Swarm Core Games is developing a PC game around an exciting new game concept. The game uses a unique engine that allows for emergent and self organizing behaviors. The players become part of a large and continually expanding web of nodes in a peer to peer network. This web will also enable the collection of a rich stream of internet performance metrics. These metrics will be used to construct a real time performance profile of the internet.
The Game Back Story
Is the internet becoming self aware? As a side effect of development and deployment of autonomous software agents on the internet, a network of self sustaining, self directed daemons has evolved and is showing evidence of pre-sentient behavior. Self discovery, self modification, intention, and other attributes of higher order cognition have been found in the behavior of this complex web of entities and information packets that appear to operate as probes of the global information space. Analysis of this web has shown evidence of larger scale behaviors akin to schooling fish and flocking birds. Also exhibited is spontaneous organization into what are best described as “factions”, competition for resources, and the evolution of probes into behaviors optimized for specific tasks (e.g. attack, defense, harvesting). Few humans are even aware of these probes, and none are sure of the daemons’ true intentions.
Net Neutrality Impact
The performance profile will be published on Swarm Core’s sister site Black Cloud Analytics. As the system scales up, a large, dense data set will be aggregated into a data store. After anonymization, this data set will be made available to academics and research groups as well as commercial interests. As the system scales to over 1,000 installed daemons, it will be able to correlate Internet data flow to ISPs and changes in these flows. As the FCC rules are finalized and implemented, the system will become another tool for keeping ISPs honest.
Swarm Core Games has launched an Indiegogo crowd funding campaign at www.indiegogo.com. For more information, contact BeTheSwarm@swarmcore.com.
