An expert trains rats to be gamers. After 4 years, the rats can shoot at enemies in Doom for the first time. In 2021, a neuroengineer and his team began training rats in gaming. Now, the project has received a major update.
A team led by neuroengineer Viktor Tóth has been trying to train rats to be gamers since 2021. In 2021, PCGamer first reported on this. Specifically, he and his team are teaching the rodents the shooter Doom. This includes movements, performing actions, and using weapons to defend themselves against demons.
By the end of 2025, the project has now received a significant update. The trained rodents can now shoot and defend themselves against enemies. This is reported by the English-language magazine TomsHardware.com. You can follow the entire project of the rats on the project’s own website.
Rats are to become gamers; their gaming setup has now received an upgrade
How did the experiment start? At the beginning, the rats stood in a harness over a freely spinning ball, where forward movement was assigned to a simplified Doom II corridor. As a reward, they were given sweetened water when they performed the desired action. Further interactions with Doom were not possible at that time.
What changed in 2025? The team of Viktor Tóth has now presented a major update: he has extensively upgraded the gaming setup for his rats: the new system still maps the movements of the rats but now also supports more complex inputs. Additionally, he has incorporated a small, curved AMOLED display into the setup, providing the training rats with significantly more spatial feedback than before. The researchers state in their own blog:
The rats successfully learned to navigate the virtual environment and trigger the shooting mechanism. The adaptation took about two weeks per rat. Due to time constraints, advanced training could not be completed, but initial data showed promising interaction with the system.
Moreover, the rats can finally defend themselves in Doom against enemies: via a physical trigger mechanism, the animals can activate the fire function of Doom. Technically, they can now shoot enemies, but practically, this works with varying degrees of precision. A shooting god like Shroud is likely still far from the rats when it comes to precision.
After Doom Eternal, a new installment in the series, The Dark Ages, was released, which aimed to break the fast gameplay style a little. Bethesda invited MeinMMO editor Benedict Grothaus to check out Doom: The Dark Ages and play selected missions. The shooter is solid and extremely difficult; however, the unique selling point doesn’t quite stand out. More about this can be read directly on MeinMMO: The new Doom plays like a really hard shooter, but something is missing
