Game Arena is an open, continuously expanding platform that evaluates large language models through competitive games, allowing head‑to‑head matchups in structured environments. Unlike static benchmarks, it prevents performance saturation by increasing gameplay difficulty as models improve. The report outlines the infrastructure and presents three pilot games—Chess, Poker, and Werewolf—covering perfect information, imperfect information, and multiplayer settings, and details evaluation metrics and competition results.
By Bovard Doerschuk-Tiberi, Yao Yan, Justin Chiu, Hann Wang, Timothy Chung, Martyna Plomecka, John Schultz, Jon Lipovetz, Clayton Drazner, Yuchen Zhuang, Jaimie Hwang, Nate Keating, Riley Jones, Andrew Lee, Oran Kelly, Ian Gemp, Michael Aaron, Laurel Prince, Kate Larson, Jeff Moser, Harrison Jobe, Chad Woodford, Siqi Liu, Andrew Wang, Bo Chang, Christopher D'Mello, Diane Chaleff, Addison Howard, Johnny Yip, Chuck Sugnet, Antonio Gulli, Meghan O'Connell, Will Cukierski, Nenad Tomasev, Dima Yeroshenko, Kinjal Parekh, Roxanne Daniel, Marc Lanctot, Domino Weir, Elsa Dong, Daniel Hennes, Melissa Nalubwama, Robert Fraser, Ryan Trostle, Jun Peng, Tom Mason, Lloyd Hightower, Chiamaka Chukwuka, Yuexiang Zhai, Phoebe Kirk, Yi Su, Yuting Han, Jie Ren, Chris Prichard, Sahand Sharifzadeh, Karim Hakimzadeh, DJ Sterling, Meg Risdal, Kate Olszewska, Ya Xu, Orhan Firat, Minmin Chen
The paper introduces LM Fight Arena, a new benchmark that pits large multimodal models against each other in the fighting game Mortal Kombat II to evaluate real‑time visual understanding and sequential decision‑making. Six leading open‑ and closed‑source models were tested in a controlled tournament where each controlled the same character, ensuring a fair comparison. The framework offers a fully automated, reproducible, and objective assessment of an LMM’s strategic reasoning in a dynamic setting.
By Yushuo Zheng, Tongrui Ye, Zicheng Zhang, Xiongkuo Min, Huiyu Duan, Guangtao Zhai
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit language‑specific skill differences by having two identical model instances play a text‑based game in different languages. Using a multilingual extension of TextArena, the authors evaluate three open‑weight models across eight languages and six games, finding that the same model can show markedly different performance—varying win–loss margins, invalid actions, and strategic choices—depending on the language interface. Analyses pinpoint language‑specific failures in spatial reasoning, card‑conditioned decisions, and optimal move selection, and demonstrate that adjusting the intermediate reasoning language can recover much of the lost performance.
By Bobby Cheng, Adam Gaber, Zhengyuan Liu, Catherine Arnett, Omer Goldman, Cheston Tan, Leshem Choshen