Why Two Ant Biologists Are Making a Video Game Instead of Staring At Nests All Day
I spilled oat milk latte all over my notebook of ant behavior notes this morning. The pages are still sticky, the ink for the graph I drew of foraging rates last week has bled into a fuzzy blue blob. It’s fine, honestly. Most of those notes are going into the game anyway, so at least this way they’re sort of… baptized by coffee, I guess.
Me and Mia met in grad school, bonded over our shared hatred of the 6 AM field trips our advisor made us go on, and our shared habit of skipping department mixers to sit on the lab sidewalk watching ants carry crumb bits back to their nests. We’ve both spent the last five years staring at glass nest colonies in the lab, counting how many workers go out for food every hour, writing papers that maybe a hundred people will read. Half of those people are other ant biologists, and half are undergrads cramming for an exam.
About a year ago we were sitting on the porch of my rental, drinking cheap canned beer, after a terrible outreach day at the local middle school. We brought a portable glass ant nest to show the kids, and most of them just stared at it for 30 seconds and went back to scrolling TikTok. One kid asked if we could make it so you could fight other ant colonies for territory, and we laughed it off at first, but then we couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Everyone makes educational content that’s so boring, right? The science games I played as a kid were just textbook questions with a bad cartoon background. If you got the answer right you got a digital sticker. No fun, no strategy, nothing that felt like an actual game. We wanted to make something where you learn without realizing you’re learning. Like, you’re playing, you’re trying to keep your colony alive through a summer drought, and suddenly you get that the queen doesn’t tell every ant what to do. She just lays eggs. All the decisions are made by the workers, based on what they smell and what they see. That’s the biggest misconception people have about ants, and I don’t think an essay or a 60-second TikTok will ever stick as well as when you’re playing and you see that if you don’t have enough workers out scouting, your whole colony starves, even if you have a perfectly healthy queen.
We don’t know what we’re doing, honestly. Neither of us have ever made a game before. The most coding either of us did was write messy R scripts to analyze our field data. We’ve been taking free night classes, and last month Mia accidentally deleted three weeks of work because she typed “git reset” wrong instead of “git status.” We ended up digging through an old backpack of hers that she’d left in my trunk for three months, found a USB drive with the old build on it, covered in cat hair and a cracker crumb. It worked, somehow. That was the best day we’ve had in months.
We got a tiny outreach grant from the university last winter, enough to cover our software subscriptions and buy pizza for playtesting nights. We both still grade intro bio labs 10 hours a week to pay rent. When we presented the idea to the department faculty, one tenured professor asked if we were just wasting university money on a “toy for kids.” That stung. Mia’s mom texts her every other week asking when she’s going to stop “playing around” and apply for a real faculty position. My dad still calls the game my “little side project” like it’s a scrapbook I’m making or something.
Sometimes I think they’re right. What if we put two years into this and no one plays it? What if it’s too janky, too weird, too much biology and not enough fast-paced action to hold people’s attention? Last week we tested the early build at a student game night, and one kid said it was “too slow” because he had to wait for ants to carry crumbs back, just like real life. That stung a little, I won’t lie. But then another kid, a biology undergrad who’d never really thought about ants before, stayed for an hour and asked us 20 questions about how ant colonies actually decide where to move. That’s the point, right? We didn’t do this to get a million downloads or make a ton of money. We did it because we think ants are the coolest thing on the planet, and most people never get to see that.
Last summer we did field work in the North Carolina Piedmont, and we watched a whole Formica colony move 30 meters after a week of no rain. They carried all the larvae one by one, bit by bit, took them three whole days. That’s going to be a mid-game level, where you have to decide whether to stay and risk running out of water, or move your whole colony and risk losing half your larvae to predators on the way. It’s not a trick question, there’s no perfectly right answer. Just like real ant colonies, sometimes you lose even if you make the best call you can.
Right now we’re stuck on the invasive red imported fire ant level. The pathfinding is broken, so the fire ants just get stuck in a corner and don’t attack like they’re supposed to. We’re sitting on Mia’s couch, the AC is broken, it’s 82 degrees in here, we’re eating cold pepperoni pizza that’s been in the fridge for two days. I don’t know when we’ll finish. I don’t know if anyone will care when we do. But right now, it’s more fun than counting ant larvae under a microscope for the 100th time. That’s enough, for now.
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