We got so bored staring at ant papers we decided to make a game instead
Last Tuesday, Sam and I were huddled in the biology department break room, microwaving two frozen bean and cheese burritos that were definitely past their best-by date, when we noticed the ant line. It was the same line that’s been crawling along the edge of the windowsill for as long as I’ve worked in this lab, coming in from a crack outside to steal sugar from the bottom of the cookie jar someone left by the kettle. Sam knocked over their half-empty iced coffee right then, soaking the field notebook we’d been using to count foraging rates, and instead of panicking, we just stared at the ants swarming the sugar spill. And that’s when we said it, out loud: why are we still writing papers that like, 17 people will ever read? We should make a game.
Neither of us has ever made a game before. I can barely work my smart TV, Sam’s experience coding is one intro bio stats class they skipped half of. That hasn’t stopped us. We’re staying up until 1am most nights on Sam’s couch, watching YouTube tutorials that are half made by 14 year olds who know way more than us, arguing about whether the humidity meter should be a little bar at the top of the screen or just a little mold icon that pops up when you messed up. Last week Sam got so frustrated with Unity that they threw their wireless mouse across the room, hit the pothos they keep by the couch, knocked a chunk of plaster out of the wall. They just shrugged and ordered another mouse off Amazon. That’s how this whole project goes, honestly.
We’re both myrmecologists, which just means we study ants, and the thing that bugs us (ha, sorry, that was accidental) is how wrong most people get ant colonies. You see the TikTok takes: “all ants are selfless little workers who sacrifice themselves for the queen!” The queen’s not a ruler, by the way. She just lays eggs. She doesn’t give orders. No one does. Half the ants in any colony are just hanging out doing nothing most days—no, that’s not a mistake, that’s the strategy. Those are the reserves, for when a bunch of foragers get eaten by a bird or a storm floods the nest. We got sick of explaining that in 15-minute conference talks that half the audience skips to get coffee, so we put it in the game. If you want your colony to survive, you have to account for those slackers. You have to plan for mess. It’s not a bug, it’s the point.
We had a rough alpha build a month ago, so I brought it over to my sister’s house to let my 10-year-old niece Lila test it. She’s obsessed with bugs, so I figured she’d be a good test. She got super into it, spent 45 minutes building her first harvester ant colony, dug all her chambers right near the surface because it was faster to expand that way. Then we programmed a random rain storm, flooded the whole thing, her whole colony died. She threw my phone onto the couch and yelled that it was cheating. I pulled out my camera roll and showed her photos I took last spring, of a colony we’d been monitoring for 18 months that got flooded just like that, all the larvae floating out in the mud, the queen gone. She went quiet, leaned over, and tapped the start over button. Then she dug all her chambers three levels down. Half an hour later she stole my granola bar and went outside to climb a tree, but that moment stuck with me. That’s the education part, right? Not memorizing how many legs an ant has. It’s understanding that ant colonies are messy, they make mistakes, they don’t always win.
We pitched this for a small department outreach grant a couple months back. The head of the committee, this 72-year-old emeritus prof who still wears a tie every day, looked at us and said “why don’t you just make a worksheet for middle schoolers? That’s easier.” It’s not easier, but that’s not the point. Worksheets don’t make you care if the little ants survive. Yeah, this is way more work. We were supposed to submit our big seed dispersal paper by the end of August, now it’s pushed back to October. Our PI is annoyed with us, but I caught him last week playing the aphid farming level on my lab laptop when he thought I was gone getting coffee. He didn’t say anything when I came back, I didn’t either.
One thing we’ve struggled with that we never expected is the slacker ant mechanic. As I said, 20-30% of your workers are just idle most of the time, that’s actual published data. But almost every person who’s tested the build so far says it’s a bug. They post on our tiny Discord server like “my ants aren’t moving, fix your game.” We added a little tiny pop-up that explains it when you start, but half the people skip it. It’s funny, right? People are so used to games giving you 100% efficiency from every unit that they can’t handle that real life is messy. That’s actually another thing we didn’t even plan on teaching, but there it is.
We don’t know what’s going to happen with this. If we’ll finish it, if anyone will play it, if it’ll actually teach anyone anything. We might put it up on Itch.io for $4, and our moms will buy it, and that’s it. That’s okay. We’ve spent the last four years staring at ants through magnifying glasses, counting their steps, writing down how much seed they carry, and most days it feels like we’re the only ones who think this is the coolest thing in the world. Ant colonies are this big, messy, leaderless strategy that works better than most human systems I can think of. We just want other people to see that, even if it’s just for 20 minutes while they’re waiting for the bus. Or waiting for their burrito to microwave, like we were that day. That’s enough, I think. (Word count: 1182)
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