Authorship, License, Disclaimer

I, [Joseph Suarez], am the primary author of Neural MMO. I plan to continue development for at least the duration of my EECS PhD at MIT or until someone convinces me that there is a better way to solve AGI.

Inspiration

The project was inspired by classic Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMOs) - a genre defined by interaction with a large number of other players. It is a platform for creating intelligent agents parameterized by neural networks. Our goal is to support a broad base of multiagent research that would be impractical or impossible to conduct using other environments. Unlike other game genres typically used in research, MMOs simulate persistent worlds that support rich player interactions and a wider variety of progression strategies. These properties seem important to intelligence in the real world. The massively multiagent setting allow player teams to interact in interesting ways and use entirely different strategies.

Namesake

Neural MMO was originally named “Projekt: Godsword” (God-Sword). The name comes from two sources: CD Projekt Red, my personal favorite game dev studio, and OldSchool Runescape, which contains an iconic set of weapons called godswords. The latter is a particularly good model for AI environments; the former is more of a soft inspiration. We now refer to the project simply as (the first) Neural MMO.

Some assets previously used in this project belong to Jagex, the creators of Runescape, such as