Source: MetaCat
In this edition of Devs on Devs, GVN from Moving Castles, Neilson from Gaul team, and lermchair from Emergence had a conversation. GVN, as mentioned in the dialogue below, is a “jester” or “horsefly” in the AW field. He humorously pushes people to refine their definitions of the autonomous world and utilizes his own on-chain and online experiments to seek truth and explore the field. With the help of Moving Castles and Trust Support, he has been involved in projects such as Mascot Stream 3D (an interactive Twitch gaming channel), Eat Drain Arson (a MUD-based on-chain game), Network States (a game built in collaboration with Small Brain and 0xHank), and numerous articles like “The Three Ages of World Generation”. Neilson and lermchair are the driving forces behind Unity’s MUD templates, MUD plugins, Unity game engines, Engine Study, Gaul, and Emergence projects. Gaul will soon conduct game testing on the Small Brain Games Discord channel.
In the conversation, the three delved deep into the philosophy and social considerations of games and autonomous worlds: whether considering usability and reliability in design makes sense, or if autonomous worlds need interactions as innovative as the new media itself. They also discussed the relationship between autonomy and automation, the pioneers of autonomous worlds, and explored the concept of on-chain consequences.
Games and Inspiration
Neilson: I think a good starting point for this conversation is inspiration, and what each of us wants to build, and what you focus on when building that. Many games are marketed this way: “I am working on… like ‘Super Car Pets’ and ‘League of Legends’. So if I’m doing “this” plus “this”, I’m always thinking in a very game-like style.
GVN: Well said. We’ve been working on this for a long time because we’re doing something unprecedented. On one hand, I don’t think you should always explain what you’re doing in words. But at the same time, I think a lesson in game design (that we learned in “Moving Castles”) is that it’s good to start from something players are already familiar with, as it shortens the learning curve.
An early screenshot of “Eat, Drain, Arson,” a game developed by Moving Castles
Neilson: Exactly, it’s about expectations. This helps guide players into a specific mindset.
GVN: Yes. I watched a speech by one of the chief designers of “Magic: The Gathering” at a game developers conference. He mentioned something: hitchhiking. It means you can only introduce limited new information at once. He gave an example of a Trojan Horse card, which they renamed as Acolyte’s Horse to embed it in their world-building. Players understand it because it still represents the concept of a horse. But later, the developers changed the card’s name. They called it Crown Bear or something similar. It’s the exact same card. People would say, “I don’t understand how to play this card.” So I like the idea of hitchhiking with familiar terms because people can immediately understand. It’s an interesting proposition: how much do you want to hitchhike on familiar game types while building something new just to make players’ lives easier?
Neilson: Whether or not there’s blockchain, you want to build something for players and yourself, something you build, expand, or remix above. Blockchain almost takes us back to first principles.
GVN: Yes. But more practically, what’s your inspiration?
Neilson: I don’t know. I don’t know if a specific game type inspired me. I’m making a game similar to a box-pushing style. I’ve been playing “Super Car Pets” too much now. I’ll pass this topic to you. Otherwise, this would be a conversation about “Super Car Pets.”
GVN: I downloaded “Super Car Pets.” But I have to say, I didn’t get hooked. It didn’t draw me in. I don’t know why, but I played just to understand it. So maybe I got hooked.
Neilson: Have you played “Vampire Survivors”?
Screenshot of “Vampire Survivors”
GVN: Yes. Someone told me the designer used to design slot machines. How about you [Lermchair]? What inspires you in terms of games, or generally?
Lermchair: The classic answer to this question is “everything is inspiring.” You constantly collect ideas, and occasionally your ideas collide, giving you new insights. I’ve been studying things outside of games. For example, the concepts of complex adaptive systems, emergence, self-organization, and co-evolution processes.
GVN: I think that’s also a great point. I think a lot of discussions about on-chain games/autonomous worlds are people thinking from a gaming perspective. Sometimes I think, “Actually, we can go beyond this.” I think autonomous worlds draw inspiration from social media and interconnected worlds, the concept of bridges. They are not only entities but also bridges between different types of worlds. Twitter is a world, Discord is a world. Imagine bridging between these two environments, connecting them, and then creating a larger world around them. Maybe we are not only building the future of games but also creating a whole new medium.
Emergence on-chain
Neilson: I still see “emergence” as a goal for me. I think that’s what you’ve always wanted to achieve, discovering complex behaviors by designing simple rules, ultimately leading to very complex patterns. That’s what I’ve been trying to do: before blockchain resolves, don’t optimistically predict what will happen next, because blockchain has all these complex behaviors that may emerge when things interact. I want to try to find the design space, draw inspiration from all other games, design many simple things together, and then hope to put them in a shared space where they can start acting in a more mature or complex way. So for me, emergence is a big inspiration.
Lermchair: Do you think “emergence” is something that can actually be designed?
GVN: Yes, I was about to ask that same question.
Neilson: I think that’s the goal you’re striving for.
GVN: I like what people from EVE Online say about not protecting players from each other, cultivating emergence in a way. You’re not designing for emergence, but designing a way to frustrate certain people. It’s not against developers, it’s against other players. So you think about what to do with frustration, and then you have a way to address it. That’s where emergence comes in. You’re indirectly providing tools for people to fix the problems they cause for themselves. And when people weaken your warlock, you feel frustrated, and if you can’t do anything about it, you feel a sense of defeat against some authority. And eventually, you create a whole new world from it.
Neilson: But I hope the world starts from surplus. I think many things being built are very direct economic trade-offs in gameplay. How can a world be born and let players enter without immediately facing all these economic realities that many on-chain games face? Instead, at least enter a space where they’re not just gathering, consuming, and building for the sake of it but truly feel an abundance of activities they can engage in, and these activities are not just to reach higher production levels. It takes longer development time and more cycles to find enough activities and items in the world so it doesn’t feel so incremental and linear, and reaches a point where it actually feels like there are a range of choices.
GVN: So you would use “abundance” to counter “scarcity,” or…
Lermchair: Or do you mean there are many things to do in the game?
Neilson: Yes, I think both. In terms of the number of items. When you start playing a game, you don’t have to worry about economic choices, whether it’s gas, resources, or other tokens. These are not the conditions when you start playing the game because you already feel the pressure of scarcity, so you don’t want to try or play the game. So surplus can take these two forms, but it can also take the form of abundance of decisions you can make in the game, but it’s not “I take this step immediately, I already see my downfall in the first step because my numbers are decreasing, I’m a bit on a downhill slope.” Right? Hopefully, it’s an expansion of choices and decisions, not limiting the decisions you can make.
Lermchair: What about decisions outside of the game? For example, some of the most interesting behaviors in “Dark Forest” actually occur outside the game, not within the game: people forming DAOs, these DAOs warring against each other, creating bots to automate gameplay.
Map from “Dark Forest”
Neilson: When games like “Dark Forest” reach a certain scale, this phenomenon occurs. It does allow for metagame or social structures to emerge. Obviously, the game already has some powerful things to support these constructs and structures built around the game. So I think “Dark Forest” sets a very high standard for many other projects.
GVN: Maybe this is the reason why the world is truly transforming from a simulated world to a living world. Fan fiction, such as “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter,” “Lord of the Rings,” anything goes. Traditionally, they have been popular because of fan fiction, as there are external elements or parts of the world beyond the world itself. Autonomous worlds have the ability to let the “external” enter and become part of the world.
Roguelike Games and Autonomous Worlds
Neilson: Since we have the mascot of autonomous worlds: the “jester,” the “magician” himself, I feel like I want to take this opportunity to define what an autonomous world means to you. I think I focus more on its significance in design, art, and culture rather than from the perspective of on-chain game development.
GVN: In 2008, many people met in Berlin to discuss roguelike games. The “Berlin Interpretation” is a set of rules about roguelike games. They built the “hall of roguelike.” A group of people dedicated to defining what roguelike games are. It’s interesting to read because I think we’ve gone through a lot to define autonomous worlds. An interesting result is that they wrote, “We can’t define roguelike, but we can create a range to understand the roguelike-ness of a game.” So I think, first, it’s interesting that we don’t need to say “this is an autonomous world, this is not an autonomous world,” but a range. I’m not sure if you can directly establish an autonomous world.
Neilson: Hmm.
GVN: Based on our practical experience in “Moving Castles,” I think a large autonomous world is a series of independent on-chain games with bridges between them, rather than a single game developed by a studio.
Neilson: That’s why we need a Berlin School of Autonomous Worlds, a San Francisco School of Autonomous Worlds, and we need some schools of thought to start creating different versions that can communicate with each other, interconnect.
GVN: Is Dark Forest an autonomous world? I’m not sure. I think it’s certainly segmented. And I think there are many features that can be implemented to make it a larger environment, embedding different types of gameplay.
Automation and Autonomy
Neilson: Well, I think following your train of thought, I might have been thinking about this question all along, which is maximizing autonomy. You also mentioned another concept, which is automation, i.e., things you can do without thinking. Autonomy is largely a sense of freedom, individuality, or the ability to break free. Autonomy is the ability to make decisions, or an individual who can make decisions on behalf of others, or an ability without any other constraints (can’t find a better word to describe it). But automation seems to be the opposite. Promodium is about automation, right? For example, trading automation devices in the game, then building larger structures, this is what many autonomous worlds are: all these different fingerprint components can be automated with each other and do all these things, creating a vast and expansive world that can essentially exist independently.
Screenshot from Gaul/Engine StudyGVN: Can you elaborate on the relationship between automation and autonomy?
Neilson: The shift I imagine is that when you’re playing a game, you become an automated entity following the rules of the game. So essentially, as a player, you are playing the game and to some extent, it’s automated. You lose autonomy because you are essentially deciding to agree with the rules of the game. So in that sense…
GVN: In a way, you wish to submit yourself. To adhere to the vision of the game creator, you have to sacrifice some of your autonomy or vision.
Neilson: Yes. You sacrifice a bit of autonomy in life just to follow some rules. Now, within this structure, you can freely embrace automation, but you can also explore the remaining autonomy within these rules because the essence of the game is still about expression. Just because you lose some autonomy doesn’t mean you lose the ability to express. In fact, you gain the ability to express because you are in a similar restricted environment with a bunch of other automated things around. So, I think that’s the real area I want to delve into: how automation and games automate your autonomy. I think a big issue is that, I believe many people enjoy watching Twitch streamers or similar social relationships, where you can watch others play games. You transfer your social automation onto something else that plays games for you. You watch others do things for you. You watch these autonomous individuals do things for you. So I think it’s about automating parts of your life, handing them over to other individuals or games or things, in order to gain or lose some autonomy.
Screenshot of the Mascot Stream 3D Stream produced by Moving Castles and Trust Support on Twitch
GVN: Indeed. I need to figure out how automation, the automation of this world, and autonomy are all political.
Neilson: It’s very reminiscent of some aspects of Italian futurism.
GVN: In the 1970s, Italy had a very strong left-wing movement, an autonomy movement, or a workers’ movement.
Neilson: It would be a dark rabbit hole.
GVN: I think we will see the idea that games can run themselves in-game. It’s a tricky issue in an environment without a tick mechanism or without automatic execution. But something I recently experienced was playing Zelda after a day of work when I was very tired. You know, I just wanted to relax, I wanted to play this game on my console. I ordered food, then started playing, and when the food arrived, I still didn’t want to think about anything. I wanted to watch something that could play itself, like a movie, but I also didn’t want to leave the world of Zelda because I was immersed in it. I didn’t have the energy to step out and immerse myself in a completely different world. I just wished I could set Zelda to autoplay, or have someone share my account and play for me while I eat. It would be so cool to have a shared Zelda save file. My partner and I would play Zelda this way because sometimes I’m not there, and I want to get something specific from the game, while she wants something else. When I’m not there, she goes around collecting things, taking photos, cooking, and making potions. Then I come back, and I get all these new things, feeling great to share an account with someone who fills the gaming gap for me, or rather, that I missed in the game because I didn’t invest too much in it.
Neilson: I think imagining such a scenario is beautiful, both in the world of Zelda and not necessarily in competition. I think it goes back to how we create a world that makes you feel like you’re adding value. You don’t feel oppressed by the need to compete but rather can cooperate in your shared single-player world, which is a fantastic moment.
GVN: Another important question is: How open is your world? In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you have a very safe environment. You can’t actually share accounts. But it still works because my partner and I live in the same place. It’s a very safe experience, trusting the people you allow into your world. Then on another spectrum. You have a completely open autonomous world where everyone should be able to change it at any time. Are we really ready to propose design solutions that don’t allow one poor person to ruin everyone’s experience? I mean, that’s what games have. EVE Online must deal with this issue. Returning to the autonomous world spectrum, there are many points on the spectrum where the world can be developed. I think what’s interesting is how all these parts on the spectrum connect to form a whole.
Lermchair: It’s easy for people to think that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a world that can be both multiplayer and single-player. But that’s almost a misconception. The world is a very elusive thing, so much so that a video game world is actually no different from the rules and design of the game itself. If you can create a blurred world boundary by objectively defining the concepts of inside and outside the world, that’s one of the goals of an autonomous world, making interoperability easier.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Image Source: Polygon
GVN: I think a big question still remains: What do players want from an autonomous world? For example, we begin to understand what we as designers may want from it, but is it the same as what players want?
Neilson: It’s worth noting that I talk about game design background and how I market a game. You’re selling a fantasy, a dream, or a player’s pinnacle experience, that’s really it. The first thing you sell is what the game world is, why people will play it and want to keep playing it. I think that’s the most important. For me, at least one design is a mental picture in my mind of players doing a series of things they enjoy, and then starting from there.
The precursor of autonomous worlds
Lermchair: What do you think are the precursors of autonomous worlds that we have seen throughout history?
GVN: That’s a good question. What do you think?
Lermchair: Have you read “Tools for Conviviality”? It’s a small book written by Ivan Illich. Illich describes the radio as a convivial tool. After radios were introduced to Central American communities, if a radio broke, there wasn’t always a manual or blueprint to repair it. However, because radio technology was easy to access and “joyful” enough, people naturally played and interacted, leading these Central American communities to form and maintain traditions in maintaining these radios. This technology formed a community to keep it alive. You can see this happen multiple times throughout history. For example, in the 1980s, Berkeley had a project called “Community Memory,” which was a mainframe computer in a warehouse. It was the first version of something like Reddit. The project placed terminals on the street where anyone could use it to read and post on bulletin boards. The question then became, “How do we place these very expensive electronic devices on the streets of public places, where they are easily damaged? How do you ensure people don’t destroy them?” The answer the creators came up with was the need to build a club or organization around this computer to maintain it, keep it going. This ultimately led to the emergence of the Homebrew Computer Club, which was also the starting point for Apple. So there are always examples like this, where people come together to maintain something and keep it alive as long as possible.
Community Memory Terminal
Neilson: That’s a great definition of an autonomous world. You have to keep it vibrant. Everyone is pitching in. I think ultimately, the only autonomous world worth building is just that. I think people are too concerned about keeping things alive for too long. I think that’s the feeling every game should strive for, where everyone in the community is keeping the game vibrant, injecting new elements, creating more things.
Lermchair: Open-source software can also do this.
GVN: I think this is a great example of how game design should operate in an autonomous world. I think people still crave to provide solutions for others. Like, yes, that’s the game. That’s how we play games. But I think my approach is to design autonomous worlds by giving people something they care about. The first thing to understand is, do they care about it? The reason why “Dark Souls” was so successful is that they gave people something they care about, so a solution had to be devised to keep their thoughts about the world going. In the second or third season of the “Lost” series, the characters find an underground shelter with a computer that has a countdown function, and they must enter a password and press enter, resetting the counter. The characters are told that if they don’t do this, the world will end. I think this is an interesting start for an autonomous world because the game isn’t about entering a code, but when the characters start to have conflicts or disagree with it, that’s when the real game happens. “Is this real?” “Should we really continue doing what we were told?” And then they form factions, these factions try to decide whether to continue or interrupt the process. That’s where the world truly comes alive. So you have this trivial game loop, but our mission is, if we stop doing this, the world will end. That’s where players can create this emerging world around the task.
Consequences in the real world
Lermchair: Perhaps the benefit of putting something on the blockchain is that you will have real consequences. On Ethereum, we can deposit a million dollars in a contract in a game and it’s said that if doomsday comes, the contract will lose all your money. If you die on Ethereum, you lose all your money.
GVN: That could be a very interesting thing. You could pretend to be a hacker group, but you would think, “If you don’t do this every day, all day, we will steal all the cryptocurrency in the world,” and see how people react.
Lermchair: Like that meme, if you die in the metaverse, you die in real life too.
GVN: I also like the perspective on real consequences because I hope to see in an autonomous world is the end of the notion of separating games from reality. The metaverse attempts to forget the existence of reality and rebuild reality with a distorted, baby boomer worldview. I think, in fact, the autonomous world is the power to connect games and the world outside of games. Perhaps EVE is like that: you can invest real money and lose money on the ship. I think what’s really interesting is the interconnectedness of this information.
Neilson: How do you know what you’re doing will make you feel good? It doesn’t feel good to lose real money. How do you know which intuition to follow?
GVN: So I think this is an important discussion because I feel like we’re all experimenting. I think most people fail when building something. How do you address this issue? How do you make something good out of it? Because personally, at Moving Castles, we’ve made a lot of prototypes, sometimes we don’t even release them, but we learn a lot from them. And we also realize that some directions are actually not feasible. When we talk about games, we can try many interesting technical ideas, but they are not necessarily fun.
Neilson: Trying to make as many prototypes as possible and completing them as quickly as possible, and figuring out what’s fun, is definitely a good thing. Then, the harder step is to ensure your project doesn’t die on your hard drive, and you have to strive to truly press the release button and put it out there one day. I think there are many great projects and software that only reach 80% completion. Hopefully, next year, many people will realize this and start building, truly going all the way to the finish line, truly pushing it to the market. I think it’s very important to train yourself to be a developer and designer, to figure out what it takes to complete something. Deal with all the garbage and prototypes as quickly as possible, and then finish something. This is very, very different from starting a project. It’s a completely different world, and I think people only realize that when they get there. So, yes, hopefully, we’ll have someone enter this field and get things done, that is, start doing things.
