Animal Controlled Computer Games: Playing Pac-Man Against Real Crickets

We explore the possibilities of replacing behaviour-generating code in computer games by real-time behaviour of live animals, and the question of whether one can play computer games against animals. To experience the differences for a human between playing against an animal or against computer code, we experimented with a variant of Pac-Man where the behaviour of virtual game characters is derived from that of live crickets in a real maze. Initial results are described in this paper.