Flickr Founders Working On Weird MMOG: Glitch

[Greg Tito]

Flickr Founders Working On Weird MMOG: Glitch

The cofounders of Flickr, the photo sharing site, are working on a new problem-solving MMOG aimed at the casual player.

Here's a little known fact: many of the tools that later became the photograph sharing site, Flickr, were developed for a game project called Game Neverending. That game began development in 2002 and featured unprecedented community interaction, players could create their own zones, but little in the way of actual gameplay. It was eventually cancelled in 2004, and its tools morphed into what would become Flickr. Now, Stuart Butterfield, cofounder of Flickr, and his company Tiny Speck, are going back to their roots and designing a light-hearted 2D game called Glitch which aims to fill the gap between World of Warcraft and FarmVille. Glitch is planning on launching by the end of 2010 and will be entering alpha status soon.

The plot of the game seems fairly nuts. You are from the future, but you travel through time to save the world by inhabiting the minds of 11 giants. Right.

Glitch's gameplay is described as crowd-sourced problem solving on a massive scale. It is unclear if this means it will be a graphical Alternate Reality Game or just a huge point and click.

Glitch will be free to play, and subsist on a micro-transaction and/or premium account business model. There are not details given on what kind of things you would want to buy in such a surreal game world.

All I can say is that the screenshots look freaking weird, but I can't tell if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Source: Techchrunch [http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/09/glitch/]

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[Sir Kemper]

Photo Shareing site, to mmog...

i don't see the transition... even if flickr did start start out as some sort of mmog...

 

[ReverseEngineered]

I'm curious to see how this turns out.

Today's MMOs are entirely designed around one problem: resource gathering. Whether it's killing 50 pigs to collect snouts, or killing a nearly-impossible dragon to get a crystal, the name of the game is acquiring things. The challenge is that doing it alone is ineffective, so you need to collaborate. The group activity itself is dead simple: beat on X until it's dead, but organizing a large group of people to do so is a challenge. Most of the fun comes through social interaction.

However, the idea of group problem solving would certainly give you another excuse to socialize. As an example, look at Photoshop contents like Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday or Worth1000.com. People may be tempted to create these things on their own, but they do so regularly and in large numbers because of the socializing involved in sharing those with each other. The challenge: make a picture that will be accepted by your peers. The reward: recognition. Additional enjoyment: marveling (and often laughing) at what others have made.

The real challenge is how to do this with problem solving. For one, you need a problem, and it can't just be one problem or else the game is over once the problem is solved. Two, you need a problem that can't be solved by one person: it needs to be complicated, likely requiring the combined knowledge of many individuals (like solving global warming). Third, you need a good reason to overcome this challenge: there needs to be a reward other than just the pleasure of overcoming the challenge. Maybe groups are competing to solve the problem and the winner gets recognition. Maybe it's something else.

One example of this that comes to mind is NASA's Space Elevator challenge. It involves getting many people of different disciplines together to tackle a difficult task, with these groups competing against each other for recognition and monetary prizes. If you could somehow stick that in an MMOG, we'd have a game that fits the criteria -- mostly. As with any puzzle game, once it's solved, it's solved. But given the current genres of games that we're familiar with, how would you modify them to fit the criteria we have in mind?

Though not perfect, one analogy exists in multiplayer team games like Counterstrike. People have to work together to form a strategy in order to beat the competition. The social interaction is high between players in the groups, but what about outside the group? This is what takes us from a regular multiplayer game and into the massive category.

For Counterstrike, this happens in the metagame. In the upper echelons, gamers know each other and are vying for supremacy. There is recognition to be had for groups like Team 3D and fatal1ty. Suddenly, it's not a game between two teams, but a game between many teams with many players, where players have a long lasting, vested interest in the outcome. If it were an MMORPG, it would be like guilds competing to be the first to kill Arthas.

Counterstrike survives because the game is always changing. Come up with a winning strategy and your opponents will try to find a way to beat it. You become faster, more accurate, and less predictable, but your opponents are doing the same. You win small battles, but you never win the war; there's always a need to keep playing to keep your title.

But Counterstrike isn't an MMO. Within the game, players aren't playing in the same, persistent world. This global, persistent world occurs in the real world, outside of the game, in the metagame.

So the question remains, how do we make a game that incorporates all of this within the game itself? And how do we keep the social interaction that makes this all work? And how do we do this with a "problem solving" game (puzzle game?) as opposed to an FPS, RPG, or other typical genre of games? And how do we keep it new, different, and exciting?

I'm very interested to see what Flickr can come up with.

 

[Swaki]

looks interesting, and since i retired from nile today (as number 70, yay) i'm looking for a little game to play while reading the escapist.

and it looks like it lets you grind mood, that appeals to me in a strange way.

 

[oppp7]

Sounds good. Not sure how they're going to make a casual MMO though...

 

[DJPirtu]

Sounds good. Not sure how they're going to make a casual MMO though...

You know, FarmVille style. (Yeah, I know. There are dozens of similar games out there, but this is propably the most well known.)
Instead of the game requiring long, up to multiple hours, time investments at a time, it only requires short periods, a few minutes at most, of gaming at each session.
Add some sort of social element based more on the size of a group, rather than simultanious gaming to make it MMOish.

PS. I like the avatar. Army of Dave for the win

 

[oppp7]

Sounds good. Not sure how they're going to make a casual MMO though...

You know, FarmVille style. (Yeah, I know. There are dozens of similar games out there, but this is propably the most well known.)
Instead of the game requiring long, up to multiple hours, time investments at a time, it only requires short periods, a few minutes at most, of gaming at each session.
Add some sort of social element based more on the size of a group, rather than simultanious gaming to make it MMOish.

PS. I like the avatar. Army of Dave for the win

Thanks, yours is good too.
By army of Dave do you mean Jack the Webcomic?

 

[fozzy360]

You had me at free.

Anyway, this seems like an interesting concept. People banding together to solve brain teasers in a free MMO? Color me curious.

 

[Andronicus]

The plot of the game seems fairly nuts. You are from the future, but you travel through time to save the world by inhabiting the minds of 11 giants. Right.

Umm, I don't quite understand. Apart from the inherent strangeness of the proposition, what do you mean by "inhabiting the minds of 11 giants"? Does that mean you have to choose one of 11 giants to be your avatar, or you actually inhabit the minds of all 11 giants at once, or you can switch between them at any time or what? Sorry, just hoping for a little clarification.

 

[Jared]

Photo Shareing site, to mmog...

i don't see the transition... even if flickr did start start out as some sort of mmog...

I agree...the logic...just, isnt there

 

[Benjeezy]

It'll be interesting to see where it goes...

I think it's worth keeping tabs on.

 

[DJPirtu]

...
PS. I like the avatar. Army of Dave for the win

Thanks, yours is good too.
By army of Dave do you mean Jack the Webcomic?

Or its fans, to be more spesific

 

[Charli]

...

...

Continue... My intrigue is piqued...