Source: MetaCat
In this edition of Devs on Devs, GVN from Moving Castles, Neilson from Gaul team, and lermchair from Emergence engaged in a conversation. GVN, as mentioned in the dialogue below, is a “clown” or “horsefly” in the AW field, using humor to push people to refine their definitions of the autonomous world and utilizing his own experiments both on-chain and online 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 developed in collaboration with Small Brain and 0xHank), and numerous articles like “Three Eras of World Generation”. Neilson and lermchair are the driving forces behind Unity’s MUD template, MUD plugins, Unity game engine, Engine Study, Gaul, and Emergence projects. Gaul will soon conduct game testing on the Small Brain Games Discord channel.
During the conversation, the trio delved deep into the philosophy and societal considerations of games and autonomous worlds: whether considering usability and reliability in design makes sense, or whether autonomous worlds need interactions as innovative as the new media itself. They also discussed the relationship between autonomy and automation, pioneers in the history 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, what each of us wants to build, and what you focus on when building it. Many games are marketed this way, “I am making… like ‘Super Car Pet’ and ‘League of Legends’. So if I do “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 think you shouldn’t always use language to explain what you’re doing. But at the same time, I think a lesson in game design (we learned in “Moving Castles”) is that starting from something players are already familiar with is actually a good thing, as it shortens the learning curve.
Early screenshot of “Eat, Drain, Arson.” A game developed by Moving Castles
Neilson: Exactly, the key is expectations. This helps guide players into a specific mindset.
GVN: Yes. I watched a speech by one of the lead 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 to Acrolian Horse to embed it into their world-building. Players understand it because it still represents the concept of a horse. But later, the developers changed the name of this card. They called it Crown Bear or a similar name. 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 familiar terms because people can understand it immediately. It’s an interesting proposition: even if you’re building something new, how much do you want to hitchhike on familiar game types just to make players’ lives easier?
Neilson: Regardless of blockchain, you want to build something for players and yourself, something you build, extend, or remix on top of it. Blockchain almost takes us back to first principles.
GVN: Yes. But more practically, what is 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 Pet’ too much lately. I’ll pass this topic on to you. Otherwise, it will be a conversation about ‘Super Car Pet’.
GVN: I downloaded ‘Super Car Pet’. But I have to say, I didn’t get addicted. It didn’t grab me. I don’t know why, but I played just to understand it. So maybe I got addicted.
Neilson: Have you played ‘Vampire Survivors’?
Screenshot of “Vampire Survivors”
GVN: Yes. Someone told me the designer used to design slot machines. What about you [Lermchair]? What inspires you in 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, complex adaptive systems and concepts of emergence, self-organization, and co-evolution.
GVN: I think that’s also a great point. I think many discussions about on-chain games/autonomous worlds are people thinking from the game’s 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 just entities but bridges between different types of worlds. Twitter is a world, Discord is also a world. Imagine building bridges between these two environments, connecting them, and then creating a larger world around them. Perhaps 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. This is what I’ve been trying to do: before blockchain, don’t optimistically predict what will happen next because blockchain has all these complex behaviors that emerge when things interact. I want to try to find space for designing rules, drawing inspiration from all other games, designing many simple things together, and then hope to put them into a shared space where they can start to act in more mature or complex ways. So for me, emergence is a big inspiration.
Lermchair: Do you think “emergence” is actually something that can be designed?
GVN: Yes, I was just about to ask this question.
Neilson: I think that’s the goal you’re striving for.
GVN: I like what people from EVE Online say, not protecting players from each other, which is a way to cultivate emergence. You’re not designing for emergence, but designing something that must cause frustration for some people. It’s not for developers but for 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 indirectly provide tools for people to fix the problems they cause for themselves. Then when people weaken your warlock, you feel frustrated, and if you’re powerless to do anything about it, you feel a sense of authority. And in the end, you create a whole new world out of it.
Neilson: But I hope the world starts with surplus. I feel that many things being built are very direct economic trade-offs in gameplay. When a world is born and players enter it, how can you not immediately face all these economic realities that many on-chain games face? Instead, at least enter a space where they are not just gathering for collection, consumption, and construction, but truly feel an excess of activities they can engage in, and these activities are not just to reach higher levels of production. It takes longer development time and more cycles to find enough activities and items in the world, so it doesn’t feel so progressive and linear, and reaches a point where it actually feels like there are a range of choices.
GVN: So are you using “surplus” to counteract “scarcity,” or…
Lermchair: Or do you just mean there are a lot of 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 both forms, but it can also take the form of surplus of decisions you can make in the game, but it’s not “I take this step immediately, I already see my downfall looming in 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 limiting what decisions you can make.
Lermchair: What about decisions outside of the game? Some of the most interesting behaviors that happen in “The Dark Forest” are actually not in the game but outside the game: people forming DAOs, these DAOs waging war on each other, creating robots to automate the game.
Map of “The Dark Forest”
Neilson: When games like “The Dark Forest” reach a certain scale, this phenomenon occurs. It does allow for metagame or social structures. Obviously, the game already has some strong elements to support these things built around and upon the game. So I think “The Dark Forest” sets a very high standard for many other projects.
GVN: Perhaps this is the reason for truly transforming the world from a simulated world to a living world. Fan fiction, like “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter,” “The Lord of the Rings,” anything really. Traditionally, they are so popular because of fan fiction, as there are external elements or parts of the world beyond the world itself. What autonomous worlds have is the ability to let the “external” enter and become a part of the world.
Roguelike Games and Autonomous Worlds
Neilson: Because we have the jester, the magician himself, the mascot of autonomous worlds, I feel like I want to take this opportunity to define what autonomous worlds mean to you. I think I’m more focused on its meaning 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 series of rules about roguelike games. They built the “roguelike hall.” 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 of things in defining autonomous worlds. An interesting result was that they wrote, “We can’t define roguelike, but we can establish a spectrum to understand the degree of roguelikeness in a game.” 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 spectrum. I’m not sure if you can directly establish an autonomous world.
Neilson: Hmm.
GVN: Based on our actual experience in “Moving Castles,” I think large autonomous worlds are 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, interconnect, and create a network of autonomous worlds.
GVN: Is “The Dark Forest” an autonomous world? I don’t know. I think it’s definitely divided by scale. And I think it has a lot of features that can be realized to make it a larger environment while embedding different types of gameplay.
Automation and Autonomy
Neilson: Well, I think following your train of thought, I may have been thinking about this question all along, that is to maximize autonomy. You also mentioned another concept, that is automation, things you can do without thinking. Autonomy is largely a kind of freedom, personality, or the ability to break free from constraints. Autonomy is the ability to make decisions or be an individual who can make decisions on behalf of others, or the ability to make decisions without other constraints (can’t find a better word to describe it). But automation seems to be the opposite of this. Promodium is about automation, right? For example, automated trading devices in games, then building larger structures. That’s many autonomous worlds: all these different fingerprint parts can automate each other and accomplish all these things, creating huge and vast worlds that can essentially exist independently.
Screenshot from Gaul/Engine Study
