Crafting virtual worlds with Hilmar Pétursson

Transcript

[Music] I consider hmar one of the world's experts in this phenomenon and I hope it's very clear as soon why he's been attracted to crypto as a medium for creating uh and autonomously enforcing simple but powerful economic Primitives so please join me in welcoming uh hmar Peterson yeah so hmer I'm happy for you to react to that but also maybe an initial question is what does it take in your mind to create a virtual world a virtual economy this is kind of the core purpose of CTP to make Virtual Worlds more

meaningful than real life and that obviously maybe sounds well it sounds crazy uh and it might also sound evil but um um we it has forced us lot to think about like what is really real life and it's been like anything really that we've done it's been a challenge by watching what our players do because uh they very uh soon started to behave uh in a way where everything happening in Eve was happening for real um and um uh and to us that made the game the the game is like a toy almost it's very hard to not see it like a toy every time I play even online is like

watching somebody do a car trick you taught them to do but they're messing it up always having this no no no not like that like that torturous um but uh uh the players didn't feel like that they felt it was real um and then uh that sort of coincides with this like crypto phenomenon um which is equally not real um and that relates to our economy which are equally not real yeah so we basically spent most of our waking hours in a game system that was designed by uh a council of economists on an Eisenhower uh post the World War II and their um design premise was how do we get us out

of the post economy slump uh and they came up with the idea of we should consume uh this is documented this is not a conspiracy theory uh the uh this version of capitalism we live in was designed by people very specifically it's not emergent for the purposes of consumption um and it obviously succeeded uh but it is a game system if you trace it down none of it is really real like the money isn't real the jobs aren't real the company aren't real none of it is really real um and crypto proves that so well because out of like a new Fresh foundations that nobody believed in um companies were built coins were built memes all the things

you went over but it obviously started on a on a on an agreed premise that it wasn't real so sometimes we get fooled into this idea that our real life is real a real life is basically buying a house that is too big taking out a moric market so we always have to be at work not at the house we don't meet our kids because we're BL um and maybe worth saying H is that I I think if I understand you properly by not real you don't mean uh has no effect or no consequence or something what you mean is that it is synthetic right as in can you unpack that a little bit Yeah so uh let's unpack it a little bit because um there obviously is very controversial even inside CCP um and and it's taken us

a long time U to kind of figure out okay what is Meaningful and what is real those are like pretty fundamental things and I have here in my many slides like it goes to qu physics is that deep uh this is very helpful this is from Emanuel Kant he he came up with this sort of mid 1800s rules for happiness something to do someone to love and something to hope for something to do in the world today is basically jobs like what is there something to do it's jobs there are fairly recent invention they're not very long lasting like uh for most of our species lifetime we were not having jobs but do we have them now

um and um and they are lacking in many ways uh the starts are basically there are 8 billion people on the planet 5 billion are working AIDS 3 billion would like to have a job 1.3 billion have a job already there's a problem but only 200 million like what they're doing so failed real life has failed in giving us something meaningful to do okay can we fix that okay internet spaceships for mostly nerds like myself uh seem to generate happiness where people love their spaceships more than their cars uh because their spaceship give their henc and navigating their social network they give them status that the people that they care about care about whereas their car is just like a I don't know a Toyota

that takes him to Walmart to buy more memory for their PC to play more online and and that mod it sound very dystopic but what we have found is because of the designs of i l i l is extremely pening it's hideous the complicated it's a murder death scam simulator I know it sounds a lot like crypto yeah so uh but uh it so happens when you live in a world like that you need friends and you really need them um and if they're there for you uh the friendships become real so when we survey Eve players and ask them why are you playing this game for 20 years some people have locked into Eve every single day for 20 years they say that is where my uh meaningful

social network is like these are my these are my peeps uh they come to my Aid when I really need it my real life friends the Friendship have never been tested I've never had to ask them to back me in a in a war campaign for uh over a year you actually underestimate it it's more like 10,000 people for a year rather than 100 people for a month so anyway uh so when we think about this okay if gives you something to do more meaningful than the current crappy jobs the world is offering or not offering gives you somebody to love all the friendships you make through the game where people attribute more value to those friendships than in the real world because the real world doesn't really

need to ask much help as even on line and then something to hope for which in our expression is mostly the next expansion uh which already the updates we deliver each game often underwhelming sometimes good so uh uh so we've thought a lot about that so okay if this is our core purpose as a company right and that kind of parallels into crypto of just okay uh in the in the case of like something to do sure you are mining asteroids in space and making spaceships and buing for world domination but you still have to pay for food and housing and electricity is there a way to make that sort of less commuted than it is

right now our end user license agreement states nothing here Belongs to You cgp owns all of it yeah you get to access if you're in a good mood as I often say it's like what I basically have is your sort of cod of hamurabi yeah uh nothing really has changed there are 282 rules you must at tier too for me as amabi ex being okay with you accessing your spaceship um and uh and that and that how would you like what are the consequences of that does that limit the maximum amount of value that people can project into this like how do you think about the consequences between a crypto system automatically enforcing certain

things versus a Fiat style there are these are the rules so I think um and you said it well in your talk about whether people care about decentralization or not is that if operates under a social consensus uh due to its onthology of having existed for 20 years so because we have not confiscated assets for 20 years we pull off a little bit sort of London real estate trick Assets in London are largely not confiscated but uh if you ad her to the code of amapi in London then they have sort of they have appreciated I

think for a thousand years so so Norms there's there's Norms that have accumulated expectation between the players and in this Cas c yeah and I think that is frankly more important rather than okay here's a mathematical proof that it works because people people just largely don't really care much about math I mean they sometimes care about the people that care about math so there's like a maven effect of like okay if at is cool with it it's probably okay um but uh E online in many ways like Bitcoin derives its value from the co social consensus that it's okay and it matters and it took Bitcoin I don't know when to count 10 years for it

to matter in some way I mean it's probably still on a journey to to actually but that is more a social idea rather than U that's right there's this like Lindy this idea that something becomes Lindy to take for granted its trust properties but then but then also maybe with like the mathematically guaranteed versus social norms you're also limiting maybe the tail risk in an extreme case where like you know 30 40 years from now CCP decides they want to try something new absolutely and sometimes we do try something new and people have big problems with it uh it's all not all been roses we literally have had protests our economy policies are not always alloted we were just run coming

out of a period of scarcity where we forced uh famine basically in the game um and while famine can be tolerated or scarcity can be tolerated in their life because in some way it's a property of nature or God or whatever is your sort of idea of that but when it's just a game designer with an Excel sheet it's a little hard to start to SW yeah it's just like some person in Iceland changed the value in an Exel seat and now I'm experiencing famine in my virtual world so so so can you say so G given this I I'm beginning to see a little bit the role that maybe crypto plays for the future of Eve should we go there or do you want to say more about how to actually make a virtual economy like the

Primitive components of a virtual economy for it to work yeah so this literally is a sunky chart for a tiny tiny portion of the eve economy so uh um here's a little corner of the eve economy of like how materials compos into products how products compos into larger products how products compos into services and this is very much kind of emergent phenomenon we did uh start with pretty solid fundamental principles of just how we would Implement a symmetry of resources on a certain topology that is the map how we would create sort of strategic corridors and

bridges Etc inside the star map so that we would induce competition cooperation to canab bridge the asymmetries etc etc and out of that this emerg so we have both been looking for an opportunity okay if we were to remake it with hindsight what what would be the imput us to do that and also if we were to do that could we built it on a different premise so um I think we've been thinking about that since 2015 where somebody explained to me how you could do how we could store spaceships on bitcoin um there obviously were Bitcoin games uh being made as early as think 2013 where people are doing like nft like just on the

protocol which is actually quite flexible I mean Bon is in many ways a engineering Marvel um continues to be be so um and that kind of unblocked this okay could there could we take it more fundamentally where where we could kind of decouple the sort of cod of hamap of like there's no Habi there are no Cay Taps there are no police there's no military could we go all the way that down so uh there was a collision of these two things of like okay currently we're building on SQL Server hosted in the docklands area area somewhere could we extend that further and then could we take 20 years of hindsight and build from a different premise and it's actually we went all the way here of

just okay how how can we take the organic output of evline back Port it into a morean structure and the more and more we looked at it okay we have to take this model this is actually an extremely interesting concept which is called scale decoupling obviously our world is very emergent from uh particles from quantum mechanics you get atoms from atoms you get molecules from molecules you get compounds from compounds you get like but uh when you're doing biology you don't need to learn quantum mechanics and the literally is a mathematical phenomenal called scale coupling underneath all

this and we are now kind of reorganizing our brain into a mechanic like this so that we also not only can build on better Foundation but we can have more emergent power from the emergent uh social economy what's happening is that in the context of the game in this example there are different levels different types of uh uh special systems like there's the economic system there's the literal spatial system between uh you know between solar systems and so on and all these things and each of them even though they're all obviously part of the same literal object in the real world there are little choke points

between them where much simpler rules can be used by a higher layer to understand a lower layer or vice versa yes uh and uh so can you give an example maybe of like uh so uh our world is actually it's quite easy to reason through our world and the emergent properties of our world how from nature we get culture from culture governance infrastructure Commerce and how we end up with fashion so we I think we have an a a a fairly good understanding that governments can change governance that affects culture but it doesn't really uh affect the core principles of nature um that's right so um and and this is

actually something that took a while for us to understand because once you've establish the premise that people feel the world is real then people messing about certain aspects of the stack seems like we were updating like uh the real world yeah right uh if some were to come hey mankind welcome to Quantum Mechanics 2.0 it's like the one you knew except with the poon hi hiin boson is not here Etc and of course we have from an engineering and r&t Etc had that happened I mean when um Einstein came up with theory of relativity there actually was like a protest letter about

like this being heresy uh and evil and it should be banned um and that in May was an to our reality we didn't fully properly understand and I mean then with quantum mechanics even Einstein had a problem it's like the not design the world like this this can't so so we're kind of like we we understand through our own world that we are discovering more and more layers to it so okay is there a way to replicate this into um uh uh um a game simulation and is there a way to do it such that it gives us more love and happiness than our current emergent

reality um because the emergent reality is largely designed by people it's not a creation of nature um and we see in the Pinnacle of our creation which are basically mega cities like London people are generally more miserable in now um and as defined by people in a city usually have fewer friends than people in a rural town somewhere in um I mean when you travel especially America somewhere in Rural America it's the friendliest and happiest people you ever meet that's true actually so what what do you think the key reason what do you think the reasons for that are and what are the types of things that you would recommend putting into a game or virtual economy to mitigate that like

what are the key things so uh what we have deducted is that EV on line is um it's a harsh brutal simulation where still nobody actually dies but great loss can be experienced um and there is something magical about Collective suffering uh which I think we have lost sight of in our quest to make everyone happy and I think anyone that's been in crypto for a while the crypto withs are the collective suffering that's true um that's why there's such Bond between people that have survived many

Winters in crypto and this idea of collective suffering um is an underestimated part of our biology um and um uh and you see people seek this they go on adventure trip together I mean offsites are a little bit more corporate offsites they're not dangerous but they're trying to be like we're going to do something like trust exercises and things we're going to throw an axe yeah throw an axe we we do that a lot um uh but even line does a different way to simulate this where I now have to trust a non-trivial amount of people to really say what they do and do what they say and if they

don't it's going to be a serious problem we prep for this for a year if it goes wrong we will lose everything and then we will suffer together something about this cycle that strengthens and forges friendship and this suffering has like a ying and yang to love being created it's almost like a Joseph Campbell style hero's journey but for communities of people that has been our conclusion based on this because like our first um dis or or sort of discombobulation with the game was why do these people love each other so much and the game and uh and love and hate us

who the makers and it was something because of this Collective suffering that the game facilitates through its brutality frankly um and often it is at the hands of another group so but you're still doing it more like it is a sport it's like right Liverpool and Manchester United kind of rivalry sure it can be quite extreme um there's still a layer of abstraction deniability almost but um but there there is something think as we have kind of Taken um as we've made the world safer and safer and safer for good reasons I'm not like that's a good plan but the outlet then still needs to be

there where where is Our Moment of collective suffering yeah so does this does the just to put a fine finer point on it does the suffering come from the fact that these are valuable things the rules are always enforced they're enforced beyond the control of people they're known known rules r that can be exploited by others like is it is it really the is that where the suffering comes from I think the the suffering really comes from is that in this case the mechanic of the game is world domination uh and it's about war and obviously that is terrible uh and we should just take that from planet Earth

and put it in on line so we can all be happy over here and unhappy over there uh but there is something about that fighting for limited set of resources against another tribe is pretty fundamental yeah yeah so the suffering comes from here's a playground where the rules are clear but our rules which is our culture is our own making like there is no doubt that algorithmically enforces that I have your back in if you're going to this to this fight absolutely uh I'm going to have your back there's no Dow to implement that it's a trust amongst us and trusting other people um and building that trust and it does take

time there's actually a formula it's proximity duration frequency and intensity CIA invented this formula CA gets most of its Intel through friendship um so they have mechanized it um and we have kind of retrofitted that on top of almost back tracing interviewing right interviewing Eve players and asking them how why have you done this for 20 years okay it's because you have friends why do you attribute the friendship you have through H online more uh than the friendship you have in reality it's been a very fruitful element to talk to

Veterans uh from militaries around the world yeah and they usually equated with this the intensity of life and death for is like relationship like at a speed that nothing else does and then they explain to us how our game does that for them which is obviously very humbling I come from Iceland we don't even have a military we've um we're uh extremely spoiled when it comes to that can you say a little bit about specifically how you're thinking about crypto in the context of the next uh Eve projects what I'm hearing when we announced we're going to make a crypto game we announced that last year just to okay get uh all the bad stuff on the table we making a

crypto game I promise it's going to be good I promise uh uh uh it was very similar when we said we were going to make a game on a database like E online is the first database game believe that or not uh Tim here used to work on ultim online remembers well he was just storing the state of ultim online in a flat file on the server disk um and when I said we're going to use a database to make an MMO people are like weird uh some Elves in Iceland are going to use a database to make an MMO uh silly people uh and I just intuitively okay we're going to store value it's going to have to be transacted we we have to build it on like Good

Foundations um and U and whether it's slow or whatever databases were quite slow 20 years ago we'll just work around that so I'm hearing a lot of that back played back to me now it was like okay blockchains are very slow that's right yeah they're like databases 20 years ago we we we have a trick for that uh and then okay economic value all these the game won't be fun etc etc and I put them to player auctions in Hong Kong that sells you uh spaceships in line and isk like there's no tomorrow like I was asking about nontransferability it's happening anyway when I look at my own data it's rap but people are doing it they claim they

don't want it but they do I have just facts to prove otherwise there's about a million dollar per month of uh liquidation happening in Eve um I've also calculated uh if I look at even line the aggregated economy and if I look at the assets on average that people have and if I transpose that to the offshore market value in Hong Kong then people's Savings in E Line are on average $1,300 and um I found statistics that the average saving of the average American is $500 which is shockingly low um and I was thinking okay I have a lot of people from America that play online they have

more Savings in even online than they have in their bank account if something happens to them I mean I they should be able to pull on that yeah if they need to pay a medical bill and the 500 isn't enough and they have 1300 and Eve who am I to prevent that really right right uh theyve spent 20 years accumulating all this Savings in online and maybe their children have a problem or they have a problem why would I like disallow that like what what what is the moral principle of like making that wrong and then of course you have to go through the whole stack of like AML antimony laundering kyc okay we could do that uh Second L

has done that you can't be done MMO like experiences have done this a Swedish game called project entropia that's run on that premise for about 20 years but there there's an interesting liquidity problem in that concept is that there is there's no counter buyer other than people inside the world that's right yeah so uh so this idea with like okay we need to solve for the liquidity and okay here are crypto nerds that have bottled up a trillion dollars of of loose liquidity if somebody were to play an MMO over 20 years accumulate thousands of dollars in Saving needs to liquidate quickly because they need to pay a medical bill well okay if we merge these two things together good things

should be able to come from that um so yeah I started to have these thoughts after like I said okay I I'm basically hamur clay tapos or database I'm not going to live forever um I can't really promise that somebody's going to take care of it not claiming that I'm some Saint like but but still it's hard I've I've I've U I've been in the meetings where we have to uphold um the antology of the world like it's very easy when you have U I mean uh 60 million people have played G online there there are extremely powerful psychological levels when you have a game can see kind of the

sort of if you play a mobile free-to-play game I mean it's these are powerful psychological drivers you can basically print money and it just doesn't feel like okay if we are to make a virtual worlds more meaningful than real life and we're just on the spot of printing money uh for corporate profits uh I mean which we also do obviously we are a company but is that the best premise of building it is there a is there another way to build the premise where it does truly belong to the people playing it and there's a collective align interest from everyone participating in the economy also us as a bit of an operator but we have the same alignment with everyone our savings

um uh are also in the in the in the economic value of the game yeah that's a very interesting very powerful idea just out out of curiosity what were the original motivations for using a database to start with uh it's an interesting fact nobody at CCP had ever made the game um when we made imine uh it's the first game made in Iceland uh and we had never met a game developer we had not even seen a game developer from afar like I'm looking at him here uh like we were just so like yeah not game developers but what we had done is that there were was a company in Iceland

founded in ' 92 to make the MERS so we had made a vrml browser where your reality modeling language was the hot thing in the '90s it was supposed to be the 3D internet very Neil Stevenson snow cross inspired we had dancing aliens we were broadcasting contrast internet World 98 we owned it we had like a motion captured singer in New York singing in a live on the internet uh in full motion capture to thousands of people over like voice over IP and God knows what and nobody needed the meters but to make the meters work on 286s yeah required some like serious understanding of Network stks and and

whatnot uh so we more had sort of enterprise software developers rather than game developers uh we were more coming from that background because we didn't have any game training so it's just natural to us I mean we're basically doing a banking application with a fancy graphical UI we just build it like a bank so um Mak sense it was just absurd to do it in a different way I I I recall I've gone back and asked around do you think you could say a little bit about if you were an entrepreneur a young entrepreneur again and you you know what what would you what would you do differently given what you know now and given what we have with crypto today how would you think about it differently so it's very much this element of like find 10,000 people that

love what you're doing like um I would really like keep that in mind um I think with crypto everything moves so quickly around so so you have a lot of this sort of there are a million people maybe liking what you're doing but uh there are not 10,000 people that love it um I would I would find that path like e line is very much that it's just like we're making a spaceship game we like it and if you like it come uh we're taking taking that kind of almost to the extreme I mean you're all invited to join just uh go to Project awakening.

iio then you can play what we're making on the 1st of May can also sign up to the haathon and whatnot that's very much made in the spirit that people are going to love it they're going to hate it but there are going to be no ambivalence you're going to be in either Camp um and starting there and then diffusing into mainstream is an underestimated value chain if you look at many things in the world they started as niches like um Metallica was making like they go from yeah I don't know masters of puppet to what they become like uh even if you start small it doesn't mean you stay small most things I mean everything about aul was a was a

was a Nish cult in the beginning still is a bit of cult but it's not n yeah they they figured out how to scale that yeah yeah the uh just before I ask my next one are there other slides that we didn't look at that are cool I don't know uh I mean there are cool slides here yeah yeah there ah there's a lot so this is like Okay um H so we actually have a bit of an invention in what we're building is that um we have this concept of energy which is um uh somewhat our way uh for addressing Cil attacks in MMOs so civil attacks and MMOs are basically botting people write extremely sophisticated S software yeah to have ai play EV on line

uh it's very hard to fight because the cost of the bter inside the world economy is basically zero it's it's the AWS Bill to run the bots so that a focused human in the world has a very poor ability to to to compete with 10,000 Bots it it's the game is not designed for that so we introduced this idea of energy like um which is um every agency in the world costs energy it's a bit inspired by gas cost for op codes uh which we also have because we're also making our own blockchain we're crazy people um but uh we also have this world

currency which is scaled decoupled from the up codes etc etc um and that gives us like a fundamental new tool to make the game fair for humans against AI is the basic idea that there is a marginal cost imposed on specific actions in the game yes so um but think more about it as so the game gives you agency in the world you can you can do something in the world um and how to limit agency we're going to do like off code accounting but for agency so every time you make an action we have an estimation of like how much agency is this giving you if you take a Starship move it from

one solar system to another solar system it has huge strategic relevance uh where so it would have a higher cost uh so it would have a higher cost indeed and then okay now we basically have energy and okay what's a good proxy for energy obviously oil is a good proxy and then we started to talk to people in the oil industry and we learned everything about it and oh my God that thing is well game designed like uh and here is uh uh schematics for refining so we have all transposed this into sci-fi so you have to to you have to mine crude matter through Rifts in the universe la la la it's all very fancy then you have to refine it into multiple sort of products etc etc

remember the mat sank from later on you make this hideous complexity etc etc and then and this complexity actually plays a purpose in building friendship and and love and all that because somebody has to understand it to make it easy for others totally no one person can handle all these pieces people have to specialize and when they specialize around this need to economize then together they can do something greater than individually yeah spot them that's beautiful yeah that's great maybe one one last one just because as some people ask me how do you think about like and this was definitely true in Eve's early days and it's true again

today how do you think about hiring around new technologies right where you're trying to do things that haven't quite been done before is there a way that you think about hiring technologists we are stealing a lot from ourselves when it comes to the technology like a lot of the technology and techniques we've already trained people how to operate on and sure like the blockchain stuff is a little different I mean it becomes maybe a lot different when you're into sort of uh zero knowledge proofs ET which we are dabbling in quite a bit because you also have to be able to create information a symmetry everything being transparent on a blockchain is not very good for a for a for a war simulator like you need to

be able to have secrets so when you go into that then um then you're quite off um off script uh when it comes to but what we have found is that as soon as we announce this and the work that out just all the people that know how to do that came to us kind of on their own because all the CK people need um almost like a simulated environment to test their ideas um at some scale and we both have scale and kind of an alibi for interaction like most of the sort of cryptography stuff involves having Secrets I mean cryptography is literally about having secrets and usually Secrets

mean that people that place value on secrets are trying to hide something uh from somebody uh so so that can often go where like tot a left turn to to a dark place but in a game like e it's all basic premise of the game yeah now I need to maintain secrets from my enemy and voila it's now in the alip of interaction of a game now all the SEC people are excited about like okay can we try to make a cloaking field out of CK math yeah let's do that yeah totally amazing amazing all right well I think we're we're we're done with this time frame I think we have some time for Q&A you mentioned that uh you get inspiration from from oil and you also mentioned like numerous

people from history how do you think about where to get inspiration and when you need inspiration yeah just curious how you think about that when we were making game online um um we were like I said not game developers um I was a computer scientist uh we had a guy with a PhD in chaos physics we had a like we had people of the streets over ra which are very artistic like um it was a very cross disciplinary sort of multifaceted thing um it's a it's an artifact of the smallness of Iceland nobody can really specialize much you always have to kind of like your social

network is full of weird people like you cannot just be a doctor interfacing with doctors so there was a lot of sort of anthropomorphic debates about like everyone was reading selfish Gene and like how do we Implement evolutionary stable strategies in an MMO like like the if you were in the CCP Cana at lunch the people were debating Neo darnis and and and these kind of things and I think that just naturally sort of in a iron shaper iron kind of way became this kind of okay now we're taking all that into this into this thing that if became um and then we found so when I've tried to recreated with like first we had a

period where we having economists make economies and we quickly understood that economies are great at analyzing optimizing understanding economies uh they can be good at making them but it's not necessarily a skill that they they would have naturally and we started to understand you you need physics people to make composable emergence because physics is composable emergence and chemistry is an ecology so you need more physicists chemists ecologists uh sociologist to to kind of decompose our world into actionable things on the other side so that's why

we see something complex like the the crude oil economy then it's like oh my God here is an emergent thing out of core properties that have been put on the planet for us to play with how can we transpose that in so we can build something with the same emergency power and generally PE people with physics training they're trained to reason through these kind of things people can also be trained in it through other means but uh so inspiration comes a lot from decomposing either history or our current world and once we have decomposed it how can we transpose into our own coordinate system of this game it's a lot of abstract reasoning as you as you as you hear over the years what

are some of the more notable examples of emergent phenomena that you've encountered to to to kind of take the Pinnacle of the extreme to explain how far it emerges is that um people have caught power lines to their enemies houses in the real world like uh imagine the madness that has to exist for somebody to find a group of people in another country find the power supply to a house because usually people are enemies a little bit across culture there's a very much sort of where your existing Friends Network comes into the game uh find the power line time when it

happens and do it like m in the madness um so that is I mean this takes a decade to happen so that that is like a an an emergent sort of like this is the tip of an iceberg of to to kind of explain where the emergence become and other element is we have the Guinness World Record of uh the most amount of people fighting online in a in a in one session it's uh something about 8,000 people uh the next game is um is less than a th000 um and and most games are really sub 100 so if you go to a typical fortnite match I mean maybe 64 some fpss

have gone to like 200 300 and even at 8,000 and U and we get a lot of calls from people which are building scalable Computing for games where you could have like tens of thousands of people interacting on the same time uh using our technology and they never really go anywhere because uh getting 10,000 people to do anything uh is extremely hard it's really just concerts Sports M matches and protests where you where you have sort of 10,000 people agreeing to do something maybe it's like a burning man event or something like that and even then like in the concert

setting or those settings it's kind of a single player replicated 10,000 times yeah you're an audience to a performer um or um I mean something like burningman is interesting it's kind of your Universial Society still it took a long time for Burning Man to scale up to those numbers uh the other thing is military and engagement military engagement can be tens of thousands of people but to to be able to do that we need to develop military doctrines we need to train people la la la it's it's it takes it takes hundreds of years to train militaries to do this so e players trained it took them a decade to get to 10,000 and some of it was technical

limits on our side getting 10,000 people to simulate spaceships and destruction at the same time it's like it's not easy but but it was mostly their effort of training military doctrines training soldiers building economies saving up for a year plan the military engagement and then execute it all inside the game with people which are basically volunteering and often like taking like there are like SMS call trees when they were doing this people were running out of Cinemas to do their bidding for their it's happening now okay I'll go and cut the power lines i f the people from the cinema like imagine the of coordination and human kind of potential to get 10,000

people to to to prep for a year for a war that takes seven days put a Guinness World Record like that is the level of emergence uh that we have seen so this scale of multiplayer is itself an emersion phenomenon that requires many many things to be layered on top for for it to ever happen regardless of strict technical limitations yeah makes total sense I think we have time for maybe one more question um thanks um big fan of uh Eve and I started playing 2007 but never was a master of it so um I remember when I played it uh Whenever there was a big battle around a Galaxy the network got

get like super cloged and everyone's like clogged there I think it's very similar to how I mean whenever there's a there's a big event or good event in the crypto world the network got clocked so I'm wondering like what did you guys do to improve this and whether like what what can people borrow from this and I mean bring it into crypto world to to improve it or maybe the the the other way around so there is a fight for Block space everywhere in anything like it it ends up in a limit which is kind of like block space uh it's very extreme in crypto because there needs to be consensus about the blocks and y y y but still like ultimately even if we have

our own database there's a bottleneck in what can stream into the database so there there and there's a limit in the simulation frames of our physics engine of like what hits a Time tick in the way the physics in online take so what hits in the block of uh of time increment in how physics sensing takes matters a lot in whether uh a spaceship survives or doesn't survive uh and then as the game grew people started to fight for this and there's a mechanism built into our sort of superc computing architecture webu built such that there's a queue to get into the frames but the queue becomes

very um unpredictable of like okay when is my message going to go into the queue and meet into the frame to go into the simulation so while we could increase the block Space by making the system more performant it is never performant enough for the time frame of the simulation step to on boort all the actions that people have put into the system this is very similar to crypto so once we figured out this is a never-ending Warfare we implemented time delion so time just slows down and uh uh and that's a very interesting way to approach it because that also happens in our own life if there's a lot going on time dilates so um you you our time perception is very

much correlated with what's going on so by doing time delion we actually allowed people to strategize more because when you're interacting with 10,000 spaceships like giving orders what to do at what time if you have to do it in real time there's only so much you can do so by uh doing time dation stretching the increment just making it go slower we created like a meta game where people are now sort of meta in on top of the time so uh I don't know how that would transpose into crypto but I'm just more emphasizing this is not a unique phenomenon of crypto any shared simulation involving shared state will have this even our own Universe works

like this there there is assimilation step I mean the whole thing are we living in assimilation I mean it stretches the concept of assimilation if you stretch the concept of assimilation enough yes we're living in assimilation it's obviously ticking there's a the time increment um and um yeah so by doing time delion we actually uh both addressed the techical foundation and make um the game in a way more fun to play very interesting I'm I am curious to think about how that would apply to crypto fascinating but anyway I know we're out I know we're out of time hmar thank you again for joining us [Music]