Rizzinator

15 years ago, I was possessed by a dream. Professionally I was writing mostly enterprise software at the time, but I was dreaming of something else entirely. Something much bigger. But the dream didn’t start there, for that we have to go back further. At the turn of the millennium, I was already obsessed with the dream. For the first time I could see a plausible path to making it real. I was working in the transition from web 1.0 (static, the odd guestbook) to 2.0 (dynamic, databases everywhere) and I thought I could see very clearly where all this was going. But the dream was not new for me, even then. It all started some 15 years or so before that when as a young kid who was into the 16-color calculators we called computers at the time, I saw an article in a magazine showing two blocky figures on a screen where one of them had a speech bubble that said “hi!”. The article described that two people in different places were meeting virtually, and chatting with each other and could even play games together like this, using something called “modems” to connect their computers via the phone line. I immediately knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It took a few years before I had the skills, tools and techniques to make any working demos of my own. But around the time of the Y2K scare, I had managed to code the first simple proof of concept for the vision that had been haunting me for so long. It was an isometric game engine, that supported creating open and extensible multiplayer games that ran in a browser. The open and extensible was the key part. I had spent more than half a decade on the web (1.0) already, and I was completely taken with how you could create an open, decentralized, extensible and practically infinite world of web pages, that the user could just “surf” around via hyperlinks, and it all just worked. When web 2.0 started happening it was clear to me that this meant that turning the web into a sort of an enormous, interactive, open and extensible mmo world would be the obvious and logical next step. Cyberspace. Lawnmower man and the Matrix. Just wait until it would be all in VR, too! I implemented my isometric proof of concept, saw that it worked, and expected that soon every company would have developed platforms to support virtual worlds connected to other companies’ virtual worlds with hyperlinks. What “worked” in my proof of concept was the following idea core architecture: you have a game server (or a p2p distributed game server) that holds game state and where players communicate actions and chat. But this game server is free to fetch the maps that players choose dynamically from anywhere on the web. As long as the maps would follow a standard that the game engine understood, anyone could just publish a map, or a new type of item or npc, just by putting a static xml file with the definitions online (this was before json). Just like a web browser can jump around between every web page, this game client was able to jump around and show and let you play any world that it loaded up in the same way as a web page, and it would let you and your friends play together and have adventures in those worlds. Second Life came and went. Facebook turned into “Meta” for “Metaverse” which turned into a fiasco. The concept never took off. My little isometric proof of concept obviously wouldn’t become the platform for a new 2.5D web, but I would have expected something from a major player to succeed. I sat there, wondering where my future went. The closest it ever came to happening, in my opinion and analysis, was World of Warcraft. There was a time when I thought WoW would evolve into the first real social metaverse. WoW had a lot of elements that made it a great candidate. It was fun, for one. But the game was in many ways a pretense for a reason to join together in social activities in a virtual world. The guild chat was the real draw and the monsters were mostly something you could waste some time with when nothing much was going on in the chat. Some people never touched a monster, instead making a career buying and selling game items in the Auction House. Some people spent all their time organizing guild activities, but never joining raids. Some people specialized in crafting. WoW had lots of things to make it an attractive virtual home than by only appealing to monster bashers. A virtual world should be a social place where users can meet while engaging in very different activities that they happen to enjoy. WoW was in many ways the sort of thing I had in mind as for the multiplayer experience I was after, but it could not be ignored that it was then for a somewhat limited subset of people who enjoy gnomes and elves. And importantly, it wasn’t open and extensible, which was core to my vision. To prove that an open and extensible WoW would be fun, I set out to code a fully playable and feature complete backend WoW style engine, with combat systems, items, quests, npcs, etc etc that were all possible to define entirely declaratively so you could just publish them as static xml files. Then, to test it, (again) an isometric frontend that ran in the browser. The frontend was a toy. The backend was not. This was 15 years ago. It worked. It took over two years of frenetic around the clock code coding, but in the end I had a backend supporting every dang feature I had ever seen in WoW, fully declarative and extensible so that you could create your own worlds with adventures and your own graphics just by posting some XML files. Your characters could then right away enter those worlds and start doing quests, fighting monsters and pvp. And it would just work, like opening a web page in a browser. It was, frankly, extremely cool. This was before anyone had really heard of the concept of NFTs, crypto was still brand new. But the way I had designed things to be maximally decentralized means it had a lot in common with how crypto would evolve. Everything - every map, every item, every npc and also every player, had a globally unique identifier number (GUID) that any other definition could use to refer to it. That together with a set of rules to prevent cheating when it was decentralized effectively worked as a sort of pre-crypto NFTs. It meant all items and even characters could be traded freely, and moved between games as the owner pleased. There would never be any lock-in where your items were held captive by a game publisher. If some game closed shop, all your items and characters would still be in your possession so when your friends set up a replacement game server, boom there’s all your stuff. Many games, like WoW, did their best to prevent anything like this, in order to protect their in-game economies and the ability to “pay-to-win”. Yes that makes sense for WoW, but it’s simply something that works differently in a fully open world. The rules are different. Not worse - imo better - but definitely different. Sometimes it makes sense for a company to invent their own “credits”, sometimes it makes sense to just accept money. Another product that came close is Roblox. In several ways that is much more close to what I had in mind than WoW because Roblox holds millions of user created worlds, and a player can just jump freely between them. The main reason it’s still not a bingo is that Roblox is not open or decentralized. Everything is owned by one company, it’s nothing like the extensible, open web where anyone can set up their own world permissionlessly and have it just work. So I worked on my iso virtual world platform, and I worked, and I worked…and then I became a dad. For over a decade I did not have time to work dedicatedly on my vision. Now, to be clear, the isometric frontend was always just a placeholder. The idea when the backend had matured enough (which was right around the time my attention became fully otherwise engaged) was always to switch it for a real 3D frontend. The iso was just for proof of concept. As the years passed, I tinkered occasionally with my backend as new ideas came to me, about how to improve scalability and decentralization. Many ideas came from the growing crypto scene, which is no surprise since decentralization is at the core of all this. When ICP came out, I knew that it would be the platform that would finally let me realize the full scale of my vision. Since genesis, I have been planning, writing specs, learning the tech, developing a deeper understanding of fully decentralized applications, testing different designs, developing proof of concepts, and even creating all the infrastructure I knew that a virtual gaming world platform like this would require, under the flag of an Open Canvas DAO called Sneed. And now, it is all coming together. My concepts all work absolutely perfectly on ICP, and they scale beautifully. We’re now also at a point where turning the isometric frontend into 3D was not even a heavy lift for an AI. All that’s really needed is a big enough plan for how it all comes together. And I have been polishing that plan for 40 years, and tinkering with the implementation for the last 15. I can’t wait to show you my life’s main work, my magnum opus. It’s going to be raw, early, because I will want to elicit feedback from the start and grow an organic community that can help grow the platform together. I will want to invite players from the ICP community who can understand how things actually work, as well as users who never heard of crypto or ICP to make sure it all works just as smoothly for them without having to know how anything works under the hood. Open and extensible, that’s all anyone should need to know. And fun. These days, even if you’re going to be a whole world creator on this platform, it’s enough that your AI understands the technical details. I want to drum up a bit of interest for this before anything goes public, and then we will start with a public alpha - and a first public in-world launch event, to which you are all invited. More details to follow, but if you have read this far - thank you for your patience and interest, and please know that I am beyond thrilled to be able to share with you this next chapter in my life long software development journey! I think we’ll have more fun than should be legally allowed, and hopefully it can help draw some real adoption to ICP (even if most users won’t know or care). Very exciting things ahead. Soon.