Modifying first person shooter games to perform real time network monitoring and control tasks

This paper describes how a first person shooter (FPS) game engine can be leveraged for monitoring and control of enterprise IP data networks. Network administration can then occur in the following manner: network events (such as port scans or packets hitting a darknet) are translated in real time to various changes in the 3D game world state. Network administrators, logged in as 'players', can then collaboratively detect anomalous network events using the visual and aural cues given by the game. Using the native interaction metaphors from within the game (such as shooting, using or healing) they can then instantiate network administration policy changes (such as network layer firewall rules) directly back onto the running network without the need for interactions with complicated command line interfaces. We explore the possibilities offered by modern 3D game engines to implement this scheme as a server-side 'mod'. Finally, we detail the modifications made to the open source game engine 'Cube' to allow both the visualisation of large amounts of live network data within a virtual environment and support interacting with this data to create network administration events.