Assembloid Agency: Unreal Engine API for brain-on-a-chip platforms

Assembloid Agency proposes an open-source Unreal Engine API for interfacing with brains-on-chips (Amirifar et al. 2022), where the API mediates between living neurons cultured on high-density microelectrode arrays and simulated game environments. Building on “Organoid Array Computing: The Design Space of Organoid Intelligence” (Leung, Loewith, and Frisch 2025), which speculates on a future where three-dimensional brain cultures assemble into more complex cognitive infrastructures and hence may become increasingly ‘designable’ and ‘playable’ organisms (Bongard and Levin 2021).

We extend this design space to apply games-design principles to context engineering for organoid intelligence, treating organoids as polycomputational agents trained through reinforcement learning (Smirnova et al. 2023). Our proposed plugin exposes functions for stimulation, recording, visualization, and real-time control of neuronal cultures within Unreal Engine. This allows researchers to prototype experimental contexts rapidly, whether using biological wetware, spiking neural networks, or EEG stand-ins. Game templates will be built on Unreal’s Learning Agents plugin to support single- and multi-organoid training scenarios.

Theoretically, the API acts as a mediating membrane where biological and algorithmic agencies “contaminate” each other (Parisi 2013), dissolving model/reality divides and enabling distributed cognition across neurons, code, and simulated space (Hutchins 1996). We address risks such as value capture by incorporating reward-schema versioning, rotating reward schedules, and stress monitoring (Nguyen 2024).

Assembloid Agency embraces the dual embodiment of biological intelligence. Here, “assembloid” refers to assembling organoids into new computational ecologies, while “agency” invokes not only the game engine as an experimental agent, but also the negotiated play of agency between biological and synthetic actors. By designing an API for game engines, we also anticipate the possibilities of interdisciplinary applications across games, interactive experiences, AI benchmarking, to architectural design, while foregrounding ethical and aesthetic guardrails organoid intelligence.