As a graduation project for his master in Mediatechnology at Leiden University, Wim van Eck has developed a game in which you play PacMan against crickets. The goal of Animal Controlled Computer Games: Playing Pac-Man against Real Crickets was to center the action in a computer game around the unpredictability of an animal. Is it possible to replace computer code with animal behaviour? Can a person play against an animal in a computer game? He built a maze for the insects to walk around in, with its proportions and layout matching the maze of the computer game. The position of the animals in the maze is detected using colour-tracking via a camera, and linked to the ghosts in the game. This way, the real animals are directly controlling the virtual ghosts.
After having inspected the maze individually the crikets are likely to find a place to group together. This enables Pac-Man to eat most of the dots but prevents the hero to eat the dots on the place where they sit, preventing the player from finishing the level.
In contrast to the fixed speed of the original Pac-Man ghosts, the movement of the crickets is unpredictable. Their speed also depends on the temperature inside of the box,. Wim and his team could change the speed of the crickets by altering the temperature in the box, this way having different difficulty levels.
To make the game more intelligent, they had the animals react to vibrations. In nature, vibration of the ground warns crickets for an approaching predator. So the researchers divided the floor of the maze into six parts, each with a motor attached underneath that vibrates when switched on. When the crickets should chase Pac-Man, the motors were switched furthest away from his location in the maze, so the crickets will flee in his direction. When Pac-Man eats a power-up, the crickets are supposed to run away from him, so we then vibrate the part of the floor that contains Pac-Man’s position.
Movies on the website.
Other posts on animals and games: Metazoa Ludens, Protozoa Games and Monkeys and video games.