Magic primitives and systemic games as a solution to everlasting virtual worlds
If you haven’t, be sure to check out the prior articles in this series: The Universal Asset framework series. Specially this one, where I talk about systemic games and their relation to magic, it’ll help make the following words make more sense. Read specifically the section titled: Is magic really just state? This other article can also be helpful.
The problem
We all love an exquisitely handcrafted story-driven AAA videogame. However, the amount of time, energy, and resources needed to build them has been steadily increasing over time, and even though they might get lower in the future thanks to technologies like AI, the Metaverse will be much more than the typical handcrafted experiences we’re used to.
The Metaverse will be a brewing multiverse of thousands if not millions of virtual worlds, often started by a single person or just a handful of people. Creating a virtual world — as in an environment with some basic functionality — is way easier than a full-fledged modern AAA videogame.
This is where systemic games can help us make them come alive. We can take a basic world with: no missions, no cutscenes or story, no intricate level design, or even complicated game mechanics, and turn it into an engaging virtual world that lasts forever. Some popular games of this style are Minecraft, ARK survival, Farmville… These are games that even though are not always classified as systemic games, tend to share a lot of aspects and mechanics with them.
The reason systemic games lend themselves so well to the Metaverse is because they’re not designed with a beginning and an end in mind. It’s not like a movie or a time-limited experience we’re meant to enjoy once and move on, they’re meant to make just being inside the world and doing the things the world allows you to do the core experience. They also have an additional nice property, although systemic games might be tricky to balance and set-up, the way they function is pretty simple. They’re basically automated or user-driven state machines that cycle through the possible states they’re allowed to have, and interact with other systems in prescribed ways.
But if we want to make building virtual worlds and new gameplay mechanics easy, and update virtual worlds over the years so they can keep growing with new capabilities and possibilities, it would help to systematize how we build these systemic mechanics. We’ve talked in the past about how systemic mechanics act like a “magical engine”, and that’s precisely another very promising use for magic in the Metaverse.
A possible solution
We’ve talked in the past about how in order to achieve interoperability of things like magic spells and magic-types between worlds, we might need to standardize a small group of magic types; potentially associating them to new Universal Primitives (UPs), such as for example colors, in the form of color magic. One thing we always want to do is reuse and recycle any UPs we already have at hand.
A lot of “canonical” magic types the Metaverse will have, can function as fuel, triggers, elements, special effects… we can apply to objects in our virtual worlds in order to change their state. For example, Fire-magic could be used for activating machines that require heat, or burning things. Electric magic could be used as a form of electricity to power machines, Ice magic could be used to freeze or refrigerate things… In essence, magic doesn’t need to be only used for combat, it’s perfect as a universal and standardized primitive all virtual worlds might share. If virtual worlds already have magic types, you’re only one step away of lighting torches with a firebolt, or coming up with a new mechanic, system, machine, etc. that can get activated or be interacted with through magic. Every player is already a magic wielder!
People could build new systemic mechanics or add new objects to an existing virtual world and require magic to interface with it. It might require some beta-testing in a secondary server and some reviewing, but it’s not only the original world-builders who can add these. Ideally the community of players of these worlds could come up with them, try them out in a secure secondary environment (such as a test-server), and if approved and proven to be worthwhile, eventually implemented into the main server/instance of a given virtual world. Other worlds can see what wonderful systems others have designed, and try implementing them in their world, since they’re likely to also use the same types of magic, if these are of the interoperable type.
Potentially these systems can be stacked, combined, and linked together. Worlds can truly keep evolving and changing as long as new usecases are thought on how to leverage the available magical primitives. And since most worlds share the same core magic types, it’s a positive feedback loop akin to the “smart cow effect”. If one person finds a new way to leverage magic in a virtual world, perhaps others can do the same.
Final remarks
A little bit of heat, a little bit of blood, a little bit of life, what wonderful things can we make out of these? Or a little bit of cold, a little bit of electricity, a little bit of motion…
Magic needs to be more than fun to use, it has to be a solution to a real problem. Systemic mechanics are a real challenge, and magic a potential promising solution. Not only that, but even though magic may seem all powerful, we can actually use it as a constraint or limitation.
The power of digital worlds is that you can make anything happen by simply coding it in. Many times this is desirable, but it’s also not fun, engaging, or interesting. Magic can help here too. If we require a small set of magic types to act as our interface with the world, we imbue it with properties typical of our physical world, such as scarcity or difficult — depending on how we allow players to use it, such as costing mana, learning new spells, etc. — and in turn make these worlds feel more real and meaningful.
