This article was taken from The WIRED World in 2016 -- our fourth annual trends report, a standalone magazine in which our network of expert writers and influencers predicts what's coming next. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

For all the legions of programmers coding the movement of individual blades of grass, and all the advances in processing power and VR, the simulated worlds of online gaming still behave nothing like the real one. It's not just the proliferation of enchanted objects and implausible weaponry. It's something more fundamental. "Say I drop an object on the floor. I leave the room and come back. In 99 percent off MMOs [massively multiplayer online games], it's just vanished without explanation," says Herman Narula, founder and CEO of London-based virtual-world-simulation startup Improbable. "How can I tell a story? How can I do anything meaningful in a world like that?"


Founded in 2012, Improbable's mission to create a platform upon which developers can build vastly more complex worlds, sprung from Narula's frustration at running up against the limitations of online games. "We read books and we cry, we laugh, we're horrified, we fall in love -- those experiences matter to people. Online worlds need to evoke the same thing," he says. "In the last few years we've seen the abysmal failure of games attempting to mimic the World of Warcraft model of repeating scripted content. The average gamer age is 37, the industry is worth a hundred billion dollars, and people are hungry for deeper experiences. They want their actions to make a difference."

For that you need something more than a player-centric illusion. You need a world with a complex system of physical laws that allows a person's actions to have significant, lasting consequences. An environment where, if a mine explosion occurs in one area, players in a town far downstream will see debris floating in their part of the river. In turn, the ruins will rust and decay even when no player is present. A world in which if you kill a dragon, it stays dead, rather than re-incarnating for the next player. A world, in short, where things stay where you put them.

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We read books and we cry, we laugh, we're horrified, we fall in love -- those experiences matter to people. Online worlds need to evoke the same thing Herman Narula, Founder and CEO of Improbable

This is what Improbable's technology claims to allow. The key, says Narula, is distribution. The standard online games model is a single server per game, meaning the number of simulated entities and players is limited by the capacity of that server. To handle huge numbers of simultaneous players the developer can run multiple versions of their game, each on a separate server, with players divided up between them. "Say you want to make a world in which a thousand people can fight together in real-time in one location," Narula says. "A single server can't deal with that. To make it work you end up limiting the game in other ways."


Improbable swaps those separated servers for a scalable swarm of simpler, lightweight machines that co-operate to co-simulate the world, swapping work between them to meet areas of higher demand. "Say there's a huge firefight in one location, maybe 20 workers are involved in simulating that. A millisecond later, that firefight ends, everyone's dead, those machines vanish and that piece of the world is taken over by just one," Narula says. "We're talking about live processes jumping between servers in the middle of a calculation. That's never been done before."

It's a bold claim with an impressive team behind it, including former Google Hangouts SRE engineering manager Sam Kalnins and former general manager of triple A games studio Crytek, Nick Button-Brown, along with software engineers from eBay, Amazon and Goldman Sachs. In March 2015, the founders convinced blue-chip VCs Andreessen Horowitz, an early backer of the Oculus Rift, to invest $20 million (£13m). The same month, Dean Hall, creator of the enormously popular open world survival game DayZ announced he was working with Improbable on a project, later revealed as space colonisation game, Ion, describing it as "The most exhilarating thing I have ever done."

The first public demonstration will come early in 2016 with the official launch of the first game to be built on the platform: made by London-based Bossa Studios, Worlds Adrift will be a massive multiplayer game in which players work together to construct airships from discovered resources and explore a world of floating islands. "We had the idea for Worlds Adrift long before meeting Improbable, but shelved it as impossible for a team our size," explains Bossa Studio's co-founder and gamer-in-chief Henrique Olifiers. "The complexity of even just an ordinary MMO means that what would be a trivial single-player problem becomes exponentially more difficult. You need at least a hundred people to pull that off."

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Every activity, whether its chopping down a tree or digging a hole, is unpredictable because these all involve multiple individual entities subject to complex laws, just as in the real world Henrique Olifiers, Co-founder and gamer-in-chief of Bossa Studio


Yet within just two months of picking up Improbable's platform, Bossa's 30-person team had a beta not just for a standard MMO, but one that showed signs of realising Improbable's claims of complex physics and radical persistence. "Every activity, whether its chopping down a tree or digging a hole, is unpredictable because these all involve multiple individual entities subject to complex laws, just as in the real world," Olifiers says. "Even if you perform the same action the consequences can be different, and players can create different ways to go about any one challenge."

This means that rather than gameplay being dependent on various scripted missions and events, the situations players encounter emerge from the interactions of other players and the world's inbuilt laws.

Much of this has, to some extent, been done before. But a game that can handle both the complex physics of innumerable simulated entities and the demands of thousands of players, all in real time, is something new. Perhaps the closest example, Narula suggests, is the space-exploration game EVE Online -- a title in which the results of emergent gameplay extend to complex business alliances, high-level corporate espionage and, last year, a 4,000-player firefight resulting in more than $300,000 worth of damage to 75 spaceships. Yet, unlike in the Improbable vision, the wreckage of this almighty battle had to be hand-designed by EVE's developers and inserted into the game days later.

Improbable's software is also drawing interest from those looking to simulate something more realistic than intergalactic warfare. "We're talking to people across defence, economics and biology," Narula says. "Researchers who want to build models of things like the world's fish population, or a mirror of London which updates in real time, allowing you to ask questions such as, 'What if this piece of infrastructure were to shut down?'"

Researchers including David Pugh at the University of Oxford's Institute for New Economic Thinking are looking to use Improbable's platform to build a model of the UK housing market. "Each household has a huge range of varying characteristics to it: income, wealth, composition. To represent that accurately, you need a massive model with complex agents, which has been a problem," he explains. "Previous platforms just don't scale in the way that Improbable's technology has the potential to."


That scalability could eventually encompass other countries' housing markets and even the operations of the wider financial system, allowing Pugh's team to better understand how mortgages are funded and produce insights that could influence the policy of government agencies. "We imagined this would be a narrow thing that only helped gaming," says Narula. "But we began to realise that it was a much more fundamental solution. It's not just something that online games need, it's a better way of handling all distributed computing.

Disclaimer: WIRED editor David Rowan was an early investor in Improbable and had no involvement in the commissioning or editing of this story.

Kathryn Nave is a regular contributor to WIRED