Editorial: Greetings, Professor Falken. Would you like to play a game?

Netcosm may look like a video game. But it’s not. It may have explosions and fire, but while it looks like Space Invaders, it isn’t Space Invaders.
Netcosm is an experiment in network data visualization designed to provide a “low cognitive burden” visual metaphor. In other words, it is meant to be as simple to understand as a child’s toy, it is not meant to be a child’s toy.
Still, many people talk about how they’d love to “see the network packets fighting” or would like to see it turned into a game.
I’ll admit that when I first saw Netcosm, it did remind me of the games produced by British game publisher Introversion, which include “Darwinia,” a game about a AI computer simulation, “Defcon,” a global thermonuclear warfare simulator inspired by the 1983 movie “WarGames,” and “Uplink,” about network computer security. All of these games have a “retro” feel to them.
So we’d like to throw this out there: “If you were going to turn Netcosm into a video game, how would you do it?”
DISCLAIMER: This does not mean we’re planning to do such a thing, but it does set the imagination afire. For example, if you could turn network administration into a game you can also turn it into a training simulation. Repeated “playings” of simulated scenarios can help network pros recover faster when the same situations happen in real life. And of course, it would be a hoot if tomorrow’s network administrators and engineers became familiar with the tools of enterprise networking through games played as teens – while people today have to start working for an enterprise before they have any “hands on” experience with enterprise networking.
We’d love to get your thoughts on this.
While we had the chance, we also wanted to thank TechCrunch, Kotaku, and Fark.com for linking to us. The YouTube video has almost 49,000 views, and over 6,000 unique visitors have come to the NetQoS site in the past week.