How the classic computer game Doom became a tool for science

When the computer game Doom was released in 1993, its utility for science wasn’t immediately clear. Since then, the first-person shooter has been used in many studies, from helping to improve artificial-intelligence models¹ to investigating the effects of video games on memory and aggression².

It has also spawned a subculture in which fans and developers, including scientists, try to run the game on different devices — from calculators to digital pregnancy tests. Last month, scientists in Australia reported that they had taught neurons grown on a silicon chip how to play the game. The phrases ‘Can it run Doom?’ and ‘It runs Doom’ have become a popular Internet meme.

Alon Loeffler, a synthetic-biological-intelligence scientist who was part of the team at biotechnology company Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia, that trained the neurons, says the team chose Doom because of the meme. He and his colleagues first taught neurons how to play the classic video game Pong in 2021. Doom, with its more complex environment, was a natural next step, he says, because “the Internet always asks, ‘Can it play Doom?’”

The subculture around the meme reflects the crucial role of play in science, says Mars Buttfield-Addison, a software developer and PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. By engaging in play and having fun, researchers are using the same kind of creativity needed to solve scientific problems. “Making something silly doesn’t take any less work than making something really technical,” she adds, and engaging in fun science can be a powerful motivator.

Games in science

Doom is not the only video game used in research. The hugely popular sandbox game Minecraft has also been used to develop and test AI models³, and the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft has been used to simulate disease outbreaks⁴.

But Doom is particularly appealing for research because, in 1997, its code was published online by John Carmack, one of its developers at id Software in Richardson, Texas. This allows people to adapt the game so that it works on other platforms or devices, says Buttfield-Addison. Doom also doesn’t require much storage space, she adds.

From bacteria to satellites

Lauren ‘Ren’ Ramlan, a biological engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, has integrated the game into her research. In 2023, during the first year of her doctoral programme, she used Escherichia coli bacteria to display a few frames of Doom. She attached a fluorescent protein to the bacterial cells that could be turned on or off, making them act like black and white pixels on a screen. She then translated and compressed the first few frames of Doom into black-and-white versions that matched the plate growing the cells.