Deal with Network Problems with a Shotgun

Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, have mapped network services and events onto a Quake Arena, allowing budding BOFHs (Bastard Operators from Hell) to utilise skills honed over hours - or days - spent playing games.

The system is called L3DGEWorld, and uses Open Arena, an open-source game based on the Quake III Arena game engine, to render system events and display them as effects within the 3D world.

The idea of navigating a computer network as a 3D environment will be familiar to fans of Tron, amongst others, and even the idea of using extreme violence to manage system processes is nothing new - Doom was being used to represent processes on a single machine almost 10 years ago.