Game DNA is a series where we take a single concept from games, strip it to its essence, and look at how it — and we — have developed over time.
The summer of 1991 was all about ants. I was seven years old, and I spent the entire school holiday camped in the garden, gently catching winged queens and housing them in shitty coke bottle formicariums. There I would watch them lay eggs and create workers, who would dig tunnels, search about the place, and scurry in lines with grains of food in their jaws. I was captivated by my bottled nests, by their self-organising complexity, and although I had no idea at the time, I think that those ants might have been my first defining games experience.