Philosophical and social considerations of games and autonomous worlds

Source: MetaCat

In this episode of Devs on Devs, GVN from Moving Castles talks with Neilson from the Gaul team and lermchair from Emergence. GVN (as referred to in the conversation below) is a "clown" or "gadfly" in the AW space, who playfully pushes people to refine their definition of the autonomous world and uses his own experiments on-chain and online to seek truth and explore the field. With the help of Moving Castles and Trust Support, he has participated in projects such as Mascot Stream 3D (an interactive Twitch gaming channel), Eat Drain Arson (an on-chain game based on MUD), Network States (an on-chain game co-created with Small Brain and 0xHank), and numerous articles such as Three Ages of World Generation》. Neilson and lermchair are the driving forces behind Unity’s MUD templates, MUD plugins, and the Unity game engine, as well as projects like Engine Study, Gaul, and Emergence. Gaul will soon be playtested on the Small Brain Games Discord channel.

In their conversation, the trio dives into the philosophical and social considerations of games and autonomous worlds: whether it makes sense to design with ease of use and dependability in mind, or whether autonomous worlds require interactions that are as novel as the new medium itself. They also discuss the relationship between autonomy and automation, historical precursors to autonomous worlds, and explore the concept of on-chain consequences.

Games and Inspiration

Neilson: I think a good starting point for the conversation is inspiration, and what each of us would like to build, and what you’d focus on when building that thing. A lot of games are pitched like, "I'm making...," like Super Car Pets and League of Legends. So if I'm making "this" plus "this," I'm always thinking in a very genre-specific way.

GVN: Well said. We've been working on this for a long time because we're doing something that's never been done before. On the one hand, I think you shouldn't always have to explain in words what you're doing. But at the same time, I think one of the lessons of game design (which we learned with Moving Castles) is that it's actually a good thing to start with something that players are already familiar with, because it shortens the learning curve.

Early screenshot of Eat, Drain, Arson. A game created by Moving Castles.

Neilson: Exactly, and the key is expectations. That helps guide players into a certain mindset.

GVN: Yeah. I watched a talk by one of the lead designers of Magic: The Gathering at the Game Developers Conference. He mentioned one thing: free riding. That is, you can only introduce so much new information at a time. He gave the example of a card called the Trojan Horse, which they renamed the Horse of Achelous to embed it into their worldbuilding. Players understood it because it still represented the concept of a horse. But then, the developers changed the name of the card. They called it Crown Bear or something like that. It's the exact same card. And people would say, "I don't understand how this card plays." So I like the idea of ​​free riding with familiar terms because people can immediately Understand. It's an interesting proposition: Even if you're building something new, how much do you want to piggyback on familiar game genres just to make the players' lives easier?

Neilson: With or without blockchain, you want to build something for the players and for yourself, like what you build on top of, expand on, or remix. Blockchain almost takes us back to first principles.

GVN: Yeah. But more practically, what are your inspirations?

Neilson: I don't know. I don't know if I have a specific game genre that inspired me. I'm making a Sokoban-style game. I'm playing Super Car Pets too much right now. I'll give that to you. Otherwise this will be a conversation about Super Car Pets.

GVN: I downloaded Super Car Pets. But I must say, I'm not addicted. It doesn't suck me in. I don't know why, but I play it just to learn about it. So maybe I'm addicted.

Neilson: Have you played Vampire Survivor?

Screenshot of Vampire Survivor

GVN: Yes. I was told that this designer had designed slot machines before. What about you [Lermchair]? What are your inspirations in games, or what are your inspirations in general?

Lermchair: The classic answer to this question is: "Everything is inspiring". You keep collecting ideas, and then occasionally your ideas collide with each other and you get new insights. I've been looking at things outside of games. For example, complex adaptive systems and the concepts of emergence, self-organization, and co-evolutionary processes.

GVN: I think that's a good point, too. I think a lot of the current discussion about on-chain games/autonomous worlds is people thinking in terms of games. Sometimes I think, "Actually we can go beyond this". I think autonomous worlds draw inspiration from social media and the idea of ​​interconnected worlds, bridges. They're not just entities, but they're bridges between different kinds of worlds. Twitter is a world, Discord is a world. Imagine building a bridge between those two environments, connecting them, and then creating a larger world around them. Maybe we're building not just the future of games, but a whole new medium.

Emergence on Chain

Neilson: I think emergence is still a goal for me. I think that's what you're always trying to get to, discovering complex behavior by designing simple rules, and you end up with very complex patterns. That's what I've been trying to do: not optimistically predict what's going to happen next until blockchain is solved, because blockchain has all these emergent complex behaviors that can happen when things interact with each other. I want to try to find space for designing rules that draw inspiration from all these other games, designing a lot of simple things together, and then hopefully put them into a shared space where they can start to behave in more mature or complex ways. So emergence is a big inspiration for me.

Lermchair: Do you think that "emergence" is actually something that can be designed?

GVN: Yeah, I was going to ask that question.

Neilson: I think that's what you're trying to strive for.

GVN: I like what people in EVE Online say about not protecting players from other players, which is a way to foster emergence. You don't design for emergence, you design for a frustration that has to be directed at someone. It's not directed at the developers, it's directed at other players. So you want to do something about the frustration, and then you have a way to fix it. That's where emergence comes in. You just indirectly give people the tools to fix the problems that are caused to them. And then when people weaken your warlock, you get frustrated, and if you can't do anything about it, you get frustration with some kind of authority. And then you end up creating a whole new world out of that.

Neilson: But I want the world to start with a surplus. I feel like a lot of the things that are being built are very, very direct economic tradeoffs in the gameplay. When a world is born and you let players into it, how can you not immediately be confronted with all of these economic realities that a lot of on-chain games face? Instead, at least enter a space where they can come together not just for the sake of collecting, consuming, and building, but to actually feel like there's a surplus of activities that they can do that aren't just for the sake of reaching a higher crafting level. It takes longer development time and more cycles to get to enough activities and items in the world so that it doesn't feel so gradual and linear, and to get to a place where it feels like there's actually a range of choices.

GVN: So do you use "surplus" as a counter to "scarcity," or...

Lermchair: Or do you just mean, there's a lot to do in the game?

Neilson: Yeah. I think it's both. In terms of the number of items. You start playing the game without having to bother with economic choices, whether it's gas, resources, or other tokens. Those aren't conditions when you start playing the game, because you're already feeling the pressure of scarcity, so you don't want to try or play the game. So the surplus can take those two forms, but it can also take the form of a surplus of decisions you can make in the game, but it's not like, "I immediately take this step, and I've seen my doom foreshadowed on the first step, because my numbers are decreasing, I'm kind of going downhill." Right? Hopefully, it's an expansion of choices and decisions, rather than a restriction of the decisions you can make.

Lermchair: What about decisions outside of the game? For example, some of the most interesting behavior that happens in Dark Forest is not actually in the game, but outside of the game: people forming DAOs, those DAOs going to war with each other, creating bots to automate the game.

Dark Forest Map

Neilson: This is what happens when a game like Dark Forest gets big enough. It does allow for those metagames or social structures to emerge. Clearly, there are things in gaming that are strong enough to support these things being built and constructed around games. So I think Dark Forest sets a very high bar for many other projects to follow.

GVN: Maybe that’s what really transforms a world from a simulation into a living world. Fan fiction, like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, whatever. Traditionally, they’ve been so popular because of fan fiction, because there are external elements or parts of the world outside of the world itself. What autonomous worlds have is the ability to allow the “outside” to come in and become part of the world.

Roguelikes and Autonomous Worlds

Neilson: Since we have the mascot for Autonomous Worlds: The Joker, the Magician himself, I thought I’d take this little opportunity to define what autonomous worlds mean to you. I think I’m looking more at what it means in terms of design, art, and culture than through the lens of on-chain game development.

GVN: In 2008, a lot of people met in Berlin to talk about roguelikes. The Berlin Interpretation is a set of rules for what a roguelike is. They built the Hall of Roguelikes. A group of people worked on defining what a roguelike is. It was interesting to read because I think we go through a lot of things when we define autonomous worlds. One interesting result is that they wrote, "We can't define a roguelike, but we can build a range to understand how roguelike a game is." So I think, first of all, what's interesting is 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 just build an autonomous world.

Neilson: Hmm.

GVN: Based on our actual experience with Moving Castles, I think that a large autonomous world is a series of independent games on the chain 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 talk to each other and connect to each other.

GVN: Is Dark Forest an autonomous world? I don't know. I think it's definitely scalable. And I think there's a lot that can be done to make it a much larger environment that also embeds different types of gameplay.

Automation and Autonomy

Neilson: Well, I think along your lines, I've probably been thinking about this a lot, which is maximizing autonomy. You mentioned another concept, which is automation, which is things that you can do without thinking. Autonomy is very much about freedom, individuality, or the ability to be free of constraints. Autonomy is the ability to make decisions, or an individual that can make decisions on behalf of others, or an individual that has no other constraints, for lack of a better word. But automation seems to be the opposite of that. Promodium is about automation, right? Like, trading automated equipment in the game, and then building larger structures, which are a lot of autonomous worlds: all these different fingerprint parts that are able to automate each other and do all these things to create huge, expansive worlds that can basically exist on their own. Screenshot from Gaul / Engine Study GVN: Can you talk more about the relationship between automation and autonomy? Neilson: The shift I imagine is that when you're playing a game, you become an automated agent that obeys the rules of the game. So you're actually playing the game as a player, and it's automated in a way. You lose your autonomy because you're actually deciding to agree to the rules of the game. So in that sense... GVN: In a sense, you're hopefully starting to obey. You're having to sacrifice your own autonomy or vision of things in order to obey some vision of the game creator. Neilson: Yeah. You sacrifice a little bit of autonomy in your life just to obey some rules. Now, within that structure, you have the freedom to automate, but you can also explore the autonomy that's left within those rules, because the essence of play is still expression. It's not that because you lose some autonomy, you lose expressiveness. In fact, you gain expressiveness because you're in a similarly constrained environment with a bunch of other automated things around you. So I think that's what I'm really trying to figure out: automation and how games automate your autonomy. I think a big one is, I think a lot of people like watching Twitch streamers or quasi-social relationships, where you watch other people play games. You transfer your social automation to other things that play games for you. You watch other people do things for you. You watch these autonomous individuals do things for you. So I think that's the relationship between automating parts of your life and handing them over to other individuals or games or things in order to gain some autonomy or lose some autonomy.

This is a screenshot of the Mascot Stream 3D Stream produced by Moving Castles and Trust Support on Twitch

GVN: Yeah. I have to figure out automation, and the automation and autonomy of this world is political.

Neilson: Very much like some Italian futurism stuff.

GVN: There was a very strong left-wing movement, or autonomous movement, or workerism movement in Italy in the seventies.

Neilson: That would be a dark rabbit hole.

GVN: I think we're going to see this idea of ​​games running themselves in games. It's a tricky problem in an environment where there's no tick mechanism or no automatic execution. But one thing that I experienced recently was I was playing Zelda after a day at work and I was very tired. You know, I just thought, "I want to relax, I want to play this game on my console". I ordered my food and I started playing, and when the food arrived, I still didn't want to think about anything. I wanted to watch something that would play on its own, like a movie, but I also didn't want to leave the world of Zelda because I was so immersed in it. I didn't have the energy to go out and be immersed in a completely different world. I just wish I could set Zelda to autoplay, or I could have someone share my account and play it for me while I was eating. If you had a Zelda multisig, that would be really cool. My partner and I play Zelda like this because sometimes I'm away and I want certain things from the game and she wants other things in the game. She's been collecting things and taking pictures and cooking and making potions while I'm away. Then I come back and I've got all this new stuff, and I think it's really nice to be able to share an account with someone who fills in the gaps in the game, or, all these things that I'm missing from the game because I'm not as invested in it.

Neilson: I think it's really beautiful to imagine that, being in the world of Zelda but not necessarily competing with each other. I think it goes back to how do we create a world where you feel like you're adding value. You don't feel oppressed by having to face off against competition, but being able to collaborate in a single-player world that you share is a really cool moment.

GVN: Another big question is: how open is your world? In Zelda, you have a very secure 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. And then on the other spectrum. You have a completely open autonomous world where everyone should be able to change it at any time. Do we really want worlds to be that open? Are we ready to come up with design solutions that don't allow one poor person to ruin the experience for everyone? I mean, that's what games have. EVE Online has to deal with that. Going back to autonomous worlds on the spectrum, there are a lot of points on the spectrum where you can develop worlds. I think what's interesting is how all of these parts of the spectrum connect together to form the whole.

Lermchair: It's easy to think of Zelda as a world where you can have both multiplayer and single-player. But it's almost wrong to think of it that way. Worlds are such elusive things that the world of a video game is not really distinct from the rules and design of the game itself. If you can create fuzzy world boundaries by objectively defining the notion of what is inside and what is outside the world, which is one of the goals of autonomous worlds, then interoperability becomes easy. The Legend of Zelda. Image credit: Polygon GVN: I think a big question remains about what players want from autonomous worlds. Like, we're starting to know what we as designers might want from it, but is that the same thing that players want? Neilson: It's worth noting that I'm talking about this both from a game design context and how I market a game. You market a fantasy, a dream, or a peak experience for the player, and that's really it. The first thing you pitch is what the game world is and why people would play it and want to keep playing it. I think that's the most important. For me, at least a design is a picture in my head of a player doing a series of things they enjoy doing and then going from there.

Precursors to Autonomous Worlds

Lermchair: What do you think are the precursors to autonomous worlds that we've seen throughout history?

GVN: That's a great question. What do you think?

Lermchair: Have you read Tools of Joy? It's a little book written by Ivan Illich. Illich describes the radio as a tool of joy. When radios were introduced to Mesoamerican communities, if a radio broke, there weren't always manuals or blueprints to fix it. However, because the radio technology was accessible and "joyful" enough for people to naturally play and interact with, these Mesoamerican communities were able to and formed a tradition of maintaining these radios. This technology formed a community to keep it alive. You can see this happen many times throughout history. For example, in the 1980s, there was a project at Berkeley called Community Memory, which was a mainframe in a warehouse. It was the first version of something like Reddit. The project put terminals on the street, and anyone could use it to read and post message boards. And then the problem became: "We're putting these very expensive electronic devices on the street in a public place, and they break easily. How do you make sure people don't destroy them?" And the answer the creators came up with was that it would be necessary to form a club or organization around this computer to maintain it and keep it alive. This eventually led to the Homebrew Computer Club, which is how Apple got its start. So there are always examples of people coming together to maintain something and keep it alive as long as possible.

Community Memory Terminal

Neilson: That's a good definition of an autonomous world. You have to keep it alive. Everybody's working on it. I think, at the end of the day, the only autonomous world worth building is that. I think people worry too much about keeping things alive for too long. I think that's the feeling that every game should strive for, that everyone in the community is keeping the game alive, injecting new elements into the game, creating more things. Lermchair: You can do that with open source software, too. GVN: I think that's a great example of how game design should work in an autonomous world. I feel like people are still hungry for solutions for other people. Like, yeah, this is the game. This is how we play games. But I think my approach is to design autonomous worlds by giving people something to care about. The first thing to understand is, do they care about it? The reason Dark Forest was so successful is because they gave people something they cared about and therefore had to come up with a solution to keep their idea of ​​the world alive. In the second or third season of the series Lost, the characters find an underground bunker with a computer that has a countdown, and then they have to enter a password and hit enter, and then the counter resets. The characters are told that if they don't do that, the world will end. I think that's an interesting start to an autonomous world because the game isn't about entering code, but the real game happens when the characters start to have conflicts or disagreements about it. "Is this true?" "Should we really keep doing what we're told?" And then they form factions, and those factions try to decide whether to continue or interrupt this process. That's where the world really comes alive. So you have this gameplay loop that doesn't really matter, but our mission is that if we stop doing this, the world will end. That's where the player can create this emergent world around the mission.

Real-world consequences

Lermchair: Maybe the beauty of putting something on a blockchain is that you have real consequences. On Ethereum, we could put a million dollars in some contract in some game and say in lore that if the world ends, the contract loses all your money. If you die on Ethereum, you lose all your money.

GVN: That could be a really interesting thing. You can pretend you’re a hacker group, but you think, “If you guys don’t do this every day, all day, we’re going to steal all the world’s cryptocurrency,” and see what people do.

Lermchair: Like that meme, if you die in the metaverse, you die in real life.

GVN: I also like the idea of ​​real-world consequences, because one thing I’d like to see in autonomous worlds is the end of the idea that games are separate from reality. The metaverse is trying to forget that reality exists and instead recreate reality in a distorted, baby boomer view of the world. I think autonomous worlds are really about the power of connecting games to the world outside of games. Maybe EVE is like that: you can invest real money and you can lose money on the ship. I think what’s really interesting is this interconnectedness of information.

Neilson: How do you know that what you’re doing makes you feel good? Losing real money doesn’t feel good. How do you know what instincts to follow?

GVN: So I think that’s an important discussion to have, because I feel like we’re all experimenting. I think most people fail when they build something. How do you deal with that? How do you make something good out of it? Because I feel like personally, at Moving Castles, we made a lot of prototypes, and sometimes we didn't even release them, but we learned a lot from them. And we also learned that some directions weren't actually viable. When we're talking about games, there are a lot of interesting technical ideas that we can try, but they're not necessarily interesting.

Neilson: It's definitely good to try to make as many prototypes as possible and get them done as quickly as possible, and figure out what's interesting. And then, the harder step is making sure your project doesn't die on your hard drive, and you work towards actually hitting the release button one day and getting it out there. I think there's a lot of great projects and software that are only 80% done. Hopefully, next year a lot of people will discover this and start building, and really get all the way to the finish line, and really get it out there. I think it's really important to train yourself as a developer and a designer to figure out what it takes to get something done. Get through all the crap and prototypes as quickly as possible, and then get something done. That's very, very different from starting a project. It's a completely different world, and I think people don't realize that until they get there. So, yeah, hopefully we'll have people who can get into this and finish things, that is, start doing things.