Interactive Biotechnology: Design Rules for Integrating Biological Matter into Digital Games

In recent years, playful interactions with biological materials, including live organisms, have been increasingly explored and implemented. Such biotic games are motivated and enabled by biotechnological advances and their increasing presence in everyday life constitute a form of human-biology interactions (HBI). Here we systematically discuss the design space for “digital-biology hybrid” games, summarize current best-practice design rules based on recent works, and point to technologies that will enable others to design and utilize similar games to advance this field. In particular, we show how augmentation with overlaid digital objects provides a rich design space, we emphasize the advantages when working with microorganisms and light based stimuli, and we suggest using biotic processing units (BPUs) as the fundamental hardware architecture. In analogy to the history of digital games, we make some predictions on the future evolution of biotic games as the underlying core technologies become readily accessible to practitioners and consumers. We envision that broadening the development of playful interactive biotechnology will benefit game culture, education, citizen science, and arts.