We quit our postdoc gigs to make an ant game. No, it’s not just for kids, probably.
Right now, Sam’s hunched over her laptop at my kitchen table, picking at a crumbly lemon granola bar that’s been hiding behind the coffee canister since before Thanksgiving. The wrapper has a little blue ant sticker we got from a entomology conference last year, and she’s muttering about path length optimization like it personally offended her. We’re two biologists, and we’re making an ant colony strategy game with educational bits. No, not the cutesy clicker game where you just unlock bigger anthills to click more. Well, okay, you do unlock bigger anthills, but they work like real anthills.
We met in the red harvester ant lab at our university, spent three years running temperature trials and counting foraging trails for a big paper on collective decision-making. We got the paper rejected twice, reviewers said our sample size was too small, we were too focused on “fluffy behavioral questions” instead of hard genetic data. We were so burnt out by the end of it, but we still found ourselves staying late just watching the ants instead of writing grant proposals. One night we got greasy street tacos after lab, sitting on the curb outside the taqueria, and we started talking about outreach. Whenever we bring high school groups or community classes through the lab, people’s eyes glaze over when we start talking about foraging theory, but when we set up a clear formicaria for people to lean in and watch, they’ll stand there for ten minutes straight, asking all kinds of good questions. I remember one quiet 10th grader who never said a word the whole tour asked me why one ant would give half its food to another ant that didn’t even go out foraging. I fumbled through an explanation of resource allocation, but I couldn’t show him. All we had was spreadsheets and a bunch of pinned dead ants. That’s when we thought, why not make a game where you get to be the colony, not just watch it?
Last month we went to a local indie game meetup, held in a dingy co-working space with free lukewarm pepperoni pizza. We told a guy who made a cute platformer about cats what we were doing, and he went “oh, educational game, cool” and then immediately turned to talk to someone else about Steam Next Fest. Sam gets so mad when people box it as just an educational game. She says “educational” is just code for “not fun” to most players, and she’s right. I still put “with educational elements” in the little test build blurb, though, because it’s true. If you finish playing and you don’t learn anything about how ants actually work, that’s fine. But if you walk away going “huh, I never thought a bunch of tiny bugs could plan better than I plan my weekend,” that’s all we want. We turned down a $5000 state education grant last fall because they wanted us to add a bunch of multiple choice quizzes after every level to align with 5th grade science standards, and we said no thanks. That money would’ve been nice to replace my beat-up old laptop that I spilled oat milk on last month, but it would’ve ruined the whole point.
We spent the first two months getting foraging behavior totally wrong, actually. I studied ants for three years, and I still messed it up. At first, I coded every ant to remember exactly where food was, so as soon as one ant found it, the whole colony would swarm it in five minutes. It was efficient, it checked all the boxes for game flow, but it felt wrong. Then one night I was sitting on my fire escape drinking a cheap beer after a full day of debugging, and I watched the wild pavement ants that nest under the step carry crumbs from my spilled potato chips the week before. Half the ants were just wandering around, bumping into the cinder block wall, going the wrong way entirely. Only like one out of every ten was actually carrying anything back to the nest. I remembered then: individual ants are dumb. The colony is smart. The whole magic of it is that most ants just explore, so the whole group can find new food before the old patch runs out. I texted Sam at 10:37 pm, all caps “WE FORGOT THE DUMB ANTS”. She called me back, yelled at me for waking her elderly cat that sleeps right next to her phone, then we got on Zoom and adjusted the code right there. We added that 60% of your worker ants just wander randomly, even when the colony knows there’s food somewhere else. Suddenly, when you play it, it feels alive. Sometimes your colony misses a huge seed patch right next to the nest for an hour because none of the wanderers bumped into it. That’s real. That’s how ants work.
We still argue all the time, of course. Last week we fought for three hours about whether to add a speed-up button. I say people don’t want to wait 20 minutes for a foraging trail to build when they’re playing on their lunch break. Sam says waiting is part of the point, that if you speed it up you don’t get to see how slow and quiet and smart the whole system is. We still haven’t decided. We’ve spent all of our combined postdoc savings on this, we don’t have a publisher, we don’t know if anyone will even buy it when we’re done. Some nights I lie awake thinking we made a huge mistake, that we should’ve just revised that stupid paper and gotten boring stable jobs like everyone else. But then this morning I opened up the test build, watched a little colony I started fend off an Argentine ant invasion by sending out just enough defenders to protect their aphid farm (that’s real behavior, by the way, ants farm aphids for honeydew, it’s so wild), and I thought, even if only 100 people play this, that’s 100 people who get to see what we see.
Sam just spilled cold coffee all over her notebook of ant behavior notes, by the way. She’s laughing about it, said it was bound to happen. Now she’s back to muttering about path length. I think I’m gonna go get another pot of coffee. We’ll figure it out. One ant at a time.
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