Animal Controlled Computer Games

Ani­mal Con­trolled Com­puter Games is the grad­u­a­tion project from Wim van Eck, a study col­lege and friend of mine. In his project he build a Pac­man game, in that the player can play Pac­man against real crick­ets, that con­trols the ghosts in the Pac­man maze. By doing this he ana­lyzes the advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of real-time behav­iour of live ani­mals in com­par­i­son to behavior-generating code in com­puter games.

Inter­est­ing about this idea in my opin­ion is, that through the use of real life ele­ments in a game, the game gets unpre­dictable. It hap­pens once to him that dur­ing play­ing the game one cricket piled his skin. Because of the new and white skin of the cricket, the color detect­ing sys­tem of the game could not detect the cricket for cer­tain period. Dur­ing this period the cricket was a real ghost for the system.

More infor­ma­tion can be found at Wim’s site or at the medi­at­e­ch­nol­ogy site (projects > Ani­mal Con­trolled Com­puter Games).