In swarm intelligence class today, two guys gave a presentation on a simulation of HIV. They mentioned that the major result from the simulation was that the problem with HIV is not its robustness, but its ability to mutate faster than the body can adapt.

Is there a way to build a game around this idea? Consider two teams competing for resources or survival. One team has great advantages when it comes to changing their play style in such a way to catch the other team by surprise. This other team is fairly good at adapting and once it has adapted, is superior to the other team. So the mutating team must constantly change their strategy and play style in order to stay one step ahead of the other team.

Because I like to give myself a scenario to work with, picture this:

It is several centuries from now and humans have pushed towards the edges of space. The military, Spatial Corps, might of the current government is monolithic and unstoppable. There are few rebellions, despite the lack of peace. Recently humans have come into contact with their first intelligent humanoid alien. Due to some unfortunate misunderstandings, the Spatial Core opened fire on these aliens and decimated them. The few remaining have grouped and are waging war against the humans using guerilla tactics. These aliens, while they have advanced technology, cannot match the brute force of the Corps. Their advantage is their ability to change forms and tactics on the fly. This has caused problems with the Spatial Core who is currently attempting to eradicate the aliens.

Now that I have set up a mildly interesting scenario, let’s look at some details. The Spatial Core is a serious army and their equipment reflects that. Weapons include close range shotgun/machine guns, medium to long distance automatic rifles, rocket launchers, grenade launchers. The aliens are capable of morphing although this requires some resources and time. Their primary form is humanoid and they have a slow firing, but fairly powerful projectile weapon. They are faster than the Corps soldiers but slightly weaker. Their secondary form looks like a dog and they are quick and agile but fairly weak. They can also morph into a larger, slower, and heavier “tank” soldier with lots of armor and a fairly powerful short range weapon. Despite this beast’s speed, he can still run down a squad of Corps soldiers.

So this is fun, but what does it mean? This has set up a simple rock-paper-scissors scenario. The humanoid form of the alien is good at hit and run tactics. Their dog-form is good against explosive weaponry like rocket launchers and grenades because they are good at dodging, however against shotguns and rifles they do poorly. The large beast is good against machine guns due to his armor, but poor against rockets.

This alone may create an interesting set of counters, but alone it does not make for good game play. I mentioned that the aliens require resources to morph. They must travel the map and find resource nodes, gather resources (by standing there maybe) before they can morph. This gives the Spatial Core a reason to defend the resource locations. Also different alien forms are better for assaulting and defending. It should be clear that the tactics used for each type of alien are completely different.

So the alien team must constantly switch between mutations in order to stay ahead of the Corps. This requires that the entire team synchronizes their changes so that they don’t end up playing different forms at the same time.

I may not have convinced you of anything, but I hope that you get a glimpse of how a game could revolve around mutation and adaptation. I will do some more thinking and will hopefully be struck by brilliance.