When Rats Play Doom: A New Era of Gaming

Usually, experiments on the game Doom involve running it on a device completely unlike a PC. But neuroengineer Viktor Totom decided to use the game differently and taught rats to play it. The experiment began back in 2021, and the author recently shared new achievements.

Four years ago, a very limited configuration was used: rats stood in a harness over a freely rotating ball, and forward movement was tied to moving through a simplified corridor of Doom II. The reward was sweetened water given to the rat for performing the desired action. In fact, the rats weren’t playing the game but running through virtual corridors, which were simply the corridors from Doom II.

But now everything is different. The updated system still reflects the real movements of the rat in the virtual Doom space, but now it supports more complex navigation and additional input data. The author used a curved AMOLED screen that covers most of the rat’s field of view. Feedback has appeared that’s unavailable even to gamers: the system generates airflows directed at the rat’s face to signal a collision with a wall. This way, the animal understands it’s going the wrong way, and the entire experiment isn’t just built on the trial and error method.

But the most interesting thing is that rats can now shoot at opponents. That is, literally fully play the game. The engineer’s experiment isn’t aimed at teaching rats to play Doom like humans. It’s more about developing tools that can be useful in various fields. Therefore, everything relies on open software and simple engineering solutions.

Interestingly, this experiment taps into the cutting-edge of brain-computer interfaces and animal research. As of 2025, scientists have been exploring similar technology to enhance human-machine interaction, focusing on neurofeedback and biofeedback systems.