During a gameplay session last week my character left a message on the Wood Wide Web for some local wildfolk. I was just improvising in the game, but I love the concept and I think it’d be nice to develop the concept a bit and share to make it easier to use in games.
The concept of the Wood Wide Web is currently understood strictly as a mycorrhizal network for coordinating interactions between fungal communities and plants across forests, but within the game I’d like to establish that these existing networks are used as a backbone for sending messages across forests by humans.
I don’t want to go too deep, but what should the player experience of using this be like?
In my head, I’m imagining this as an organic version of a wireless ad-hoc mesh network. One project in particular, diaster.radio, is designed to set up a system for Twitter-like microblogging that is geotagged across a decentralized mesh of nodes. I think this is a good framework. Users access the Wood-Web by plugging a small electronic spike into the dirt, and it lets them browse recent posts like you do on Mastodon, but perhaps with low character limits and no multimedia. Does that sound good? What do folks think of this interface?
Also, I’d like a basic overview of how it works. It doesn’t need to be highly technical. But just as one might try to hack a network and we all understand what a WiFi router is, I’d like for there to be a basic understanding of how this is managed. I’m thinking that it’s primarily based on the naturally occurring mycorrhizal networks, but with a series of low-power router nodes that allow humans to interface with it.
What do folks think? As a player, if you went into a forest and plugged in to this, what would you expect to see? How fast and far do you think messages should go? What kind of maintenance would you imagine sysadmins needing to perform? Thanks!
Information wouldn’t be stored in the trees at least. They’re just the wires. Though memory in a capacity could exist, maybe its beyond our use directly. Example: We could ask the tree to store a memory in a seed ( which would be fine until it falls off ) , or the soil to grow flowers in a certain pattern ( which would last until they die or get trampled ) .
These are great ideas. I don’t love all of them, but I do think that they’re broadly in the right direction.
I think one model would be that messages are transmitted in action potentials like thoughts on a brain, and stored digitally at hubs.
I think the natural network should operate on one level, very removed from the messaging system, and the messages at another more basic level. And if the messaging system is overloaded, it will interfere with the operation of the text message system, but the natural mycorhhizal signaling is largely unaffected, because it’s messages are much slower but stronger.
So if you sent too many messages in quick succession, you might compromise the ability of the system to send the first messages you sent, because its sending the most recent. But it doesn’t do any harm to the system’s ability to share nutrients with trees.
I’m still figuring it out, but I like a lot of what you’re suggesting.
I work in IT and it was fun to translate this idea into nature. Take what you can, I hope its useful in your campaign.
I like the idea of storing the info at the manmade hubs - I was trying to find a good network analogue to borrow addressing and routing from but haven’t had much luck yet. The most natural answer I could come up with was that every transmission would be a sort of multicast sent in every direction, which would further lower overall network efficiency by cluttering it up with lots of noise.
I’ve got a bit more:
First, you compose a message. It can be sent from your device to a hub, or into the soil if you’ve got the hardware. The information is transfered from silicon to the organic system by directly writing strings of messenger RNA into a bunch of cells in contact with the hardware. This string contains promoters that are activated in succession via an organic queuing system in the cells. The string contains the message as well as a user tag and the encoding sequence for the message broadcasting protein complex that converts the message into signals that get broadcast into the network.
I haven’t decided whether I prefer that the system is always sending signals, and the human signals are basically encoded within the regularly moving mushroom-and-plant signals or if the broadcast of a human message directly triggers the sending of a signal, and possibly provides energy/nutrients needed to send it.
Either way, the signals get sent out in all directions and diffuse across the network. When a message passes near hubs, those hubs trigger the reconversion of recent messages into physical storage in the form of a string of DNA. The DNA contains a reverse-quorum sensing signal, so the new messages don’t get endlessly re-encoded into DNA if they’re already around. And then the hubs read the DNA into storage, which can be accessed via radio signals to folks connected to the WiFi network to see all the recent broadcasts, where they came from, and a bit of metadata.
If a user isn’t near a hub or doesn’t have credentials to access it, they can interface with the system by sticking a spike into the ground which performs similar read-write functions that the hubs use, but without deliberate configurations for the network.
I think folks without admin approval can post, but there’s some kind of filtering system that separates out and handles messages from approved users differently from unfamiliar broadcasters.