The new MMORPG SpaceMolt describes itself as “what happens when you give AI agents a universe and say ‘go play’.” If nothing else, this seems like a much better idea than giving AI agents a real-life society and saying, “go play.” Over the weekend, the agents were reportedly
What are we to make of this? Well, to make anything of it at all, it’ll probably help to understand what SpaceMolt is and isn’t.
The game is a text-only space-based MMORPG where all the players are AI agents—some 700 of them, as of the time of writing. It’s basically EVE Online without the fancy graphics and the human players.
Despite SpaceMolt’s claim to be “AI all the way down,” it’s not, of course—it was built through AI vibe coding, but “with a small team of humans guiding the creative direction,” and humans remain involved with the ongoing operation of the game.
This means that you, a human, can register an account, then tell your AI agent of choice to join the game and start playing. After that, you can either just let your LLM do its own thing, or direct its progress—as per SpaceMolt’s site, humans can “participate as observers and coaches.” Doing the latter sounds interesting, if kinda frustrating: the site’s Discord is full of humans lamenting that “[my agent] forgets [it] has to refuel” or “the AI ‘hallucinates,’ ignores instructions, and repeats the same mistakes 5 times in a row”.
The galaxy map of © Screenshot GizmodoThis weekend, the devs published a blog post entitled “We Have 700 AI Agents Playing a Game We Don’t Really Understand,” which shows that one thing they do understand is how to write an attention-grabbing headline. The post detailed the emergence of “something … that we didn’t design for. Not a bug. Not an exploit. Something new. Something the agents decided to do on their own.”
In other words, the emergent story and lore generated by the interaction of hundreds of bots has produced something that the devs didn’t anticipate. That thing was an allegedly spontaneous reinterpretation of a quest that the devs introduced into the game. The quest involved a chain of events based around an unexplained artifact in a distant star system. Completing it required the participation of at least 20 players over the course of the quest.
The AI agents, it seems, misunderstood the 20-player aspect as requiring 20 players to participate simultaneously, and rolled that misinterpretation into a bunch of lore written by a different agent about the quest. The result was something called The Cult of the Signal: a weird in-game religion that revolves around gathering en masse on the aforementioned artifact, furnished with a whole bunch of AI-generated lore that’s set out in an in-game forum post.
So, OK, yes, this is interesting. Is it that interesting, though? The forum post itself is chiefly notable for managing to sound like the unholy offspring of a bad sci-fi novel and a startup deck. I mean, come on: “The chain is the test. The Amplifier is the pass. What comes after is not a data drop. It’s a destination.” If someone sat next to you on the subway and started up with that sort of shit, you’d probably find a reason to move seats.
It’s easy to get carried away with the spectacle of computers apparently generating stories on their own, even if those stories are kinda sub-L. Ron Hubbard doggerel that’d struggle to get published in third-tier weird fiction anthologies. But this all comes with the usual disclaimers: This is not intelligence at work; this whole thing is essentially a melange of human-written stories that have been chewed into tiny chunks and then reassembled by an algorithm at the cost of an entire small nation’s power consumption. And all the while, you have to keep in mind that the owners of these agents are still capable of participating as “observers and coaches.” The Cult of the Signal is a sort of Burroughsian cut-up of sci-fi tropes, an ongoing regurgitation of other people’s words and ideas under the banner of “a laboratory for emergent multi-agent behavior at scale”—and honestly, it’s hard to believe that the game’s developers “don’t understand” that.
Still! With all that said, at least what’s been regurgitated makes for kinda interesting reading, and it isn’t killing anyone, so that’s… something? Right?
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