Playing God with Galactic Cellular Automata in Stars Reach – grokludo 11

A design-centric podcast interview with grokludo that manages to cover the Game of Ur, Borges, types of randomness, and much more over the course of 90 minutes.

Raph Koster has helped forward our understanding of game design for decades. He’s the author of A Theory of Fun, a must-read for game designers. He was lead designer on the pioneering MMO Ultima Online, and led the creative team on Star Wars Galaxies. Now he’s back with a new MMO called Stars Reach, built on 3D cellular automata system that simulates everything in the galaxy. The game’s not out yet, and already the stories emerging from this kind of simulation are hard to compare with anything else. So strap in, we’re going pretty deep into game design theory – that’s what grokludo is for! – and in the second half, we cover what to expect from Stars Reach.

Video

Transcript

Somebody said, “I think all of Raph’s games are about the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.” And I was like, “Oh, yes, that’s me. That’s it. That’s that’s what I like making games about. We are simulating every cubic meter of the environment. If you make this intricate world simulation and then the only thing that players can do in it is kill, well, why’ you bother, right?”

Interviewer: Raph Koster has forwarded our understanding of game design for decades. In 2004, he wrote a Theory of Fun, pretty much a must-read for game designers. He was lead designer on pioneering MMO Ultima Online before leading the creative team on Star Wars Galaxies.

Now he’s back with a new MMO called Stars Reach, which is built on a fascinating 3D cellular automata-like system to simulate the galaxy. Already, the behaviors emerging from this kind of simulation are hard to compare with anything else. So, strap in. We’re going deep on the game design theory in this one. That’s what Grudo is for. And in the second half, we’ll talk more about what to expect from Stars Reach. You know, it’s the type of thing you rarely find time to do when you’re pumping out eight stores a day on Kotaku.

But um I wanted to kind of like trace the genealogy of certain uh mechanics and uh like, you know, uh something as small as like a a parry uh in like a a combat, you know, trace it all the way back to the beginning. In the same way, I guess there’s like a a sort of tradition of that in literature and stuff as well. Like I think it was um Jorge Borges who used to just kind of for fun trace philosophical concepts all the way back to um the Athenians and stuff.

Yeah. Funny enough, I actually was answering posts on Reddit today where somebody said, “Hey, it seems like the Pac-Man genre died off. are there modern examples?” And I’m like, you’re not thinking of it carefully enough.

The Pac-Man genre is actually the visit every location on a map genre. And Cubert is one as and so was Minor 2049er and Bristles. And you know, I gave him a bunch of early examples from the 80s and I said, but it evolved into visit specific important locations on the map. And today we call it a secrets system. Um where you have to go find specific key dots to pick up. Instead of saying, “Oh, you got to pick up every dot.” You we only pick up the locations that have interesting dots. And that is in everything.

And now you hunt for stars in Mario, right? Um or you find secret pickups hidden in Uncharted or um uh Tomb Raider or whatever. And I think a lot of people don’t they don’t deconstruct mechanics enough to to walk through them that way. So, I love that idea for that. You should go do that.

It’s, you know, it’s funny you mentioned that cuz like I actually re reread a Theory of Fun ahead of this and um unfortunately I had the old version. I didn’t have the um second edition.

Yep. Yeah. It’s you know it was uh you were talking about in terms of video games uh a lot of games are variants of the same game whereas in board games they do a lot more innovation on the actual underlying abstract and mathematical problems. Um, I was that was one of the questions I wanted to ask you is that how how much of that do you think is transferable? Like is is there uh like is that due to an inherent limitation of video games or or are there genuinely things that video game designers can learn from the the board game meetups where they do a lot of that?

The the practice of game design is the same whether you’re doing it on tabletop or in digital. I think the difference there is more cultural than anything else.

Tabletop has certain constraints that digital doesn’t right around real time around kind of the processing time for simulating stuff. You could in theory simulate in tabletop to the degree you do but it would be tedious as hell so nobody does right. Um and uh in general in tabletop it’s harder to have certain kinds of hidden information. processes have to be more public, right? But I think that’s some of what led tabletop to being very deconstructive, right, about how they look at a game. These days, you read the back of a tabletop game and it will say this is a worker placement game with an with an action point mechanic and uh you know, a double blind auction system or whatever. Like they’ll they’ll be very mechanical in how they describe it.

Whereas video games are very experiential now. And I think a lot of people have real trouble separating the mechanics from the surface that they see. And we could we could do that. We could assemble collections of mechanics more. But instead, we we tend to give genre names to particular collections of mechanics. And it’s pretty rare that we actually invent new mechanics or fresh combinations. Instead, what we tend to do in video games is ring changes on the content.

The art, the theming, um the pacing, the data, that kind of thing. And so most games are actually clones of one another in video games.

I guess it’s it’s quicker iteration on the board game side, isn’t it? as well because you know without having to code anything like you can go to a board game meet up and uh you might have uh planned a rule set and then someone else at the table says well what if it was a bit like this and then uh you can just kind of do that without having to go home and and code it.

That’s right. Yeah. It’s it’s a lot easier to do rapid iteration with tabletop.

I actually strongly encourage people who are learning game design to start with tabletop and not just jump straight into computers. Um, I think having the pace of iteration lets you get some lessons under your belt faster.

That sort of difference between um the underlying mechanics of games and the aesthetics of games, it’s it’s something that we’ve discussed on this podcast before. Uh, you know, I’ve had on academics specifically to talk on about loot boxes and uh loot box regulation and stuff like that.

Um, and it’s something that’s come up because I think like most of the time, you know, uh it’s fine for only designers to be thinking about uh those underlying mathematical uh problems and the the abstract concepts and uh you know, for the most part players, you know, are free to just kind of enjoy the the fictions and the the set dressing that uh lie over a game. Um but when it comes to policy, that’s where it kind of um it it it uh this this issue of a lack of luda literacy kind of becomes a problem where it’s like um our policy makers, you know, uh I guess the age-old problem was talking about violence in games. Um where uh and there was a section about this in in a theory of fun as well.

I was thinking to myself, uh, I’ve lived this because, you know, if you talk to to, um, a person who’s played a lot of a game, they’re not even seeing the aesthetics anymore. They’re just seeing the underlying mechanics. And I’ve interviewed several esports uh, pros who, you know, if you were to say to them to a Counter-Strike professional at a tournament after he gets a head shot, if he were to say, “Wow, that was gory.” Uh, he would just be like, “Huh, what?” like you know I was I was just making the calculation of uh you know vertical and horizontal mouse flick um and it’s also kind of a problem when it comes to loot boxes because policy makers kind of don’t see gambling unless it has those visual gambling motifs uh even if uh the underlying system is a gambling system.

I mean uh so there is a generational factor but it isn’t that different from and frankly any other field that gets about headlight brightness and the correct angle at which to place the bulb for the headlight in a car right um they have to write legislation around it but in pretty much all democracies there’s the system of a variety of things that you have in government experts, bureaucrats who learn how things work. You have lobbyists who represent the industries who can come and be brought in and sometimes it’s to pick their brain and sometimes it’s for them to, you know, try to get advantage, right? Um there’s staffers who do research, all of that, right? Because you can’t expect a given legislator who’s been elected to a term and who has knows nothing about it.

They still have to vote on the legislation, but they’re probably not going to be experts on headlight angles or on um you know, double blind trials for a medicine or on you know, I don’t know, regulating some financial instrument, right? like it. So, they’re not experts on any of those things at at a detailed level. There’s staff that have to be though. And the real risk is if there’s no staff and no no industry knowledge and no nothing. That’s when you get just cuckoo stuff, right? That’s when you get stuff that just doesn’t make any sense at all.

because it it’s not like even even players necessarily always see the intricacies of when something is really turning into gambling. You know, one of the classic examples as regards loot boxes is, you know, yeah, we can all say, “Oh, there’s something off about that daily loot box that I walk up to and I roll a die and I get an output and it’s trying to get me to buy something,” but we don’t have any problem with “I’m off playing Diablo and there’s a random drop that only happens once every 10 hours.”

But I know that if I kill enough skeletons, I’ll get I have good odds of getting something. And it’s like, you know, those are actually almost identical, right? From a technical point of view, from a game design point of view, the differences are much more about uh what surrounds the randomness mechanic there. Um because you don’t want to remove randomness. That would be bad. We count on randomness in games everywhere.

Um, so yeah, it’s it’s tricky and and you have to be able to see specific kinds of dark patterns.

Yeah, I guess all the way back in 2011, I think it was, I I did my first story on how kind of everything in an MMO or RPG setting is a gamble. You know, it’s like when you mine the rock, you might get the gem. Uh, when you attack, you might get the crit. Um, do you think? But I guess yeah, it becomes more of a problem when it’s like a a planned sort of uh a variable reinforcement schedule. Even even getting the jam is a variable reinforcement schedule, right?

I mean, um it it it really actually becomes a problem when you’re tying it into the commerce aspect, right? And there is the question of whether just pure random reinforcement might be addictive. There’s that, but even that there’s kind of the gap between gambling and just addictive or compulsive behavior and compelling and, you know, and just randomness.

Um, you know, when we when we run a foot race, right, this has happened countless times in in real life sports. uh the weather that day and where the sun was and what clouds happen to come out and how wet is the track. Those are all randomness too. And um we we think of those things as from a game design point of view, those are just statistical variation in the content, right?

The system is the same running the foot race, whatever. Um but the terrain is a little bit random. The level design was a little bit different. I had a chance of the gem. I had a chance of the sunbeam in my eye, right? Like games rely on that kind of randomness because otherwise they’d be puzzles. Otherwise, if you know that there are no random variables, then there’s always going to be an optimal solution through.

It’s like, yeah, it gives you the chance to improvise based on that randomness. I guess there are like some philosophical differences in the types of randomness. Like there’s you know uh rock paper scissors is like you know subjectively kind of random but uh it’s really it’s like the other person actually deciding something um versus like you know the environmental randomness that you mentioned versus uh like a genuine random number generator.

Um, and I guess you know all that’s pretty academic uh until you get a you know a situation which probably is rare but um uh you could I guess theoretically get a situation where a company alters its odds for a loot box uh uh mid swing like you know while while the uh race is happening you know it’s like uh actually we don’t want to give away that many.

No. And that that’s outright, you know, that’s a a dark pattern, right? That that is I tend to prefer thinking about randomness in general as being about uh that variation, that statistical variation, right?

Um because it it really helps to kind of reduce your assumptions about what’s happening, right? If you start thinking of it as oh this is statistical variation in the problem set to any given individual the complexity of the world might just seem random right?

I mean that cloud blocking that sun or the sunbeam hitting you technically that’s not random, it’s just math we can’t follow right? Like there’s nothing random about the rate at which vapor moves in wind. It might be chaotic but it’s not random.

But to the human perception, you know, it’s above the threshold that we just go, well, I don’t know. Therefore, we call it random even though it’s not. Um, get enough other people that you’re interacting with and things become very unpredictable, right?

Um, some designers think in terms of input randomness and output randomness, which are um basically different ends of randomness. Input randomness happens at the moment that the player does something. Um output randomness happens like rolling the dice after, right?

And and those are different and they have different kinds of outcome. I mean they’re different processes, right? One is let me inject some randomness with my action and others is I might have a fixed action but the output might vary, right? Those kinds of things, they’re all tools in the designer toolbox, and saying that any given one of them is is bad or pernicious is really really hard because they’re just basic they’re kind of like basic moves, you know. Um it isn’t until they’re put inside generally like a commercial structure or something like that that we really see dark patterns emerge.

It’s funny because, you know, when we’re talking about um tracing the genealogy Kriegspiel, Ur, and other early games of certain game systems, um one of the ones that I was really interested in looking at was um rolling a die to see if a soldier fired a shot and hit his mark or not. And um you know, which goes all the way back to like Kriegspiel.

Yep.

It was especially interesting to me because it’s so tied up with loss aversion and you know XCOM players will will be very familiar with loss aversion. We’re more sensitive to um loss than we are to gain and and you know it seems like when you there’s 99% chance to hit. Uh we always miss it.

And uh Kriegspiel was uh it was this for those who don’t know like uh a war game that was used to kind of train Prussian officers uh in the art of war and it included logistics and supply lines. And at first uh it was using chess pieces that made sort of chess-like moves but somewhere along the line they they switched to simulating shots uh with randomness. And uh in hindsight, it kind of seems like the obvious thing, but I was wondering if if it was just always going I was wondering if it was inevitable for them to make that jump because it does seem like as humans anything that we can’t properly simulate, there’s an inter intermediary step where we use randomness like a roll of a dice.

That’s right. I I was going to make exactly the same observation cuz I’ve said that for years that um in general when we are simulating a system if something falls below the threshold we want to simulate we give it a probability randomness instead. That’s it it’s kind of a go-to move and I think it is inevitable. I think it’s the kind of thing that that um we always do when modeling systems, right? because otherwise it, you know, it doesn’t feel we can’t simulate everything, right? It’s kind of like that thing, the perfect scale map of the universe is the size of the universe, right?

So, um, you know, we’re back to Borges again.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, and so, uh, it’s it’s really really standard and typical for getting to a certain point and we stop simulating and we just use some form of randomness there to plug the hole, right? Um, some kind of probability distribution.

When we look back at the history of games going much further back than Kriegspiel um and think about it from more of an anthropological sense, right, or more of a cultural history sense, what we see is that uh much early game playing seems to be about dealing with the concept of fate and dealing with the concept of unpredictability and is tied in with fortune telling and and all of this, right?

And so you know often even early games that we don’t know the history of, like, the game of Ur — many people have uh you know concluded that the game of is fundamentally a philosophical statement about a human life and it is it uses randomness. The links between the classic deck of cards and the tarot deck. The use of divination in old Roman games. I could go on, right? There’s there’s many many things that connect this notion of we don’t quite know how to predict this. But if we play with it, we can start building mental models of probability distribution. That’s, you know, that’s kind of at the heart of play, right?

It’s let me take this system I don’t understand. Poke it, prod it. It wiggles in particular ways that I don’t understand why. But the more I do it, the more predictable it gets, right? That is play. But, you know, you I want to poke it to get this outcome is is the act of play, right? You get better at it by practicing on poking the thing.

Um, but it’s also kind of the scientific method, right? You form a hypothesis. If I poke it here, what’s it going to do? And once you get it to something reliable, you know, you go from hypothesis to theory to that’s a fact. I know how it works now, right? Um, so to me, those those concepts are very deeply intertwined and very human.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Um, so many potential jumping off points there. Cuz I was recently reading um, James Paul Gee’s book, the uh, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, which talks about how the similarities of the the scientific method and and what we just kind of naturally do in play. Uh but when you describe it like that, it sounds almost like the the similarities that occur across civilizations between early games are inherent in in how we would design a game due to our psychology.

And it’s it’s almost similar to how Joseph Campbell would describe the similar mythologies that spring up across civilizations in that, you know, it was kind of always going to be this way because we all share this psychology like we were bound to have uh similar mythologies and and maybe bound to have similar games and games of chance as well.

Yeah, maybe. I do think that we do see even in really old games uh really strong cultural differences that represent qualities of cultures, right?

Like Ur, Senet, those games are too old for us to really understand them, really know them, right? We’ve reconstructed rules, so we think we understand what that game is…

Right um for for those who don’t know I guess I guess you have listeners who may not know but uh the game of is a die rolling game where you have to go from one end to the other of a track right but the weirdness in it is that each player starts on their own track and Then there’s a long middle strip in the game where you’re both on the same track and then you have to roll perfectly to get out at the other end.

And you could think of these almost as uh that the way these work is you have like a childhood period where you’re not intersecting, not competing. You’re just trying to roll and get out of childhood. Then you have the long shared track. And the thing with the shared track is if you land on another player, they’re out and they go back to the beginning. They have to be born again. And then at the very end, the track splits again and now you’re in old age and you’re not competing with each other anymore.

And um you know, you can see that as a metaphor for fairly cutthroat kind of kind of existence, right? At least this is our reconstruction of it and how we interpret it now. Um but it you know we don’t when when you look at later games — right because that one’s ancient that’s like Babylonian right — but if you move forward in time to see games like the taflfamily of games in um Nordic countries and uh or the uh mancala family in in Africa. These also seem to encode qualities of how the cultures worked.

So the tafl family is um it’s essentially a combat game, but it’s very different from chess because it’s asymmetrical. You have a raider, one side plays the raiders and the other side plays a king and his band of defenders. and that side has to get the king off the board and the raiders try to capture the king. So, it’s almost like uh like a fox and geese kind of game, but it is very much sort of about like your Viking band with a jarl and his, you know, and his and his soldiers, right?

Um, mancala is a game about planting seeds and many of the rules in different parts of Africa, you lose if you win by too much, because that would mean that um you want to be successful at planting, but you don’t want to cause everybody to starve because only one person ended up with all of the crop, right?

Like these things are end up encoding cultural values. they end up encoding things about the way that uh the people at the time saw the world. Even chess, the making of the queen into a powerful piece was a response to uh what was happening in European politics where powerful queens were becoming dominant political figures and it got encoded into the game, right? So yeah, I think um games end up since they’re modeling and simulating things, they often end up reflecting the mindset of the culture that played them.

That’s fascinating. Talking about those early games and coding the cultural values. In your book, you you kind of lamented that a lot of the popular games today, uh, they sort of satisfied or they taught skills that were kind of Do modern games satisfy modern compulsions? evolutionary obsolete. Uh, and they satisfied compulsions that that perhaps don’t serve us very much in in the modern day, like, you know, hunting and jumping over rivers and things like that.

Um, uh, and as I mentioned, the the version I was rereading was, uh, not the the more recent version. So maybe this is something that you updated in the second edition, but now that gaming is more mature, uh, and we’ve had the indie explosion.

Uh, do you think that that’s changed?

It has changed a lot since the first edition of the book was written. There’s a line in uh, in the edition that you read actually that uh, outright says, “What happened? How come we have no games about farming?” Well, that sure changed, right? But but there weren’t any at the time that I wrote the original edition.

Um yeah, I think the big thing there is that there are things that are easy to simulate. It is very easy to simulate force projection and capture or kill um you know territory and so on. It’s really easy to simulate those. And so they are kind of go-to tools, right? We know what mechanics to use. We know what code to write. It’s very straightforward to just stack in shooting and jumping and running over and over again and end up with games that fundamentally are still teaching us kind of the same reflexes and the same patterns of thought as always.

Um, I think the the there’s there’s kind of two strands to even thinking about what happened with indie games because there’s there’s sort of a a thematic experimentation angle and then there’s a formal experimentation angle, right?

And when when the innovation works the best, both of those are happening together. But there’s an awful lot of um thematic experimentation that doesn’t necessarily bring with it mechanical experimentation, innovation in terms of new game features or truly novel game designs, right?

So I I think I wrote years ago an example of a game about healing, right? Uh as a thematic flip, it would be incredibly easy to make an RPG. It was exactly like an RPG today except that you’re a healer instead of a killer and what you’re doing is putting hit points back, right? And you could make exactly the same MMO or exactly Diablo or whatever and all you’re doing is instead of killing them, you’re turning them from near dead to alive.

And that would you know on on one level that would be radical because it would force us to like re-examine assumptions but on the other hand mechanically it’s it’s not right like it it isn’t inventing anything novel in terms of a system right um

It’s still like a an economy of health that you —

Right it’s still just an economy of health the only difference is whether numbers are going up or down right really is is the only difference and of course as we Oh, if you just redefine health as sickness, then it could even work exactly the same.

You could just diminish the amount of sickness, take it to zero, now the person’s left healthy. Yeah. So, it’s it’s Yeah. Um, I do think there’s an enormous amount of the indie space which has pursued exploring thematic areas that games didn’t cover, but doing it with just, you know, we have platformers about grief. We have platformers about fitting in. We have platformers about, you know, um um so I think that there’s nothing wrong with that and it’s good to see that kind of thematic experimentation happening. Um but I I do often wish we saw more of the other side of things, the the formal side of experimentation, the invention of new mechanics.

I’ve even seen I I see this fairly regularly hanging out in like game design subreddits and whatnot. I hear people say all the mechanics have been invented and I’m like no, that’s like saying all the math has been invented. It’s a bottomless pit. There’s so much more out there for us to go do. Um, and of course the the trick to pursuing that is is as simple as trying to simulate whatever that tricky topic was. Can you simulate grief, in uh simulate fitting in, like as a simulation system, not as a bit of story that you stick on, right? Um, and that kind of thing I think can lead to completely new forms of gameplay, and is how we really expand the field in the end. So I personally would love to see both and uh you know I wish that I wish that we saw more of that mechanical experimentation.

What I tend to see is mechanical experimentation usually only happens when we get some new technical capability that forces us to try out some new mechanics.

Um, I’ve kind of felt a similar way about criticism is, you know, a lot of critics um that I’ve talked to over the years do focus a lot on the uh thematic and the aesthetic and the narrative. And some have even just outright said to me at at um meetups, you know, all I care about is graphics. If a game has good graphics, I’m giving it 10 out of 10.

Um, and I do wish that there was more focus sometimes on like and it does take more effort like you know I get that if you’re playing an RTS and you really want to make objective calls about the balance between asymmetrical factions like it it requires a lot of play time and that um you know talking about the graphics doesn’t um but yeah it’s it’s one of the things that I I wish I would see more in the criticism space u I think now in terms of like I guess the equivalent of the indie explosion in in games like the the sort of criticism equivalent of that is YouTube.

Uh and now we are kind of seeing more of that in you YouTube, right? Like there are some YouTubers who do kind of specifically focus on that.

Yeah. Although I I’ll have to be honest and this might get like vast swaths of of fandom angry at me, but I I think that the vast majority of YouTube discussion of game design is pretty shallow. Um, I think that, uh, the length constraints, the fact that by and large it isn’t practitioners doing it, it’s it’s players doing it. Um, uh, I think there’s generally a real lack of historical context. Uh, where people don’t know the history of games all that well.

Yeah, I I find a lot of it, particularly I know a lot of folks who say, “Oh, I don’t want to read any game design books. just point me at game design YouTube channels.” And I’m like, there there really is no substitute at the moment for reading the, you know, the 10 best game design books. You’re not going to find the equivalent of that on YouTube. It just doesn’t exist. It just doesn’t. Um, but yeah, I think a lot of YouTube uh criticism is very, it’s player centered, not craft centered, you know.

Um, interesting.

And there’s nothing wrong with player centered criticism. Um, but if you are trying to be a better game designer, um, it’s only one lens and not necessarily even the most important one, you know, you do have to learn about the craft itself, not just how players react to it, right?

Yeah. And I guess a lot of that is not very content friendly like because you know when you’re learning about the crafts um you do kind of have to go back to these really basic and abstract things that don’t maybe uh visually pop in the way that uh a YouTuber would want it to. like you know if you were to go back and you know whether it’s playing retro games or uh you know some of the the more interesting experimental games that interested me were like you know I don’t know if you remember when Jason Rohrer did a series for The Escapist where he tried to encapsulate an emotion with a game and I I thought he did a really good job of that. You know he would sort of take a concept uh like perfectionism and make a game out of that.

Uh I thought that was super interesting. Uh, and then you’ve got like I think back in the the 2000s or maybe even before uh I’m blanking on the guy’s name. He was I think he worked for EA. He made a game called The Marriage.

Rod Humble. Rod Humble. That’s it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

You’re describing the art game movement. The original art game movement of the early 2000s that actually it was a movement that was uh partly inspired by theory of fun and other writings. At the time there was uh Brenda Romero’s game Train, which was tabletop, but was also uh the the the title of that series of games she made was the mechanics are the message.

And that kind of sums up what both Jason and Rod were trying to do at the time.

Could you explain Train just quickly for uh for those listening?

Yeah, Train was a game. Uh it’s it’s an art game in which players are essentially attempting to uh a packing problem where they’re trying to pack figurines into a train and get deliver to them deliver them to the destination. Um and then at the end of the game you learn that you were participating in the Holocaust.

And it’s meant to be a um a pretty overt message about complicity, right? That by participating according to the rules, you are being complicit.

And the game tries to signal to the player in a whole bunch of ways that hey, the rules you’re operating within are not okay. Like like the game is literally played above broken window glass uh to echo Kristallnacht, right?

So it’s like hard to pack the people. It’s like it’s hard to get them in the train. It’s hard to get them in the train.

Yeah, exactly. It’s it’s very much aimed at forcing you to think about, wait a minute, why am I playing this?

And um you know, I’ve I’ve had debates with her about what what is the right way to play it, right? to to not play it, to subvert it, to play to lose, right? Um but the key thing there is that the mechanics are aiming at delivering delivering the artistic message like that is what is doing it. There’s no story in Train.

Yeah, there’s it’s only at the end, right, that you’re told like um the the train has made its way to the concentration camp and then you’re like, whoa, hang on. What?

Yeah, exactly.

Um there is no story really in The Marriage. The marriage um is a very personal expression about what it feels like to be in a particular marriage where uh the characters are abstract shapes and they’re just you know they just have rules like um they get bigger when they’re near each other under certain circumstances. In other circumstances, one shrinks the other and eventually there might be new shapes that appear if they spend time together and that wears them both down and so on, right? And it’s a metaphor for, you know, moments in a marriage and how it affects things. Um, but there’s no story. And in fact, if you don’t read the paragraph on the web page, you don’t even know it’s about people. You think it’s just shapes.

Um uh in Jason Rohrer’s case, it’s uh there many of his games do layer on more story a little bit like Passage for example. You are moving, you know, you start out as a young figure and you get older and older o as you progress and eventually Keel over dead and there’s um another character joins you for part of the journey, but eventually you part and then you Yeah.

The whole point of that movement was finding ways to have, call it the formal side, the mechanical side, the simulation side convey artistic messages, not just putting story on top of a platformer or putting story on top of uh, you know, something else. It’s not that putting story on top of a platformer is bad, but I think it can uh likely never be as resonant as those moments where you are involved in the choices. Right.

Absolutely. Um, there was a a paper that came out and I I don’t really think the paper proved what its main point was, but I just found its point interesting, which is that in instances where the the mechanics don’t really line up with the the theme or the story.

So, you know, people will talk about ludo narrative dissonance, uh, people usually talk about that as a flaw. And you know, if the game itself is conflicted, then the player will feel conflicted and it’ll take them out of the immersion because they’ll they’ll feel like, you know, what I’m doing here is not really lining up with who I’m supposed to be embodying. Um, but the paper was talking about how uh it could maybe be used as a tool, like a narrative tool rather than just as a flaw to sort of ram home a point in the way that uh I guess juxtaposition could be used in a in a painting or something like that.

Yeah, I don’t think I think dissonance there or consonance there. Once you understand the basic principle, you can play with it, right? I think the when we talk about getting better at the craft, it’s about learning those tools for your tool bench and then deciding whether or not to pick them up or to what degree to use them. You know, that becomes that becomes uh up an up to you kind of moment, right? As a creative.

Um there are many examples where something we might call dissonant have made for powerful experiences in games. Uh you know I mean we talk about breaking the fourth wall in theater and TV and books right that kind of dissonance is a form of breaking the wall inside of a game right and we see that happening in from again that same time period. um Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ria for example, there’s a moment where you have to play a Tetris piece and put it someplace and it is physically impossible to do so. Um right, like that’s breaking the expectation of the player in a very particular way.

Um so I think a lot of it is about just learning what some of these craft tools are and then figuring out ways in which you can apply them. Um, I don’t think that, you know, you have to always aim for perfect ludo narrative consonants or whatever, but I think it’s more telling if you are building dissonance without even being aware of it.

That’s very different from if you’re doing it on purpose, right? And I think that’s that’s the distinction between being a conscious craftsperson about it and just being naive about it.

Yeah. Yeah. you have to be like uh Picasso said, you know, I learned the rules so I could disregard the rules or something like that. Um so, you know, a theory of fun comes out comes out and then um there’s this art movement that we’re talking about. um and a lot of exploration around um the the abstract side and what what kind of communication can be done with uh things like moving shapes um uh when you subtract uh almost all theme and almost all story in your book uh you know.

One of the main themes that you touch on um I guess you kind of um opened with it and ended with it is that you were contemplating your grandfather’s skepticism about games as a as a vocation and as an art form and you arrived at something like Pascal’s wager where uh you said that you know if if I take this seriously and and I’m choose to be very responsible about it.

If I’m wrong then whatever I was a crackpot all along. Um but if if I I’m right um well even if I’m a crackpot then at least I haven’t harmed anyone. Um, but if I’m right, then I would have taken this art form seriously uh in the earliest days of understanding it and uh sort of been one of the first to kind of create a map of the territory.

Um, so now that the indie explosion is in full effect and you know that the art movement has has happened and I guess is still happening, um, have you seen any any games that sort of nudge you towards that latter conclusion of of Oh, yeah. you being right?

Yeah, absolutely. I think at the time that the first draft of that book was written, um, we had only recently been, uh, considered to even be protected speech in the United States, uh, you know, protected artistic expression. There was active debate about whether or not games were an art form or not. Um, among game developers, it was an active debate. Many developers were like, “That’s not an art form. It’s just entertainment product. It’s not, you know, can’t be art.” That was that was a thing I got told by um mentors actually, right?

Um that attitude is dead. It’s dead, and good, I think. Um because I think now there’s no question in people’s minds that games are a medium.

I think one of the things that has happened more and more since the book was written is video games have evolved more and more into not being games per se. Right? There’s more of whole swaths of video gamedom are primarily narrative not particular gamelike at all. Um they’re you know there we have not just visual novels but all kinds of experiences where the mechanical piece is truly truly minimal and it is in the um only interactivity can express but not necessarily games.

Artful Escape was an Annapurna game. It’s sort of a platformer kind of except you can’t lose. There’s no way to to fail at the platforming. You’re a kid who wants to be a musician and then you get abducted by aliens to participate in in an intergalactic rock tour. The game consists of you sliding sideways and you can express music and jump and do all this kind of stuff, but yeah, it doesn’t really matter how well you do. at the jumping and periodically you play an incredibly simple game of Simon and that’s it. The vast majority of it is about the feeling of zipping and sliding and expressing these musical notes as you go. And it feels awesome to do, but it isn’t really a game in the classic sense. It’s just pure play.

And I think we’ve seen more and more of that kind of thing where um we have more software toys than than uh pure traditional games these days. And I think that’s good. That’s not a bad thing at all. I think bringing back just the the sense of play and exploration is important.

Um the other side of it, you know, we do have the Dark Souls kind of vein which is very very gamey, very very challenged driven and mastery driven, right?

So I to me it’s been great to see that overall expansion of the palette, right? Um, the fact that, you know, gosh, in the early to mid 2000s, I could literally lay down the boxes, cuz we still bought boxes of of games and lay them all down on the floor and 80% of them would be a burly dude with a gun, right? And it’s not that way anymore, right?

And I think that’s wonderful and is exactly what you would expect from people starting to take the medium more seriously as uh you know an avenue for artistic expression.

Yeah. And even you know to to further the point on the Dark Souls. So, I mean it’s it’s like super gamey and super refined like you know combat mechanics and stuff like that but also on the storytelling element kind of pushing the you know forwarding the the idea of an interactive story. I mean, obviously, you know, we there’s been choose your own adventure books for a long time and things like that, but the idea of a story that is not even there unless you engage with it. and a story told purely through level design and actions that you see and item descriptions um is like you know that that seems to be like there were so many different things that uh Dark Souls did that people kind of copied but that seems to be one of the more important ones

It’s like you know when we talk about what a story in a game can do differently uh than a story in a book or a film I think Dark Souls kind of hit on something and my friends are all going to be laughing right now because uh you They they they criticize me for always somehow bringing it around to Dark Souls. Like what does this have to do with Dark Souls, Jeremy? Yeah.

This is my fault, I I brought it up.

I although I’ll say, you know, that idea of telling a story in that I’ll just say environmental storytelling, right? telling a story in that more environmental way um is actually from a very non-gamey side of things that came out of that indie explosion, right? And in fact, the kind of people who love Dark Souls, many of them were the kind who sneered at Gone Home, um Project Esther, uh you know, things like that. Dear Esther, sorry, Dear Esther and what was the other one? Proteus, right? which were very experiential, you know, just go through and people said, “Well, where’s the game?”

Well, guess what? Now Dark Souls is built in part on that kind of stuff, right? And so, you know, this is why I I always kind of say, you know, you got to watch out what you call not a game. You know, the lines between toys, puzzles, and games, those lines can be very blurry.

Um I think it’s important to have craft terminology to understand this is a game in a classic sort of ludology sense but from a uh what players can play with, I mean players can play with a ball, right? It doesn’t take much to uh provide an interactive experience that players can build a game on top of and so excluding the end product doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Um, I think we can be uh precise in terminology while still being inclusive in terms of what we count as a game.

Do game design lessons line up with cognitive psychology?

We you talked in your book about evolutionary psychology and sort of the the cognitive theory and when I read memoirs from um storied game designers like u you know for example that was going through the Sid Meier memoir and um I think um I’ve seen Yeah. Yeah, I’ve I’ve had multiple instances of this where they they seem to have independently arrived at concepts that I would also read in like, you know, a Daniel Kahneman book where like, you know, Sid Meier talked about how he always felt that players needed to win 70% of the time to feel like they had won 50% of the time, which is something, you know, like a loss aversion that that Kahneman would talk about.

As someone who’s uh uh read quite broadly on these these subjects um I was wondering if you’ve you know in the course of your research you’ve ever been reading about concepts like that and and thought to yourself I know that you know I I kind of stumbled on that while I was making games

All the time. I started reading and you know I’m not ashamed to admit it. I started reading pop psychology first right um and then started reading some of the original papers and and whatnot digging underneath it. Um yes there were all kinds of things out of psychology but then since I worked in MMOs obviously also out of economics and sociology and anthropology that ended up really resonating for me.

One of the biggest career revelation moments was actually when I learned about uh the science of social networking which came along before social networks right like we shouldn’t confuse them but uh the the whole thing like is six degrees of separation and all and Dumbar’s number and the way human networks form and all of that stuff and it was so deeply relevant to what I was doing in MMOs at the time

And I ended up talking with people in the field um and saying, you know, we observed this in our game and we have data. And they’d be like, you have data on this? You know, um because, you know, a lot of what they were doing, they’re they’re trying to gather data on it. And I’m like, I have a petri dish with hundreds of thousands of people in it. I can see the social graph literally, right? Like uh that kind of stuff. um we take it more for granted, but in the early 2000s it was not it right like um you know it was one of those things uh it was it made the news when they used that science to figure out who the ring leader of 9/11 was, right?

Oh wow.

Um because they were able to trace who talked to who and identify who the ring leader of the of the terror cell was.

Um so yeah that that kind of crossover has happened to me a lot and it’s happened a lot with um social stuff. It’s happened a lot with psychology of learning. Um it’s happened with economic things a lot. Uh there, you know, I know that for example, um modern monetary theory and economics is something the economists debate a lot, but there’s an awful lot where I go, that’s exactly how it works when I’m being god and running an economy of of an MMO, right? Like it works this way and we know that we have data on it. We can see how it operates.

Um, that kind of thing happens to me a lot and it has happened with a bunch of theory of fun over the years. Uh, bits of stuff that I speculated in theory of fun or just claimed asserted, right? Uh, lots of bits of it got have gotten validated by um, you know, validated by later studies like uh, Nicole Lazaro for example had her four kinds of fun, right? And uh and I said, ‘Well, we really have this kind of fun and we have these other things. Maybe we shouldn’t call them fun because they they they involve other kinds of things. And I’m I was focusing more on pattern matching and problem solving and that kind of thing. But you know, her her ideas and mine were super complimentary and she is a trained psychologist, right?

Well, way later out comes studies about um different kinds of human enjoyment and which ones are activated by which human hormones. And it turns out that there is a breakdown very similar to what we were both talking about that oh no well that one is because you have you know serotonin plus dopamine gives you this dopamine alone gives you that and you know and it it was like oh well there it is just as we predicted.

Things that came up in in sports training and deliberate practice and things like that end up reinforcing it. Um there there’s all kinds of interesting things like that where it often feels to me like people working in training, in education, in psychology, especially around hormone stuff and endocrinology stuff. Um, and in game design and in a few other fields, it often feels to me like we’re all touching the same elephant and just using different language to describe, you know, flow versus deliberate practice versus this versus that. Those are coming from very different subfields out there.

And yet, you know, game design is a place where they all kind of meet.

And you you you know in the course of working on UO and Star Wars Galaxies, you had to research a lot in into uh different forms of government, which I guess is a good jumping off point into Stars Reach cuz once again, you are playing God. And um it looks as though um there will be sort of the the opportunity for different factions to own a whole planet and a player to run a planet and politics will be a skill tree.

There are many ideas in Stars Reach that have been percolating for me for 20 30 years now. Today the the MMORPG genre or label has uh has come to mean you know a particular constellation of features that are a great example of what we were talking about when we started this conversation of just sort of looking at the surface of things. Um they they’ve fallen back into being. Let’s make a world that has other people in it, but fundamentally you are engaging in an ongoing treadmill of defeating enemies in order to get a nicer piece of loot so that you can go defeat the next enemy.

And that’s what the game is about, right? And uh I got started in online worlds long enough ago to remember when that wasn’t the only kind of online world there was. um there were more more things there and first and foremost it was about being in this alternate reality that was the the core point and the activity that you did in there was secondary right

So with Stars Reach we’re trying to make an alternate reality uh that happens to be about building civilizations with your friends different kinds of people who play in different ways each of them maxing out their level in that but the sum of the parts is greater than their individual activity because they form an inter related web of people who end up building a civilization.

They end up forming an economy, settling on a planet, building a government together and so on. And they do it each for their own selfish reasons probably. we end up collaborating and competing with each other in all these ways and often don’t understand the value that other people bring. I want the game to kind of convey that we’re all in this together and we have to solve some of these problems together.

Even if they’re not friends of yours, even if they’re not people that you hang out with. I always use the analogy of I’m not friends with the plumber that I tend to call and I don’t know who maintains my telephone lines out the outside and I have a vague awareness that there’s an enormous amount of stuff under the streets without which I could not live and I know nothing about it. Right? But there are players for whom that stuff is what they enjoy doing. So, they play their power grid game and the other person plays their plumbing game and I play my kill monsters game. Turns out we do all actually depend on one another.

One of the nicest compliments I ever got. It was a just a random observation on some gaming forum. Somebody said, “I think all of Raph’s games are about the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.” And I was like, “Oh, yes, that’s me. That’s it. That’s that’s what I like making games about.” And so, um, yeah. Stars Reach is a game about that. It’s a game about different kinds of people discovering that they need each other.

I’m glad your answer went in that direction because I was going to uh bring up like, you know, the the sort of there’s a whole genre of story designers bringing out a new game and uh the the marketing department uses the line, you know, the game I’ve always wanted to make or the the dream game.

And you know, it was at the point where Jouos would go to E3 with their bingo card. Uh, and they would say, “Oh, you know, Molyneux said it and um, yeah, you know, Will Wright said it.” Oh, oh, Cliff Cliff Bleszinski, bingo. Uh, so I wanted to take it in that direction of of what makes Stars Reach your dream game. And obviously, you know, there’s this whole other element that I I actually really do want to drill down on, which is the cellular automata element, but it sounds like the this um with this game, but also kind of your games before there’s a strong uh theme of like uh simulation leading to emergent behavior. Would that be correct in saying that?

Absolutely. Um and and and also the social stuff that I described, I think, is also been a theme in all three of of the MMOs, I think.

You know, I was trained as a as a writer, as an artist, as a musician. Um, and all of those are areas where you exert an awful lot of authorial control, right? Um, I ran D&D campaigns. I wrote my own campaign and module and blah blah blah. Did all of that. And there you still exert an awful lot of authorial control, right? And uh when you start making uh online worlds, you start out and I started out making ones with lots of quests and lots of, you know, directed gameplay or whatever.

And that’s still very much authorial control. Um but that sense of falling into a world and getting lost and it acting in predictable ways but not being controlled by an author having that emergent property that’s something magical that that digital games in particular can do better than I mean they can do it better than tabletop because you can’t have simulation to that degree in tabletop.

It’s something very unique to computers and um you know at that extreme end we have things like Dwarf Fortress right where the authorial control is at one step removed it’s building the rules of the world but the world is kind of going on its own right and falling into you know think how cool it would be to play Skyrim inside of a Dwarf Fortress world where you where stuff is happening and it’s alive and it’s around you right I mean That to me feels like one of the ultimate promises of of uh CRPGs, not not the Final Fantasy, which is all about control, author control, right?

Um it’s sort of the other the other direction. I think that other direction was also one of the key inspirations for the entire Elder Scrolls series, right? uh you know Daggerfall started out all it was all procedural right it was all generated and dynamic so yeah UO galaxies uh Stars Reach very much all leaning into those ideas of simulation and once you put thousands of people in it you start realizing it can’t just be about simulating the environment you have to simulate the player activities and because if you make this intricate world simulation and then the only thing that players can do in it is kill. Well, why’ you bother, right?

Um, and you know, from real early on, even in even in UO, even in the text muds I did before that, um, there was this sense of there’s got to be more to do in here than just kill things, right? I mean, you know, I didn’t dream of Middle Earth just to go there and kill orcs. I also wanted to just go have lunch with the hobbits, you know, I or or whatever, right?

The finest weed in the South Faring.

Yeah. It wasn’t just about the just about the mayhem. It was also about the just the the sense of awe and wonder of being there, right?

So, yeah, simulation to me super super important. Stars Reach is built on the idea that we can simulate with modern computing capability. We can simulate these alternate worlds in ways that nobody’s ever done before. We’re not doing what Dwarf Fortress does in terms of simulating all the NPCs, but we are doing um as you mentioned a cellular automa simulation. We are simulating every cubic meter of the environment. We know the humidity, the material stuff is made of, what state of matter it is. Things can have chemical reactions with one another.

Um, you know, water meets dirt, it turns to mud. When you walk through the mud, you might slog and get stuck. Um, build a road and uh and now you won’t get stuck. And so stuff like that sounds like it’s just um it sounds like it’s just uh there for for the cool factor, but actually has all these implications on gameplay.

It gives a much better um underlying um substrate, I guess, for crafting, of course, for player building, for even for the combat. Like you might be fighting some monsters and they lob um heat shots at you and the forest burns down and now that affects where you can take cover and it means that where there used to be forest that might now be prime farmland but now the habitat for the monsters is gone and now there’s different creatures showing up, right? like it makes the world alive on all kinds of levels.

And we’ve had it now in live testing with players for over a year. And um it turns out that having a living world around you really hooks people.

I’m I’m super interested in it. And you know, I’m I’m one of those old jaded uh games journers who’s played every type of AAA game under the sun. Um, you know, I I I typically only come out of my cave for an interesting idea. Uh, I just happened to to be reading this book um called Awe. It’s all about the feeling of awe and how it can actually be a healthy thing for us to uh regularly get a sense of awe in our lives.

And there are various cognitive benefits as well such as um the DMN the default mode network which is a part of the cortex involved in egocentric thinking is less active after experiencing awe and it’s also uh shown to help pull people into system two thinking as opposed to system one.

Um, so I guess not every game can instigate that feeling of awe, but you know, I’ve always been the type of gamer that, you know, loves exploring systems. So something like this, like, you know, a 3D cellular automata that’s a galaxy wide, that that is that that’s what does the awe thing for me.

Yeah. it. Uh when when we did our very first couple of play tests, one of the things we did was we invited only in like a hundred people to run around and all they could do was run around. But we showed them things like let me open blow a hole in the dam and watch the water flood a canyon or I’m going to plant a bunch of tree seedlings and now I’ve set up a — like we have this thing called a growth beacon that accelerates the growth of of trees.

And one of the players um said that they got a moment of awe because they were standing in the middle of the forest. And they had this moment of an artist didn’t lay this out. The trees grew here and in fact were still growing around her at that very moment. The trees were growing and she said it, you know, it basically gave her chills, right? Yeah.

There’s something magical about that even when it isn’t tied to a game system, right? Um, but then when you do tie it to the game system and you have that moment where you know the weird aliens blasting away at you and the forest catches fire around you and now you’re like, “Oh no, what do I do?” But then you blow a hole in the dam and flood the valley and it puts out the fire. Right now we’re in the realm of gameplay, right? um that is novel that you can’t get without having this level of simulation.

Um routinely we have players who are going digging and mining and tunneling which you’re very used to doing from Minecraft and and many other games now and then every once in a while they’re like um so I dug really far and then there was a cave in and it killed me. Yeah. And it’s like “yeah were you digging through soft material?” And they’re like “that can happen?” Yes. Why, yes, it can. You might need to build supports as you go and so on, right? And they’re like, whoa. Um, and so sometimes it isn’t the dramatic moment like there’s a YouTube short of a guy just watching slack jawed as gravel slides down a slope in the Yeah. Yeah. And just going, it’s moving. That’s so cool.

Right. Um, and it’s funny because on the other hand, there was also a different person has a different YouTube video up where they’re they’re on the edge of a cliff and a giant meteor comes down from the sky and lands on the rim of a lake, blows a huge crater in the ground. the lake starts to drain into the crater, hits the heated ground, starts to steam up, and he’s just going, “Oh my god, that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in a video game.”

And then one in one of the comments, somebody goes, “Eh, I mean, I can drop a giant nuke in Helldivers.” It’s and and so they don’t even realize the difference because people are so used to things being faked, right, to it only being in the storytelling layer and not being in the mechanics of the game, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Helldivers is fun, but it’s, you know, it’s not even in the same universe. Um, pardon the pun, but u I guess that kind of like that kind of solves the MMO content treadmill problem for you as well, right? Like it’s this um level of simulation and players creating their own stories.

Yes. It doesn’t mean that we won’t make our own content. We also embrace a couple of other things that are very different from the main current of MMO design today. today, most MMO design, because it’s about progressing on a treadmill until you hit end game and then you just do raids over and over again forever or PvP over and over again forever. Um, each of the zones is basically like a level you move through once and you’re done with it. Um, and at the same time, because there’s so much emphasis on experience and story, a zone is incredibly expensive to craft. It’s, you know, all this handcrafting detail and attention goes into it.

It’s very expensive only for it to get burned through by locusts and then sit mostly empty eventually, right? And this has been a dilemma for MMOs for a long time. What happens now in modern MMO design is that um they let you level and then they say, “Ah, levels don’t matter. You can go back to zones and we’ll autoscale everything.” And right like it’s almost like a hack layered on top of the original problem.

Um, so we said, well, if we’re simulating these zones, we can generate zones and that means we can have as many of them as we want and we could throw them away and just make new ones anytime. And so we built the game around that idea that the map does not stay put. That instead you discover new zones, new planets, new space areas, chew them up, destroy them, abandon them, they go away, you find new ones, and it isn’t a static galaxy at all.

Instead, new zones are coming in and old ones are exiting. Already in our pre-alpha, people are currently playing in four zones and we have thrown away eight.

Oh wow.

And um we also have a feature right now where a wild wormhole gate opens up periodically and there’s a different zone, a whole new zone on the other end each time it opens up. So kind of like an instanced each of them is fully persistent. If people decide to move in, then everything persists and is saved. So it’s only if people abandon a place do we recycle it.

And that’s just so different from how MMOs have evolved.

Interesting. um the the whole zone thing because the you know the the old sci-fi trope of the um one biome planet um which uh is you know I guess Star Wars is the u the biggest culprit there of having like a a desert old desert planet or an old jungle planet which um

He stole it from Dune.

Oh yeah, there you go. Um which you know in real life uh tends to not be very realistic or sustainable. Um but uh when you have a system like this um I imagine there are so many things that you have to keep in mind you you have to sort of uh build something that that is sustainable and you know with with these you know at least when it comes to two-dimensional cellular automata you know typically when you design a system it either explodes in complexity or it peters out to nothing or it just uh it can create these like sustainable moving systems. Um, so what do you have to keep in mind when you’re designing like a planet of 3D cellular automata uh so that it’s sustainable and then also I guess kind of resilient to terraforming and all the things that the players are going to do.

There’s there’s a bunch of factors there. We had to decide which kinds of materials or resources were exhaustable and which ones were not that were self-refreshing. And that line was easy. We said inorganic materials. If you extract all the gold on a planet, it’s all gone. It doesn’t come back because you literally carved away some of the map, right? Like it’s not there anymore.

Um, but plants and animals can reproduce. And what we did was we did set max population caps on things and we have backs stops in the gameplay in our lore is that this is a terraformed garden of worlds left behind by an ancient civilization and there are still robots that are tending it and that act as gardeners and backs stop it and you get in trouble if you drive things extinct.

So you still can drive things extinct but the robots won’t come for you. um that lets us have mechanics in there that do things like keep barely alive populations around. Um things like that. We backstop the cellular automa with outright spawners that exist one level below the cellular automata. Um, they kind of act like if in Game of Life you have gliders that are the living things and you got glider guns that make the gliders, think of the critters as being like the gliders, but think of the spawners of being like glider guns.

And um, we we salt those around the map to kind of provide initial state. Um, and uh, they will replenish things until you destroy them. And at that point, they’re not there to replenish things anymore. So, think of almost like a water spring. Like, if you plug the spring, no more water is going to come out, right? Um, so that helps give us a back stop that makes things more resilient. You can still destroy it all, but it’s more resilient.

Then the caps provide uh, you know, there can only be so many trees on the planet no matter what kind of thing, which we need for performance reasons and so on. Um, so there’s a lot of that kind of thing. We uh you have to design all of your content in a very different way. We don’t build single biome planets. We do say this planet has an overall hydraology. This is how humid it is, what color sun it has, what temperature ranges exist, but sometimes those ranges are narrow, in which case you might get single biome. And sometimes they’re broad and there’s seasons and climate change and all of it happening.

And you might have, you know, tropical swamp on the same map as as a frigid mountaintop. And those can coexist. And that means we don’t design biomes. Instead, we derive biomes off of local conditions on the map. And based on what the local conditions say, those are the kinds of plants that thrive there. Um, so that meant we had to go make the art for all the biomes.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right. All of them. And make sure that, hey, uh, we’ve captured a spread. So if you have a planet with a lot of climactic variety, there’s something in all the different ecological niches. Um, so yeah, it really does change how you design and how you think about things quite a lot. It did occur to me that there, you know, there are all these methods of destruction.

There has to be kind of methods of creation as well that that are kind of operating under the hood.

Yes. Not just under the hood. We give them two players. We allow them to do things like, you know, if they destroy that glider gun, which in our case is um what we call makers. Um that’s what the spawners are. They can make new ones to repopulate a planet.

Um, there’s actually a uh if you claim a planet, there’s actually a computer that you can install on your planet that is an ecology monitor that lets you see the populations of all the species and what’s going extinct and and so on so that players can attempt to actively manage uh the ecology of their world.

I guess the one of the games that people are going to naturally compare it to is No Man’s Sky. um which uh you know I guess I’ve seen people describe it as a cross between Minecraft and No Man’s Sky which uh seems apt but um you know No Man’s Sky kind of uh introduced us to this uh idea of like you know billions and billions of different life forms but they’re all kind of like you know the they have a limited number of sliders and uh which might decide like their nose length or something like that and they just have each slider is is at a different point and together when you combine all of those, you know, combinations, they there’s there’s millions and millions.

So, I guess that sort of introduced a lot of people to the idea of uh uh mathematical uh difference versus like human perceived difference. Uh because if something’s mathematically different, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it seems different uh to a human being. Like if you know, if a nose is just a one centimeter shorter, uh technically it’s a different you know, species. Um but uh to a human it’ll just be like ow looks the same.

So I guess I was going to ask like where Stars Reach has sort of uh lives on that spectrum of like you know creating an art asset for everything and on the other end like you know uh attempting some sort of procedural generation or or having sliders or something like that.

I think what No Man’s Sky is doing is kind of a lot like what Spore was doing, which was a whole research project for both teams, I think, for Spore and uh Hello Games, right? Um we’re not trying to solve that. Uh it’s, you know, it’s a big R&D project for us. We’re a small team. We’re a lot smaller team than than No Man’s Sky. Um so we’re we’re making variations in our lore because the planets were terraformed. Things appear on multiple worlds. And that’s okay.

Uh we do uh procedurally modify their behaviors and uh things about them so that their speciation has occurred on the different planets. You know, No Man’s Sky just isn’t an MMO, right? And so I think a lot of people look at us at the two projects and they do compare us. They go, “Oh, space game, loads of planets.”

I can dig a tunnel in No Man’s Sky, you know, and I can build a base in No Man’s Sky, but if I leave a planet on No Man’s Sky, my tunnel disappears. And if I build a base, I can only do it with what is it, five other people, right? This is a game where, you know, a few hundred of you land on a planet and start doing things. Um, so it’s a very different proposition in that sense.

And uh it opens up things like a fully playerdriven economy whereby my planet might be out of gold and or out of water and I have to import it from your planet for where you and your guild have colonized a planet that is uh you know a water world full of islands and therefore have water to spare for my deserty planet and and so on. Right. So yeah, it’s it’s different in that in that very important sense, but it is that is the kind of thing which people may not get from looking at a screenshot, right? Um which is I think one of our challenges in marketing it.

When you talk about the you know 50 and 100 people getting together and and terraforming and stuff like that. Um, I know that uh it’s it’s been said that PvP might not be available on launch, but uh will be coming soon afterwards. And I’m just wondering what uh what what considerations have to to take place when we talk about uh a faction owning a planet and terraforming as a group? Like what what kind of extreme terraforming is going to take place when people are deciding to defend a planet?

Uh well, I mean that is a ways into the future and so any answer I give is is kind of speculative. We plan on having um a three-c cornered faction system where uh players and planets can declare for a faction and that would enable territory battles to happen on those planets. Um I do picture some sort of territory control system, but if people own a planet, they have a lot of freedom to terraform and modify it.

So, it really is kind of up to them. Uh there’s all kinds of things that you could do. Uh you know, dig trenches, reroute rivers onto them, uh melt a mountain into lava onto your enemies is a thing that you can do in this game, right? Um uh it’s certainly a tactic the aliens use on you a lot. There’s several of them that attack with heat attacks strong enough to melt pools of lava under your feet, uh that you can fall in and die. So, um, yeah, I think, uh, all of those kinds of things are possible. The big consideration for us is that if you allow it, PvP will swallow a game whole, of course.

And so, it’s really important that people who do not want to participate that they can opt out, that the game does not require participation in PvP in any way if you don’t want to participate. So, it’s all opt-in. Um that’s that’s really really crucial right it this is another place where that zone-based model helps us because seamless world setting the boundaries between safe and not safe areas is full of exploits and cheats and and all of that here we can say the other side of that wormhole is in wild space and you know anything goes over there and you know before you go through right um so it gives us really bright lines for ownership of areas and rules changing from area to area.

We have seen over the years MMOs got bigger and bigger and more and more seamless and at the same time we saw a push from players to I’d rather play with just my friends in a private server, right? Like it’s like there was this bifurcation and we’re kind of saying can the chocolate be with the peanut butter? Can Can we have that private server feel in a larger galaxy? That’s more or less what our architecture lets us do.

You and your friends can have a private server and still have trade routes and still have economic contacts, still be able to go visit another server and so on. So, you’re in one galaxy in one universe. To you, it feels like one game, but we’re giving you a lot of the controls of a private server when you claim ownership of a planet. And it seems like the type of thing that you could just keep expanding as well, right? Like more sectors and more sectors. Yes, we can we can expand it. Then this is really important for a business point of view.

We can shrink it too. Um, you know, if people abandon a world because they’ve used it up, the the wormhole collapses, the trade route is lost, whatever. Um, and then we can apply that towards making a new zone instead, right? And stay costneutral, right? It’s not like World of Warcraft, which accumulates all these zones and then they sit empty, right? Um, yeah, that’s right. So, we can scale the service up and down.

Already during the pre-alpha, we had an event and it was tied in with ongoing lore storytelling that we were doing whereby there was an alien artifact that came along and started it was going to hit one of the players planets and destroy it. and we did out of the game storytelling via fiction and the planet was saved except that it was done in a way that the robots didn’t like.

So the robots destroyed all the planets anyway and um we destroyed all of the players planets. They were all blown up and the players were logged in as the robots rained meteors and destroyed their house and everything and we wiped those away and players had to go find new worlds. Um so it lets us do things that we haven’t been able to do in in other games that are really cool.

It’s that’s a sort of I guess you need to make um you know with with regards to emergent behavior uh rising from the simulation and stuff like that you have to be sort of super careful when you decide to use the hand of God like that, right?

Yes. In this case uh you know the players knew out of character that it was coming and why we were doing it but we also narrated it in character and it’s led to players doing things like they’re they’re kind of building history books now. They’re they’re maintaining the history of the planets that they lost and the the the places they’ve been that we can’t get to anymore and all of that kind of thing.

They’re preserving the memory because it’s it’s already a game that has history to it in that sense, right? Empires fell, you know, cities cities that people knew have been lost and destroyed. The concept of legacy.

The last one I’ve got for you is just a basic one. Well, I was wondering it’s possible for players to be on fire and there are different status effects. Uh I was wondering if that interacts with the sort of uh 3D cellular automata as well. Like does does my fire affecting me also affect the 3D cells that I’m inhabiting?

Right now we have that being unidirectional. Fire in particular is um it spreads really easily and so we put really tight rules on how easily it spreads. Um so we currently have it it can originate from high temperature from lava. It can set in-game plants and whatnot on fire. It can set people on fire.

The plants — Fire can spread from plant to plant, but we don’t have it that it can spread from player back onto plants or the landscape because if we did that, we’re pretty sure players would burn the whole map down in no time. Um, so, uh, we’ve had we’ve had to do a lot of tuning of things like how quickly do plants grow back, how, you know, like literally we just implemented, uh, I think it was this morning. We implemented the feature where when players trample grass, it dies and leaves behind bare soil. We just implemented that this morning and it’s a grace note kind of a feature, right? um uh grass already grows back over bare soil. So this is just adding the you know wherever players tend to trample there will tend to be pathways right but even something like that we really have to weigh well how fast does it happen?

How quickly does stuff grow back? Fire is so destructive. Lava is so destructive. Water is so destructive. We’ve held back from allowing players to scoop up water and just dump it anywhere because landslides happen and floods happen. We had an incident uh last year where um we had a decorative lake and there was a leak in the lake essentially and when we filled it with water, it flooded the player city and a lot of players had built basement and they had not lined the basement and the basement collapsed. uh you know and so the flood actually had very real consequences like this city got massively damaged and um and a whole bunch of rebuilding had to happen because of this flood.

So we’ve been reluctant to just hand players the ability to you know pour hoses of water over everything because it’s the universal solvent, right? It it it really can destroy things really quickly. So um yeah, we have to be really careful with that stuff. We want to empower people, but it’s really easy to empower them a little too much.

Why is it that emergent disasters make the best stories.

But it’s a great story. That’s right. Um, so I I was actually just now before this call specking the feature that will allow them to um redirect water and and all of that. Um, but I’m putting a lot of hedges and guardrails on it.

Yeah. Yeah. I’m I’m so grateful, Raph. Uh thank you so much. You know, this there’s there’s people in this world where it’s it’s like, you know, whenever they open their mouth, I feel like I’m learning. Um so, uh you know, this has been a great chat and um you know, thank you as well for for sort of uh your book, A Theory of Fun.

My pleasure. You you I you you are an uncommonly researched and informed interviewer as well. It’s not often that people will throw, you know, Kahneman and ludology at me in the course of one conversation.

So, it just happens to be an intersection of the interests.

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for having me.