In collaboration with a lot of people. I'll reach out to see what you guys prefer for name / psuedonym if anyone wants to distribute this externally

Overview

A group of us got together during AW week (Aug 2023) to dream up insane interactions between worlds. It's a discussion that was inspired by a question that Ludens posed: what happens when you drive a car into a tennis court?

Neither a racing game nor a tennis game would ever plan for this event, but given they share the same base layer, they could. Whatever happens during the interaction is insane and unexpected. We want that.

Our discussion had two goals. First, we maxed out insanity. We wanted to come up with interactions between worlds that no one would anticipate. It was a massive free-for-all between all the games we've ever built or played. Second, we got pragmatic. We explored what the design process would actually look like to enable interactions like these.

We had builders from 6 on-chain games / studios (Moving Castles, Sky Strife, Primodium, Words3, Network States, AutoRoad) at the table. This is a hastily prepared debrief of what we came up with.

Insane Interoperability

EVE interoperated with Dusk a few years back. You could battle for control of planets in EVE, launch missiles from those planets, and have these missiles become orbital strikes in Dusk. The effects were fantastic. The battle was intense. Dusk players, who were hard-core console lovers, would go out and buy PCs just so they could get on EVE to further their violent influence.

This level of interoperability is more meaningful than a lot of what we're seeing with on-chain gaming today. When people talk about interoperable crypto games, they typically mean there's some shared economy. Assets in one game could be transfered to have some impact in another. Game mechanics in the connected games are only affected indireclty via resource shifts.

We think this is only the first level. What's next? Interactions between worlds must directly affect game mechanics. Shared economies have mostly served as growth hacks in the hopes that token holders in one game would be incentivized to play another. We want to go further into shared universes. Doing so could be the big jump that makes these worlds feel real.

A good way to measure interoperability is by the number of bits that are exchanged between the worlds. If the outcome of a battle in world A determines the owner of a tile in world B, that's a single bit. We aimed to exchange a thousand bits.

RFI: Request for Interaction

Here are concrete ideas we had for Insane Interoperability. We banned any discussions around technical feasibility and focused on creativity. Looking at this list now though, they are all feasible today.

1. Worm God. A higher dimensional being that slithers between worlds and can enter yours at a moments notice. You can offer sacrifices to it in the hopes that it blesses your world with gifts or shields it from disasters. Maybe next week it'll enter Network States and scatter troops in one terrible swoop. Armies from the red empire might land close to the capital of the blue. Defenses in the green empire might get fragmented, opening up valuable opportunities for pink to conquer.
2. Catastrophic events whose vibrations are felt between worlds. Factories in Primodium have done too much damage to the underlying tectonic plates. An earthquake ensues, splitting a critical supply chain in AutoRoad and adding a new mountain line on the Network States map.
3. Construction work that spans dimensions. Players in AutoRoad finally complete a build that connects two prosperous towns. Territories in Network States now have a back door by digging down into the AutoRoad dimension and using the road to transfer resources quickly. Leaders in Dark Forest can blip into AutoRoad as a wormhole to instantaneously get a shipment of ore to a neighboring galaxy.
4. We spent too much time on the Worm God. Whoops. Will add more ideas as we go.

Learnings

1. The dev cycle for high-bandwidth interoperability is tractable. At the time of release, you can open up your state and logic to change by X amount. Future contracts can then be whitelisted into having access to these altering functions. The API for these functions boils down to a few simple operations, as we found when thinking through how future worlds could cause changes in Network States.
2. Think in terms of abstract mappings. You don't need the same coordinate system between games to have sensible interactions. It's very doable to have a space MMORTS send laser beams into a card game.
3. Think about information transfer as your main axis when designing interoperable games. Ask yourself how many bits of external input you'd be comfortable with. We recommend maxing that out to create the most interesting experiments.
4. Shared realities > shared economic systems. Asset sharing won't lead to meaningfully new experiences for players. Perturbations in state and logic will.

Next Steps

Please reach out if you're interested in this! A lot more happened in the room that wasn't outlined in this rushed doc due to time constraints.