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!