Glitch, My New Second Home
Late Sunday afternoon the voice of God rained down upon my head and the world around me ended. Sunday, not Saturday. This is not a rapture thing. I’m not talking about the God, just a God. And the world that ended is called Glitch. I’ve never been much for online multiplayer and haven’t spent any real time with an MMO, but I remember spotting Glitch about a year ago and being immediately taken by its unique, children’s book art-style. But along with its innocent look came a promise from the developers to create a world for grown-ups. Curious I signed up for a beta key and promptly forgot about it. Twelve months later, beta invite in hand, I’m harvesting cherries to blend fruit juices in hopes to make enough “currants” to buy a house. Or at least I was until God shut down last week’s test. Such is the disappointment of a closed beta.
Glitch is the latest project from Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, two of the visionaries that brought us Flickr. There’s no hacking and slashing, no violence (except chicken-sqeezing) and the quests focus on learning about and interacting with the world and other players. It’s also a serious contender for your time, with development progressing smoothly, recently into a closed beta, along with a new $10 million in funding. To understand Glitch a little better, here’s how they describe it on their website…
“Glitch” is both the name of the game and its fundamental concept: the yin and the yang, the fundamental force, the alpha and omega, the path, the way, and most of all: the happy accidents of unfettered creativity. In Glitch, things don’t always make sense at first. But that’s where the fun starts. Glitch is a web-based massively-multiplayer game which takes place inside the minds of eleven peculiarly imaginative Giants. You choose how to grow and shape the world: building and developing, learning new skills, collaborating or competing with everyone else in one enormous, ever-changing, persistent world. For starters, it’s all one big world. Which means everyone is playing the same game and anyone’s actions have the ability to affect every other player in the game. It also involves very little war, moats, spaceships, wizards, mafiosos, or people with implausibly large muscles. Also: we have egg plants. Egg plants make it very different. We comb the internet every single day looking for fresh and original visual styles. The look varies as you travel around the world, from psychedelia to surrealism, Japanese cutesie to hypersaturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media. We love awesome illustration and animation and part of our mission is to find the best of the best and bring it to a wider audience.
This morning Glitch is back online and though the framerate is low and the world stutters a bit (did I mention it’s newly in beta?), the chickens, pigs and butterflies swarm in vast numbers and I’m running around handing out fruit juices to new players and traveling south to get “My Papers” from the Bureaucratic Hall (see image above, note the beauracrat playing Farmville) just so I can ride the subway and hopefully buy the house of my dreams before it goes back offline tomorrow. If this sounds nonsensical, well, you’re not far off.
Unlike other MMO’s, Glitch aims to firmly set its sights on the social aspect of multiplayer games, creating a world to be cooperatively managed by both developers and players. Although the rural feel, product-management and colorful landscapes are reminescent of Farmville and and it’s ilk, Glitch is far deeper, demanding imagination, cooperative world-building and a desire to interact with those around you. Also, you get to milk butterflies. Seriously, that has to be harder than fighting a dragon (perhaps more dangerous, too).
Pausing a second from scraping barnacles (which is ground into Barnacle Talc, a useful component of construction), I check if a newcomer is of the right level to give a fruit juice to. Offering items to low level players is just one of the quests to keep the game social, but I haven’t been having much luck. Everyone playing this morning seems to be veterans of the alpha, or at least recent converts like myself, happily returning after the abrupt ending Sunday afternoon. But I have had a few really nice conversations with other players, which bodes well for a world meant to be built cooperatively.
I’ll definitely be sharing more from Glitch, and even though I’ve only played it a few hours, the most telling aspect of my experience so far has to be that I already feel at home in this world. If any of this sounds good to you, request an invite here.
(Written for GoodGameGet!)
