Dream On

Other developers have tried to do so, but largely without success. The Sims Online, There.com, and Second Life are all examples of online worlds that discarded the combat focus and linear storytelling of the MUD derivatives, but the enormous success of World of Warcraft led the industry in a different direction.

"I think a lot of people learned the false lesson that WoW represented the only path that you could go down. Yet there's a whole bunch of people - like me - for whom that genre doesn't have a lot of appeal."

For Butterfield, the game that most closely matches Tiny Speck's ambitions for Glitch is EVE Online. In EVE, CCP Games' created a world that truly rewards collaboration, its players creating epic narratives that play out over months, even years. Ultimately, this makes EVE "too much of a commitment, too hard, too cut-throat" for most people, but the events that take place within its world remain fascinating, even to the layman.

"Kudos to them [CCP Games] for having persisted all this time," he says. "It's just so much easier to do what WoW and many others have done, which is - I don't want to sound overly critical because there's some great things about it - but the side of the genre I don't like is that standard amusement park criticism: you grind to level up and then you get to go on this ride, but nothing you do has any real impact on the world."

"That boss will still be there for the next person to kill. Everything respawns. The world can't really change."

Glitch is designed to sidestep both issues: on the surface, it is a side-scrolling platformer in the vein of Super Mario Bros, and about as inviting and accessible as a game can be; underneath, it has been constructed from the very first line of code to be adaptable, its future almost entirely dictated by the whims of its players in what Butterfield terms a "call and response" dynamic with its designers.

There is an obvious tension between making a game accessible and giving its players absolute freedom, and finding the right balance between those qualities has defined Glitch's existence to date. Butterfield admits that the current tutorial doesn't give a clear enough picture of the basic processes that will allow players to go on and discover new things for themselves. It needs work, but it is one of the only parts of Glitch that can be easily improved.

"The harder challenge is the first five minutes of play. In a single-player game you can script it incredibly tightly... but at some point we need to drop players out of tutorial mode and into the world, where other players are doing things - people who have been playing for a week, or a month, or six months if they were in the beta. That can just be confusing and overwhelming, especially if you've never played an MMO before."

Kudos to CCP Games for having persisted all this time. It's just so much easier to do what WoW and many others have done

And the potential for confusion is growing all the time. Glitch left beta around six weeks ago and it already has 1200 items and 93 skills, and those numbers will only get larger. However, where in a game like World of Warcraft new players are often seen as easy prey, the absence of combat and general atmosphere of levity has created a community based on generosity and altruism. As long as Tiny Speck keeps on providing new things to discover, the community will be far more effective than any tutorial in guiding new players through the world.

Butterfield quotes one of Glitch's players, whose description of the game is apparently superior to any of the sound-bites generated at Tiny Speck: "a massively multiplayer online environment in which you gather resources and learn skills so as to devise ever more creative ways in which to do nice things for each other."

A more pressing issue is that, left to their own devices, individual players tend to be less kind to their own experience. Butterfield claims that the one lesson he learns afresh each day is that players will always chase the largest reward, no matter the cost.

"People get a lot out of the humour of the game, they like the quest copy, they like all the flavour and stuff like that. But if there's two alternatives for your next action and one of them gives you ten points and the other gives you seven points, once you know that this one gives you ten points you'll do the ten point thing. Period."

"That's a fundamental of game design, and certainly a fundamental of MMO design... That part is a constant battle."

The constant introduction of new items, systems and features is an integral aspect of what Glitch is trying to achieve. However, its sandbox structure makes balancing in advance extremely difficult, and gamers tend to be highly attuned to spoiling their own fun in the name of cheap and easy experience points.