Biotopy is interested in the convergence of science and play: what roles might games take in scientific research of the future? In the last decade, citizen science games like FoldIt, EteRNA, EyeWire, and Borderlands Science have demonstrated that player participation can help accelerate scientific discovery across protein folding, RNA folding, neuroscience, and phylogenetics.

Additionally, biotic games have emerged as a new medium that integrates living systems into game mechanics. Microbial cultures — perhaps bacteria, yeast, or algae — can act like game cartridges, generating custom events in a digital game world based on different biological processes. These can be used in combination with different hardware — in our case, the Pioreactor — an affordable, 3D-printed, Raspberry Pi-powered bioreactor that we analogize to a game console, which can programmatically grow different microbial cultures and output biological data to game engines, such as Unreal Engine.

This project, Biotopy, is a Pioreactor-based game engine that seeks to combine concepts from scientific discovery games with biotic games to allow citizen scientists around the world to collect, grow, and interact with different microbial populations.