What this game is about
This game demonstrates the essential difference between the behavior of living and non-living things. The difference is that the behavior of living things is purposeful while that of non-living things is not. But this difference can't be seen by just looking at behavior, which is the point Ryan Gosling's character was making in the movie Project Hail Mary.
Gosling's character correctly pointed out that the life-like movements of the particles descending from space don't necessarily mean that they are alive. This is because the purposeless behavior of non-living things can look just like the purposeful behavior of living things.
In this game, as in the movie, what you will see is a number of bug-like entities moving around on the screen. But, unlike in the movie, only one of these bugs is actually alive. You can only guess which one it is by just looking at the bugs behavior. But Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) provides a way to do better than guessing. PCT provides as objective means of determining which bug is moving purposefully (is alive) and which bugs are not. It is done by applying disturbances to the movement of all the bugs and looking to see which bug is least affected by them.Disturbances are applied using the mouse or trackpad if you are on a laptop or your finger on the screen if you on a smartphone. The behavior of the live bug will tend to resist these disturbances because it is a control system with the purpose of maintaining a perception of moving along its own desired path. This disturbance resistance is what reveals the live bug: it is the one whose movement is least affected by your actions.
The goal of the game is to see how quickly and accurately you find and delete (with the crosshairs) the live bug among the un-alive ones depending on the number of starting bugs (3,6 or 9), the liveliness (high or low) of the live bug and the speed of movement (slow or fast) of all the bugs. Variations in these parameters vary the difficulty of detecting a the bug that is resisting your disturbances. Variations in liveliness are particularly interesting because this parameter varies the purposefulness of the live bug. A high liveliness bug is very purposeful and will act with great force (high gain, in control theory terms) to resist disturbances that would push it from its desired course. Such alive bugs are easier to detect than low liveliness ones because you can more easily see their resistance to your disturbances.
Key idea: The behavior of living systems has the purpose of controlling perceptions; the behavior of non-living systems is simply caused by external forces.
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