Stewart Butterfield had a dream.

He wanted to build a game that was different from anything else he had played. He wanted to start a company to build that game and then make it available to everyone in the world for free. He wanted to push the boundaries of how people play games together.

Unfortunately, his idea came in 2002, when few venture capitalists wanted to invest in making games, much less free ones.

At the time, Butterfield's startup, Ludicorp, was running out of cash. Things had gotten so bad the company was about to sell off furniture to make payroll. In desperation, the developers took a prototype social network side-project and enhanced it so that it allowed users to upload and share photos. This project eventually turned into Flickr—and it became so popular that Yahoo purchased Ludicorp in 2005.

Butterfield stayed on at Yahoo for a few years, but his original dream still pulled at him. By 2009, venture capitalists were now tripping over each other to fund free-to-play online games, so Butterfield seized his chance. He founded Tiny Speck and set up offices in San Francisco and Vancouver.

Butterfield had been impressed by the success of casual, browser-based games such as Farmville, but he didn't find the games themselves terribly interesting. Despite being hosted on the world's largest social networks, they tended to be primarily single-player experiences. Sure, you could send bundles of grain to another player's farm, but you couldn't watch them farming and then step in to help them out.

Way back in 1982, one of the first games to attempt a collaborative multiplayer experience was LucasArts' Habitat, a side-scrolling adventure where many players explored a single world. Just prior to the founding of Ludicorp, Stewart had read the seminal essay "The Lessons from Habitat," a post-mortem analysis of the game by its original developers. One of the most interesting things about Habitat was that the players themselves came up with new gameplay ideas together. Recreating this "emergent" behavior has long been a dream of massively multiplayer online (MMO) game developers, but it has rarely been achieved.

Tiny Speck's own game was called Glitch. Taking Habitat as an inspiration, the developers started crafting a world that would be more about player collaboration than combat. In fact, there would be no combat at all.

Glitch was intriguing, so I recently dropped by the Tiny Speck offices in Vancouver to find out more about both the company's game design ideas and the technology used to bring them to life.

No combat? So what do you do?

Designing a game without combat turned out to be difficult. What would players spend most of their time doing? The Glitch designers decided to beef up things like crafting, where players combine raw materials they find in the world to create new and useful objects. The game features dozens of different skills to learn, from baking to meditation, with many different sub-ranks within each skill.

In addition, the player can interact with almost every object in the world. Pigs can be patted or nibbled; just like the ones in the Simpsons "Garden of Eden" episode, they are unharmed by the process. A player with a rake, a watering can, and some beans can plant a patch of dirt, then come back later to pick fruit off the tree growing there. When many players do this all at once, the flora in any area can change daily.

Glitch also has quests, handed out by a smiling stone that floats at the top center of the game screen. Quests consist of everything from exploring new areas to interacting with other players using objects you've crafted yourself. When you complete quests you get experience points, which let your character gain levels. You also gain energy, which is important, since almost everything you do in the game drains energy. If you run out completely, your character will descend into "Hell," where the only escape is to crush grapes with your feet until you are allowed back into the "real" world. Little tombstones that occasionally dot the countryside are indicators that not everyone is careful with their energy usage.

The fun factor

The key question isn't about game theory or design, though. It's about whether Glitch is fun to play. The answer is a surprising yes. Despite the lack of combat, there's plenty for your character to do. The floating stone periodically hands out new quests and reminds you when you have finished learning a new skill. Skills continue to increase while you are offline—as in Eve Online—making it worthwhile to log back in even if you've been away from the game for a bit.

Where the game could really become interesting is with player interaction. Some of the quests have been designed to stimulate this sort of activity, such as the quest where you have to put on Wax Lips and blow kisses at other players while under the influence of Garlic Breath. The surreal and funny ways that objects can be combined reminded me a bit of old adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island—games in which there was also no combat (unless you count "insult swordfighting").

Game design and player interaction

The main problem with crafting a game world and waiting for players to create emergent behavior is that the first thing they do is try to kill one another. Even when the game doesn't allow player-vs-player combat, people still find ways to annoy each other, such as killing important non-player characters like quest-givers. None of this is possible in the Glitch game world.

It's sometimes hard for players to shake the competitive urge. Originally, rocks could be mined by only one player at a time, leading to frustration for the player who clicked a millisecond too slowly. The designers changed this so that multiple players could mine simultaneously, but people complained that other players were "using up" the rocks too quickly. A new system was implemented where having multiple people mining gave each player more ore than if they had worked individually. Finally, a quest was added to reward collaborative miners still further.

Tuning the quests and interactions to provide the right level of difficulty and reward was complicated. In beta testing, the development team found that while singing to butterflies was repetitive and boring, people would still sing to butterflies obsessively—because it provided small but guaranteed amounts of experience. The devs tried to balance this by making singing to animals cost energy, but then players simply farmed huge numbers of girly drinks (which made animals interactions cost no energy) and continued to grind the same thing again and again. The girly drinks were then nerfed, and people immediately complained.

"We realized that if we incentivized things that were inherently boring," Butterfield told me, "people would do them again and again—it showed up in the logs—but that they would secretly hate us."

Player housing is implemented, with an apartment-style design that lets anyone have their own home without cluttering up the landscape. You can decorate your home and grow things in your own garden on the patio. Unlike many games, in Glitch it does not take long to save up enough cash for a place of your own, though making it look less than spartan will take considerable effort.

Funny little touches to the game litter the game. For example, getting the right papers to let you purchase an apartment requires multiple trips to the Department of Administrative Affairs (Ministry of Departments) where you spend much time in a waiting area while bureaucratic lizard men play Farmville on tiny computers.

I hadn't logged into the game in awhile, and when I did I saw that my in-game mailbox was wiggling and jiggling, waiting for me. At first glance I thought: "Oh no! Spammers have infiltrated the Glitch servers!" But when I read more closely, I realized the developers were just pulling my leg:

$$$ CHEAP RX AVAILABLE NOW $$$ MAIL ORDER PURPLE FLOWERS, HAIRBALL FLOWERS, NO-NO POWDER FULLY LEGAL* PRESCRIPTIONS** FROM REAL DOCTORS*** TROUBLE PLEASURING YOUR GLITCH GIRLFRIEND/BOYFRIEND/ FRIEND-OF-VARIABLE-OR-UNDISCLOSED-OR-UNDEFINED-GENDER? WORRY NO LONGER WITH ALL NATURAL RUBEWEED ENHANCEMENTS. $$$ CHEAP AND LEGAL* $$$ CALL NOW * May not be as legal as advertised. ** Prescriptions may be scrawled on bar napkins in crayon. *** May not be a doctor. Possibly just a piggy we refer to as Doctor Piggles who signs prescriptions (see above) with his foot and actually truth be told it is pretty adorable.