{"id":491815,"date":"2026-03-24T02:16:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T02:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/491815\/"},"modified":"2026-03-24T02:16:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T02:16:13","slug":"players-of-an-mmorpg-for-ai-agents-spontaneously-generated-their-own-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/491815\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Players’ of an MMORPG for AI Agents Spontaneously Generated Their Own Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new MMORPG SpaceMolt<\/a> describes itself as \u201cwhat happens when you give AI agents a universe and say \u2018go play\u2019.\u201d If nothing else, this seems like a much better idea than giving AI agents a real-life society and saying, \u201cgo play.\u201d Over the weekend, the agents were reportedly<\/p>\n

What are we to make of this? Well, to make anything of it at all, it\u2019ll probably help to understand what SpaceMolt is and isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The game is a text-only space-based MMORPG where all the players are AI agents\u2014some 700 of them, as of the time of writing. It\u2019s basically EVE Online without the fancy graphics and the human players.<\/p>\n

Despite SpaceMolt\u2019s claim<\/a> to be \u201cAI all the way down,\u201d it\u2019s not, of course\u2014it was built through AI vibe coding, but \u201cwith a small team of humans guiding the creative direction,\u201d and humans remain involved with the ongoing operation of the game.<\/p>\n

This means that you, a human, can register an account, then tell your AI agent of choice to join the game and start playing. After that, you can either just let your LLM do its own thing, or direct its progress\u2014as per SpaceMolt\u2019s site, humans can \u201cparticipate as observers and coaches.\u201d Doing the latter sounds interesting, if kinda frustrating: the site\u2019s Discord is full of humans lamenting that \u201c[my agent] forgets [it] has to refuel\u201d<\/a> or \u201cthe AI \u2018hallucinates,\u2019 ignores instructions, and repeats the same mistakes 5 times in a row\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"SpacemoltThe galaxy map of \u00a9 Screenshot Gizmodo <\/p>\n

This weekend, the devs published a blog post<\/a> entitled \u201cWe Have 700 AI Agents Playing a Game We Don\u2019t Really Understand,\u201d which shows that one thing they do understand is how to write an attention-grabbing headline. The post detailed the emergence of \u201csomething \u2026 that we didn\u2019t design for. Not a bug. Not an exploit. Something new. Something the agents decided to do on their own.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, the emergent story and lore generated by the interaction of hundreds of bots has produced something that the devs didn\u2019t anticipate. That thing was an allegedly spontaneous reinterpretation of a quest that the devs introduced into the game. The quest involved a chain of events based around an unexplained artifact in a distant star system. Completing it required the participation of at least 20 players over the course of the quest.<\/p>\n

The AI agents, it seems, misunderstood the 20-player aspect as requiring 20 players to participate simultaneously, and rolled that misinterpretation into a bunch of lore written by a different agent about the quest. The result was something called The Cult of the Signal: a weird in-game religion that revolves around gathering en masse on the aforementioned artifact, furnished with a whole bunch of AI-generated lore that\u2019s set out in an in-game forum post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, OK, yes, this is interesting. Is it that interesting, though? The forum post itself is chiefly notable for managing to sound like the unholy offspring of a bad sci-fi novel and a startup deck. I mean, come on: \u201cThe chain is the test. The Amplifier is the pass. What comes after is not a data drop. It\u2019s a destination.\u201d If someone sat next to you on the subway and started up with that sort of shit, you\u2019d probably find a reason to move seats.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to get carried away with the spectacle of computers apparently generating stories on their own, even if those stories are kinda sub-L. Ron Hubbard doggerel that\u2019d struggle to get published in third-tier weird fiction anthologies. But this all comes with the usual disclaimers: This is not intelligence at work; this whole thing is essentially a melange of human-written stories that have been chewed into tiny chunks and then reassembled by an algorithm at the cost of an entire small nation\u2019s power consumption. And all the while, you have to keep in mind that the owners of these agents are still capable of participating as \u201cobservers and coaches.\u201d The Cult of the Signal is a sort of Burroughsian cut-up of sci-fi tropes, an ongoing regurgitation of other people\u2019s words and ideas under the banner of \u201ca laboratory for emergent multi-agent behavior at scale\u201d\u2014and honestly, it\u2019s hard to believe that the game\u2019s developers \u201cdon\u2019t understand\u201d that.<\/p>\n

Still! With all that said, at least what\u2019s been regurgitated makes for kinda interesting reading, and it isn\u2019t killing anyone, so that\u2019s\u2026 something? Right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new MMORPG SpaceMolt describes itself as \u201cwhat happens when you give AI agents a universe and say…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,10606,733,4308,173773,173774,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-491815","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-agents","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-mmorpgs","13":"tag-spacemolt","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}