s survival and continued play. (c) Opponents adapt their behavior to their health and current combat conditions.
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Training stage
Backbone
Action branches
Basic Dynamics adaptation
10−6
10−5
Interaction adaptation
5×10−7
10−7
Arena bidirectional adaptation
5×10−7
10−7
Sliding-window autoregressive training
10−6
10−5
Consistency distillation
10−6
10−6
Distribution matching
10−5
10−5
Appendix
Table 1: Generator training learning rates.
Setting
Parameters
FPS
SCOPE
∼ 5B
4.12
LingBot-World 2.0
14B
4.47
RIGen (Replay)
22B
4.41
RIGen (Online)
22B
3.93
Appendix
Table 2: Generation throughput at 832×480 . Parameters count the generation backbone. Both RIGen settings include refinement.
We tackle the challenge of building real-time interactive video worlds with user-defined behaviors. Such worlds must track object states, apply interaction rules, and render the resulting consequences as users act. Yet existing end-to-end video world models typically learn interaction dynamics within the generator, making it difficult to specify object-level rules and reason about their consequences. In this work, we introduce BoxWorld, which separates interaction reasoning from generative rendering. Given user-specified rules, a coding agent creates a Box World Engine that determines interaction outcomes and exposes the resulting object states through a lightweight interface of layout boxes, persistent object attributes, and dynamic status variables, leaving appearance and physical effects to generative rendering. A Box-State Generative Renderer then renders this evolving state stream into video autoregressively, enabling online control over object motion, state switches, and conditional events. Rendering this state stream is non-trivial: the renderer must respond to object-level state updates in real time while remaining coherent with the generated history. To this end, we introduce a three-stage training strategy that learns object grounding from open-domain videos and state transitions from gameplay videos, both annotated automatically, and finally performs rollout distillation on self-generated histories. We further propose PairedStateBench, a paired benchmark for fine-grained interaction control. BoxWorld substantially outperforms end-to-end world models and remains competitive across multiple public benchmarks. Project page: https://boxworld-web.github.io.
Zike Wu, Ahmed Hatem, Chintan Trivedi +4
University of British Columbia · Vector Institute for AI · Huawei Canada +1
Recent game world models can generate visually realistic and interactive environments conditioned on player actions. However, games are not defined by pixels alone; they are governed by explicit mechanics, namely state-dependent rules that control health reduction, skill activation, and game termination. These mechanics depend on precise internal states, such as health points, skill meters, and timers, which are tightly coupled with visual observations and determine how gameplay evolves. Without modeling these state dynamics, existing game world models may generate visually plausible rollouts but violate the underlying game rules. In this paper, we propose StatePlay, a novel state-aware game world model that jointly predicts visual content and game states to promote mechanics-consistent generation. StatePlay adopts a mixture-of-transformers (MoT)-style architecture that preserves specialized visual and state representations while enabling cross-modal interaction, allowing predicted states to guide frame generation. Each branch is further optimized with a distinct objective suited to its modality. Experiments show that StatePlay achieves an average normalized L1 distance below 0.06 for state prediction. Furthermore, compared with models without explicit state modeling, our method improves mechanics fidelity in generated game rollouts by 18.6%. Overall, our work highlights the importance of state-aware game world modeling and advances beyond pixel-level realism toward complete and mechanically faithful game generation.
Zijun Lin, Zeqing Wang, Cheston Tan +2
Tencent · Nanyang Technological University · Centre for Frontier AI Research, A*STAR +1
Modern game development relies heavily on conventional graphics pipelines. High-quality visual content requires modeling, material authoring, animation, lighting, effects, and runtime optimization, making asset production expensive and extending the development cycle of game prototypes. Recently, video foundation models are beginning to change film and video production, but games differ from linear media, they require not only continuous and realistic imagery, but also stable and reproducible gameplay rules, object states, and interaction outcomes. We present Magpie, a real-time generative world-rendering system for interactive games. Magpie separates gameplay execution from visual generation. Designers define scenes and rules in a game engine. At runtime, the Game Engine resolves player actions and maintains world state, while an independent Render Server generates visual output from white-box frames produced by the engine. Magpie provides a system-level implementation path for applying generative models to real-time game rendering. It preserves gameplay designability and reproducibility, and reduces the dependence of early game prototypes on complete visual assets.
Xiaoyu Zhan, Xinyu Wang, Xiaohong Zhang +6
Mogo AI Ltd. · Nanjing University · University of Southampton