Year: 2021

  • How Virtual Worlds Work, part one

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking

    Diagram one: the client and the server

    Apparently, our recent articles have caused a bit of a stir. It’s been gratifying to see so many folks commenting and weighing in on what we have planned, and the metaverse in general.. One thing that’s really struck me is  the enthusiasm for the reinvention of online world technology. Whether a particular commenter is focused on decentralization, player ownership, or user creativity, there’s clearly a lot of interest in new ways of doing things.

    How Virtual Worlds Work
    1: Clients, servers, and art
    2: Maps
    3: Object templates and instances
    4: Object behaviors
    5: Ownership

    In my experience, whenever we are exploring new ways to approach old concepts, it’s important to look backwards at the ways things have been done before. A lot of these dreams aren’t new, after all. They’ve been around since the early days of online worlds. So why is it that some of them, such as decentralization, haven’t come to pass already?

    The answer lies in the nitty gritty details of actual implementation. A lot of big dreams crash and burn when they meet reality – and some of our most cherished hopes for virtual worlds have pretty big technical barriers.

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  • But First, the Game

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking
    Comments 1 Comment

    In the last couple of articles, I might have spent too much time talking about big buzzwords – metaverse this and persistent state technology that. I get it, it can be confusing!

    If I were to start throwing around even more technical stuff – like, how we drive Node.js from our highly-optimized C# server backend to implement a TypeScript-based scripting environment so gameplay code can be reloaded without a build or restart – well, plenty of people’s eyes might glaze over.

    So instead, I want to talk about why our overall tech approach makes for better lives for our developers and better games for our players.

    A fundamental truth

    To make better games, we need to enable developers to iterate faster.

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  • Revealing Playable Worlds technology

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking
    Comments 8 Comments

    Last week, I talked about “metaverse,” the hype around it, and how much of what people dream about is actually stuff online worlds have done for many years now. I ended the article on a bit of a tease, promising that I would talk about what we are doing.

    I won’t tease this time.

    We have built a metaverse platform.

    Wait, did you say “have built?” Past tense?

    Oh, it’s not done. We’re probably going to be working on this for years. But I say “built” because, well, we have the basics of this stuff working. 

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  • Online world or metaverse?

    Hours Categories Game talk

    A lot of people are talking about the “metaverse”, and as a result, a lot of folks are wondering what the heck that word even means.

    Frankly, it’s a reasonable question. But as someone who has actually built, launched, and operated a metaverse before, I have answers!

    I recently spoke at the Digital Economy Forum, hosted in Korea by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and organized by the Korea Startup Forum. After the panel, we got the question “what’s the difference between Second Life and a metaverse?”

    Here’s the short-form answer:

    Online worlds lead to multiverses which lead to metaverses. And just about no one has actual metaverses to offer right now.

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  • Thinking long-term

    Hours Categories Game talk

    Another week, another post over on the Playable Worlds website. This time it’s about “engagement” and “retention”: those words which can be boogeymen for those concerned about the business practices of game publishers, but which are also crucial to long-term enjoyment of a game.

    The first virtual world I worked on was LegendMUD. It is still running after a quarter-century. My second was Ultima Online. When I go to a UO player gathering, I see three whole generations of families who have played that game for 23 years now: grandparents, parents, and kids. Why?

    Because running a game like this, a world like this, a service like this – this is a long-term emotional relationship with the player.

    Read More “Thinking long-term”