Sam Arbesman shared this post in his newsletter — highlights from Maxis’s annual letter (the makers of SimCity, the Sims, SimEarth, SimTower, etc.).
As much as it seems like the simulation tech Maxis developed over the years was all about top-down, “god mode” design — especially in SimCity — they’re just as impressive for the emergent gameplay they pioneered. SimLife was literally about watching evolution play out, followed up by an even-more-advanced experiment with evolution in Spore.
Packy McCormick is onto something with his recent pieces on web3 and the emergence of the “metaverse” being enabled by Ethereum.
This week he writes about Axie Infinity, a NFT-powered Pokémon-like PvP game built on the blockchain. The resemblances to Pokémon are many in terms of the gameplay, but that’s about the end of the similarities.
If they pull it off, Axie will be like Roblox on steroids, with better margins and better incentive alignment. Axie might become an even more important corner of the Metaverse, and a beacon for people building decentralized worlds online that blur work and play.
Axie’s mini monsters you collect are generated through breeding monsters together, which requires the ecosystem’s tokens to do (SLP), and mints new monsters that can be auctioned to others, for real money. There’s an expanding community of people worldwide, particularly in southeast Asia today, that are using Axie’s “play-to-earn” strategy to make real money playing the game. Gaming as a job isn’t a new thing, since people have been farming resources and selling accounts and add-ons on the gray market for years. But those economies were explicitly disallowed by centralized developer platforms like Blizzard’s World of Warcraft universe.
With Axie, play-to-earn is the entire point of the game.
I started to get my wallet set up to give this a try. Super interesting to see gaming converging with the internet and decentralized economic forces.
In high school I was pretty big into PC gaming. Games like Ultima VII, Syndicate, Fallout, Total Annihilation, and Crusader were in heavy rotation for years. Sid Meier’s Civilization II was particularly formative for me at the time it was released, and I’d credit with a lot of my early interest in world history.
An interview with media and gaming industry analyst Matthew Ball.
Make sure to listen to his thoughts on metaverses (around the 34:00 mark). The section on Epic Games and the future trajectory they’re putting themselves on is incredible.
Matthew Ball dives into Nintendo’s potential and what differentiates its culture from the rest of its media and gaming comparisons, like Disney.
The section on their mobile performance is particularly shocking. I knew Nintendo hadn’t been that engaged in trying to compete in mobile gaming (meaning iOS and Android), but it’s been a lot worse than I thought. Seems like it would be a dead-on win for them.
Obviously, Nintendo’s share of the economics declines across each group. This, itself, is not a problem. What’s a problem is that the greater Nintendo’s involvement, the less successful a mobile title seems to be. Nintendo’s mobile creative seems to erode the success of a title more than its IP lifts it. Put another way, Nintendo’s involvement increases margins but decreases revenue by an even greater degree.
One of my favorite games hit its 20th birthday. Two decades ago Deus Ex was an amazing achievement in open narrative, emergent game design.
In this piece, Rock Paper Shotgun gathered up a bunch of the original team from John Romero’s Ion Storm studio to look back on the process of creating the game:
Harvey Smith (lead designer): We were very influenced by three games: Thief, System Shock 2 and Half-Life. There was a lot of discussion around whether it was more elegant to get through a level without being spotted and killing everybody. But there was also political discussion about whether there was inherent bias in a game that gives you a mission to kill a bunch of enemies without questioning it. And of course, there is.
The collapse of trust in our leading institutions has exiled the 21st century to the Siberia of post-truth. I want to be clear about what this means. Reality has not changed. It’s still unyielding. Facts today are partial and contradictory—but that’s always been the case. Post-truth, as I define it, signifies a moment of sharply divergent perspectives on every subject or event, without a trusted authority in the room to settle the matter. A telling symptom is that we no longer care to persuade. We aim to impose our facts and annihilate theirs, a process closer to intellectual holy war than to critical thinking.
A good summary of Hayek’s famous 1974 address, “A Pretence of Knowledge.” Thinking you can “figure everything out” with expertise is dangerous.
If we truly wish to improve society, we must be humble and realize the bounds of what is possible with social science. Rather than attempting to shape society directly like a sculptor shapes a statue, we must seek instead to understand and to create the right environment for progress, like a gardener in a garden. Overconfidence in the use of science to control society will make a man a tyrant, and will lead to the destruction of a civilization which no brain has designed, but which has instead grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.
I enabled a trial of Google’s Stadia gaming service yesterday to kick the tires. In Google fashion, their entry into the gaming market isn’t centered around consoles and hardware, but cloud-distributed streaming.
During the unveiling at GDC last year, it seemed impossible to believe that you could deliver a latency-free, 4K experience in high-end games.
15 years ago I was gaming a lot more, but in the last several I’ve done almost none outside of the random iPhone game. I still loosely follow the gaming industry, and often wish I could easily jump in and mess around in games without the heavy investment in consoles and $60+ titles.
Stadia gets you around the need for upfront expense, and its subscription model should make it easier to dip in and try games.
Within 2 minutes of making my account, I had Destiny 2 loaded up. It runs inside a browser window and has some amazing auto-scaling tech to keep latency low and graphics as high as they can be given bandwidth constraints. In the few minutes I ran around, the visuals were in and out, but completely playable.
The big console makers should be worried. This is exactly the type of disruptive shift that steals customers. It’s not ready to pull over the hardcore gamers, to be sure, but the semi-casual folks like me never want to own more hardware. If they can improve the tech (which is a certainty) and get the business model right for subscriptions (less certain), they could capture big market share in games.
This is a physics simulator that replicates the physics of interstellar objects. You can simulate massive planetary collisions or supernovae in the Earth’s solar system, in case you want to see what would happen.
A neat catalog “map” of mathematics, with visualizations of things like prime numbers, symmetry, calculus, and more. Quanta Magazine does fantastic work.
In 2019, there were over 33,000 businesses in Japan over a century old, according to research firm Teikoku Data Bank. The oldest hotel in the world has been open since 705 in Yamanashi and confectioner Ichimonjiya Wasuke has been selling sweet treats in Kyoto since 1000. Osaka-based construction giant Takenaka was founded in 1610, while even some global Japanese brands like Suntory and Nintendo have unexpectedly long histories stretching back to the 1800s.
This 2013 piece from Dexter Filkins gives an excellent background on Qasem Soleimani, an important figure now well known after his killing a couple of weeks ago, but prior to that hardly known by anyone other than experts, even with his massive influence in the region.
I’m always intrigued by complicated simulation games. I remember a few of these “real-time” MMO games being popular in the early days of online gaming. Glad to see the genre still kicking in an era of low-attention-span gaming largely taking over. From the Prosperous Universe website:
At the heart of our vision lies the concept of a closed economic loop. There have been thousands of browser-based sci-fi strategy games before that emphasize military conflict. By contrast, Prosperous Universe is all about the economy and complex player-driven supply chains in which every material has to be either produced or purchased from other player-run companies.
Roam is an interesting note-taking tool that’s like a hybrid graph database and wiki. I tinkered with it a little bit. Seems attractive as a way to take meeting notes to try it out.
Maksim Stepanenko’s notes on Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History. I’ve got this one on the shelf, and these nuggets make me want to pick it up now to read.
While working on some Lego sets with the kids, I wanted to know if some extra parts we had were from the sets they got, since everything had gotten mixed up. Since it’d been years since I had any Legos, I thought there might be databases out there to lookup parts by number. Lo-and-behold I found this one where you can input an individual part ID, and also find out what other sets contain the same part. A tool that I would’ve eaten up as a kid cataloging our Legos and searching for “custom” parts.
This is a neat piece showing some of the process and iteration behind the Google design team’s work on the controller for their new gaming service, Stadia.
Olsson says the team went through “hundreds” of prototypes, some of which were more successful than others. One of the first steps included giving test subjects sculpting clay and letting them shape it to their tastes. The company then 3D scanned and photographed the models, most of which were, at Olsson puts it, “not so successful.”
Another prototype included a controller with a grid-shaped pattern on the front that allowed users to place elements like the thumbsticks wherever they found them most comfortable. Even the angle of the protruding hand grips got the full scrutiny of the design team. A clear acrylic prototype with rotating handles and a built-in protractor helped track player hand positions for analysis.
I’m looking forward to trying out this service. The idea of having access to games without any new hardware or up-front investment is interesting. I’d give it a try.
If you enjoy hearing stories from visionaries, listen to this talk that Gabe Newell (founder of Valve) gave at UT Austin:
In it he discusses economies within Steam, where Steam is headed as a central core of APIs for game publishing, and a good bit about how the company operates.
“It seems fairly obvious that the Internet does a better job of organizing a bunch of individuals than General Motors or Sears does. Corporations [with hierarchies] tend to be pre-internet ways of organizing production.”
I love to hear stories about really smart people doing work and making things. Gabe definitely fits into that category: He left Microsoft in their crazy lucrative years during the mid-90s to found a video game company with his own money, with a flat structure, and no job titles that now generates hundreds of millions in revenue.
