Tetragotchi

Darwin at Home invites you into the algorithm by introducing the Tetragotchi multi-player online game. As a player you will create, control, and evolve your own personal Tetragotchi, a virtual muscular body made of tetrahedron shapes which lives on even when you are not online. They exist on a single spherical world which they all share, so your Tetragotchi is not alone.

Each Tetragotchi has a set of genes (each a series of 1's and 0's) for constructing its body and another set for coordinating muscle contractions. Your challenge will be to train your Tetragotchi to run by using natural selection, and your goal will be to conquer others or be conquered. To overpower prey your Tetragotchi must catch up to it and consume the last of its energy.

Evolution by natural selection is ultimately responsible for designing all of us, and Tetragotchi gives players food for thought by focusing in on this process and accelerating it. Our biology evolved over vast expanses of time, but Tetragotchi evolution is something players can actually see happening. The speedup comes from taking advantage of the virtual world where many things can occupy exactly the same place at the same time.

When you enter evolution mode, a group of identical clones of your Tetragotchi are created at its very location in space and time. Each clone has its movement genes slightly mutated from the original, and they compete with each other head-to-head, contracting their muscles with slightly different strategies. This is a very visual process in the game and it explores what could happen in the near future if your Tetragotchi had slightly different genes. During this intense competitive battle, the worst performing mutations are periodically eliminated and new mutations of the better competitors take their place.

Stretching your mind to try and understand the time that went into real biological evolution is difficult, so Tetragotchi really plays with the notion of time. Time proceeds very slowly in the shared world where the Tetragotchis ultimately exist, but the experience on your personal computer is greatly accelerated. When you log in, you start with a snapshot of the world at that moment, and then using your computer as a kind of time machine, you can see the world as it might proceed in the next 24 hours. Players see an hour pass by in a few seconds, and the evolution experiments with different alternative futures.

Each step is a concert of many individual muscle contractions and their resulting movements, but in the Tetragotchi world this action is in very slow motion. A step takes about an hour, so despite the drama of pursuit the player's experience is more like that of a strategy game. The owner of the hunted Tetragotchi may log in and evolve a move to avoid capture before it happens. Unlike most other games, Tetragotchi has the element of suspense.

When a Tetragotchi predator conquers its prey, the prey perishes but is later reincarnated as a genetic descendant of the predator, structurally similar but without movement genes. In this way, body shapes which are better at running or crawling will prevail, yet reincarnated Tetragotchis must once again evolve muscle coordination for themselves. Existing descendants of the prey become orphans but the predator acquires credits for each one of them for capturing their ancestor.

A speech balloon appears above each Tetragotchi and players can change their text at any time. Players might use this text to identify their Tetragotchi to others, or to make any comment that they choose, and whatever they type will persist after they log out. This introduces a social element which reminds players that there is a person behind each Tetragotchi, and the genealogy inherent in the game can serve to produce unexpected relationships among players.

Each player joins the game using a verified email address, so notifications can be sent to owners of Tetragotchis who are under attack, offering a hyperlink to get back into the game. Events can also be published using RSS/Atom as a blog which players can follow.

Hopefully people who have evolved their own Tetragotchi will gain some insights into what evolution by natural selection means.

If you want to be among the first to play Tetragotchi, follow me or join the community.