Why Games?

"This was fun"

I don't remember who exactly said it, I could probably check the video recording if I wanted to be able to attribute it for sure but I think the sentiment was generally shared amongst the group. For the last hour, we'd played a game that I'd made – chaos.soccer – and generally had fun. Now a bit over a week later I want to reflect on games in general, the chaos soccer live stream, the worlds game (Soccer), and what the future for games on the atmosphere is.

The World Comes to America

And Scotland comes to Boston

It's been awhile since America hosted a World Cup, and while we only "co-hosted" this one it felt close enough. I'd been to the World Cup in Brazil 12 years ago and the Euro in Germany two years ago, so I knew roughly what to expect from a FIFA event in a city. There was some general "What is the world going to think of us" concern, especially as I reflected on the march that myself and a few of the Italian fans did with an impossibly large, loud, and boisterous Croatian crowd from downtown Leipzig to the Red Bull Arena. I managed to run ahead of my group, duck into a market, grab a few beers and pop them open as we walked. The police taking notice of our large group told the Croatian fan who was drinking, waving a flag, and chanting to please not do so on the hood of a parked car but otherwise continue to be as rowdy as possible.

America, I was worried was not ready for this. We generally cannot consume alcoholic beverages on the street, motorists are not thrilled with people closing down streets for pedestrians, our public transport infrastructure is horrific, our stadiums are only accessible by car, and our police can be... problematic.

Scotland would be playing 2 games at Gillette Stadium, Renamed Boston Stadium for the World Cup, despite the fact that Boston itself was quite a drive from Foxborough where the Stadium actually sits. Leading up to the game the city braced itself for the arrival of the Tartan Army, people were worried that Boston, a town equally famous for it's Puritanical roots and heavy drinking culture would find it's tap lines dry before the games were over.

It started, like all things do as a side project

chaos.soccer has, what may be, the least exciting origin story. I was working on a game idea I'd called deception.town (still some work TBD on the multi-player version of this) when I got frustrated with the tile level editor I was using. I decided the best solution was to build my own and tilemap.world was born.

The tilemap editor worked great for my uses, but the one issue I had with it was that in order to make a reasonable announcement I would have to include some content that people could use. The problem was that most of the tile assets I had access to were licensed for use in a game only. To let people use these assets to build their own maps for their own games would clearly be a violation of the license and a "kinda dick move" since these assets were being sold to support the artists.

That was when I came upon the amazing Fozzle over on itch.io . Fozzle makes money from game building tutorials, and as part of those tutorials has commissioned a series of CC0 assets. I grabbed his Scallywag assets and threw together a quick island that I could use as a demo.

I looked at some of the other assets packs Fozzle offered. The Void packs I threw together to make a space shooter for my 5 year which leveraged Chromes speech detection to help him learn sight words. I saw the Lucifer assets, and remembered some formative years playing Diablo II but otherwise didn't think anything of it.

Games are Social

I'm not sure if anyone has traced the root of "play" but the notion of playing certainly predates our evolution into modern humans. Play is a highly social behavior and, while there are ways for non-humans to engage in play by themselves, most often when we think of play we imagine 2 or more individuals engaging in a behavior that is both fun, and socially rewarding.

Games are play with structure, and while I'm not a scholar of these things I would not be surprised to find that other non-human animals have something akin to structured play. Games by their very definition become something social – certainly any game played with more than 1 person. Especially if people can have non-structured interactions outside of the game, it will be very social. Given the social nature of games it's not surprising that as games have moved from something played around a campfire, to something played on our phones to pass a train ride we've brought ways of keeping the un-structured social interactions into the mix.

Wordle is the interesting case, during it's peak the company I worked for at the time had a dedicated slack channel for sharing your Wordle results, a 5x6 grid of red, green, yellow, and black square emoji. That this format of sharing scores was something that had been created by Twitter, before being adopted by the Wordle creator is telling. We played a game that is very much just for one person and then we immediately wanted to know how to make it social, and we found a way.

Watching Through the Eyes of a Child

My 6 year old is very into soccer. He's half Italian, half Canadian, and fully American. Honestly I'm behind on teaching him to skate but his mom's coming through on the soccer. That the world cup would be coming to America, and moreover that we could jump on a train and get to a Fifa Fanzone in downtown Boston was a real treat.

Spectator sports are a fundamentally tribal thing. While some games are more or less zero sum there is generally a winner for each, and for a given game you must choose who you would like the winner to be.

Championship games: The World Series, The Superbowl, March Madness, The World Cup are unsurprisingly the highest watched of any spectator sport, and I think it's likely due to the ability for us to, for a moment, unite our tribes.

That my six year old kept chanting "Messi, Messi, Messi" and rooting for Argentina was, at times, frustrating. But I could often join him in these chants because my dark horse favorite, Canada, wasn't playing against them.

The dynamics of spectator sports are not-dissimilar to the dynamics of other network effect driven systems. Football – not soccer – is popular in America in large part because it is popular. The tribal dynamics of a football team fandom are no different than the dynamics of a soccer team. However people tend to be joiners, and so the sports and teams that are popular tend to attract more new fans, feeding the loop. Could soccer rise to an "also a fan of" status, perhaps, although it already fills this spot in many ways, and there are lots of spectator sports sitting at-or-below it's level in terms of popularity.

Does this mean there's no hope for the world's game in America? Is MLS doomed to be a small time league? Will the US never hoist the Worldcup?

Potentially, but myself and many you probably reading this are currently taking part in an experiment called the Atmosphere, or AT Protocol. Atproto seeks to break the network effects of traditional social media in a way that they can no longer be used for extraction. If the MLS can succeed then so can we, so I'm going to do my part and with the World Cup over I'll become a New England Revolution fan, while begrudgingly buying my kid some Inter Miami gear.

Silly Ideas Made Real™

It was a few days before the first World Cup games when I had a silly thought: "What if I put a Box2d physics engine on top of a soccer ball and let it bounce around a field?" I would need someone to kick it, and someone else to kick it against. My brain having formed some tenuous connection between the Box2d physics engine and the Diablo Games (the creator of Box2d worked on Diablo 3) remembered the Lucifer content packs on itch, and I'd remembered seeing the .soccer TLD, one thing led to another and a quick stop at marque.at later and chaos.soccer was born.

It started off as a simple game, browser based, with no online play. You could either be a Warrior, Sorceress, or bring your own character from rpg.actor - my one and only Atmosphere integration. I'd used Claude to throw most of the game together in a day, grabbing the Planck.js physics engine, and the Pixi.js rendering engine I'd used before.

The result was moderately fun but highly incomplete. Still I showed a few people at the Boston At Proto meetup.

That I could use Claude to help me make this game in a day says a lot about the state of software as a whole, some of that is the power these models bring to rapid software development. I think just as powerful though is the fact that for free I can put a strong pixel art rendering engine and physics engine into a browser, and run it even on a phone in a beer garden. We can sometimes forget that agentic software development is just the end of a long curve driven by our ability to make more with less by building on what was before us and chaos soccer was a good example of that.

The universal social layer

The AT Protocol in games promises to be a game changer acting as a sort of "universal social layer". Systems like cartridge.dev are trying to build versions of systems like Steam on top of this. Imagine being able to find out what games your friends are playing, right now, and with a single click join them and launch those games. Imagine if the infrastructure to do that was not something that was owned by a vendor who was interested in locking you into their product, nor something that had to be built by a game developer, rather it was something that was owned by its users and decentralized. We can build these things with AT Protocol.

The power of AT Protocol is it's approach to both decentralized data ownership, and permissive data use. Other federation technologies focus on identity federation, or federating data between instances while At Protocol breaks these into discrete buckets, shared identity, federated data, novel experiences.

The case of joining a game one of your friends is playing a simple but meaningful one. It should be just as easy for me to see you're playing some new game on my XBox and with a single click, purchase the game and start playing with you as it is for you to do the same on Steam. We shouldn't need Valve, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo to form a consortium to achieve this. Save files should be portable, phone, tablet, desktop, console, I should be able to move between them easily. Games should be able to interact with each other in fun ways, an item in one game could confer a benefit, or just aesthetic appeal in another. Moreover we want this benefit not just reserved for people who have a big publishing contracts and can run massive servers, or host their own game stores. Rather this should be something that someone with a silly idea can make real in a weekend.

USA, USA, USA!

As a host the US was guaranteed a spot in the group stage, and given a early match against Paraguay. I was excited to watch the game with my kid, and wanted to do something with that excitement.

After some feedback on the single player chaos.soccer variant I'd taken the day and asked Claude to move my game engine to be server authoritative. It worked ok, I figured, we should have something to draw people in so I added some custom jerseys for your rpg.actor avatar to be given away during the match.

A silly idea for that first match became a bit of a tradition. I'd pick up my son from afterschool, bring him home, we'd make dinner together and then stay up late watching soccer – he'd fall asleep for the 11pm games – and then I'd create 8 jerseys for the next day's matches. It was a bit of a content grind that I wasn't entirely thrilled with but once I'd committed to creating all 48 jerseys I wanted to see it through.

The problem with working on a video game next to a 6 year old is that they're going to ask, "Can I play it" and for a little while the online version of chaos.soccer wasn't much to play. you could run into the ball to send it flying into a net and then it would reset. I decided I needed to beef it up and merge the single and multi-player games.

A new type of internet needs Newgrounds

Newgrounds was a big part of my coming of age online. Sitting in my basement, we'd boot up our brand new Dell and play some ridiculous new game. Years later I'd obtain a trial copy of macromedia flash and play around with the idea of making a game or animation of my own, something I never really did.

Newgrounds very much preceeded modern social media but was social in the ways things were before so much of our lives were online. We would talk about it, over lunch, on the bus. We'd hang out together, in person and watch the shorts or take turns playing a game. It was fun and social, but most importantly it was approachable.

It took barely any effort to open Newgrounds and try something new, or a continuation of something you'd seen before. There was very little risk or effort involved when both of those things were very much the mainstays of gaming until that point. I'd played plenty of Goldeneye at my friends house, but I'd need to convince my parents to get us an N64 if I wanted to do the same at my house (they relented eventually). Once I had it I had to get them to drive me to the mall so I could buy the cartridge. While I do feel a sense of nostalgia and worry about our culture moving away from physical media to some degree it's hard to argue that it hasn't had an overwhelming benefit on accessibility for both consumers and producers.

Games on the atmosphere hold the potential promise of being a "best of both worlds" where the ownership aspects are more centered on the consumer and producer in ways that make sense, while at the same time the distribution model has a low barrier to entry.

I'd found Newgrounds, not through a search engine but through the old fashion social network of having a friend tell me about it. The AT Protocol has a potential to give us that discovery layer without compromising on the distribution.

Livestream and the Finals

Thanks again to @rpg.actor for giving me the great idea to do a livestream, and being willing to participate. Also thanks to all the people who I managed to convince to join me
@iame.li @tynanpurdy.com @trezy.codes @vicwalker.dev.br @scanash.com
We played for about an hour, it turns out it was stream.place 's 2nd birthday so we had digital cake (and Eli got real cake) and we generally had fun.

I'd hosted the livestream on Thursday right after the Semi-finals, and 2 days before France and England would play for 3rd and Argentina and Spain would play for the World cup. We were hosting a World Cup watch party on Sunday so I needed to divert my attention to preparing for that. I put further updates to Chaos soccer on hold, didn't post about it much and took a welcome breather, being out of the content creation game for a second. I promised myself I'd get a post about the livestream done for the Monday following even if it meant staying up late the night of the World Cup.

Being as we had a 5-turning-6 year old who was obsessed with Soccer, and who had a birthday only a few days away my wife and I opted into a combined World Cup Watch party and 6th birthday. We did our best to fight the sun and wind and get a projector setup running a stream of the game, we got a giant inflatable soccer target, smoked some brisket, baked focaccia, and opened some Spanish wine for the adults. Then we loosed 5 and 6 year olds on our backyard.

There are people in the US who deeply care about soccer, they were there to have fun, watch the game, have a beer, and generally hang out. There were other people who, when we tried to wait for half-time to bring out the cake, were getting antsy. They had other plans that didn't involve watching the world cup. This is the reality of soccer in America. Some people care deeply about it, although amongst those people I often hear them talk about their favorite premier league teams not their favorite MLS teams.

In 2014, on our way to the airport in Recife Brazil my girlfriend (now wife) and I opted to take a scenic route. We thought it may have been a mistake when we arrived at a "Ferry" across a river that was little more than some plywood on top of 50 gallon barrels pulled by rope by some nice men. We were relieved to make it to the other side and find a small town with a take out place where we could buy some cold water and maybe some snacks for whatever lay ahead. As we entered we noticed a group of people huddled around a TV. Brazil was playing in one of the last group stage games of the tournament, and these people had gathered on chairs, or just sitting on the concrete floor to watch. We grabbed water from a cooler and waited at the counter to order, when no-one came we poked around a bit but couldn't find anyone working there. It wasn't until the game came to the half that one of the people from in front of the TV got up and walked behind the counter to take our order. The food was delicious but the message was pretty clear, soccer is more important than anything else.

I would hope that, in time, professional soccer grows in popularity across the US, but against a country in which life stops for a match whose outcome didn't effect their ability to advance I can't imagine we'll ever have a chance of winning. Maybe that doesn't matter – the important thing is that like any game soccer offers us a chance to engage socially, to gather around that TV set in equatorial Brazil, or under a tent on in my back yard. It's a game, that remains very approachable. You don't need to learn to play soccer, kicking a ball is a developmental milestone for children between 15 and 18 months of age, kicking it at a big target is likely only a few months behind. You need a bare patch of land, grass, dirt, concrete, or sand. The Sports we watch in the US tend to be ones that are more complicated to approach, while soccer remains popular as a sport for young kids I do wonder if we're replacing the "let's hang out and play soccer" with electronic play. The latest SmashBros is still social but the US will never hoist the World Cup if our kids prefer it over just kicking a ball around.

What's Next?

World cup is over and so I can stop caring about chaos.soccer for the next 4 years right?

I've stood up chaos.futbol with a server in Sao Palo so Vic doesn't need to ping back to the US to play. I've got a few other outstanding tasks but beyond that I'm hanging up my soccer boots for now.

I've got 2 projects spinning out of chaos soccer, the first is the rpg item store. This takes a semi-experimental thing I'd built for chaos soccer, the ability to trade rpg actor items for gold and buy items that others have traded. I need to put some economic safeguards in place and generally harden the system before it's launched.

The other project is the one that is far more interesting.

I want to build Newgrounds (sort of) on the AT Protocol. I'm calling that Cavu Games – Cavu is an acronym meaning Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited, it means clear open skies, something that I think fits well with the ethos of the atmosphere.

With Cavu the goal is to make the approachability to games reach an all-time high. There's a few pieces to that.

Cavu is going to be first and foremost a web-based game engine, something anyone can host if they wanted to host it themselves. The goal would be to also allow a developer to leverage our hosted version rather than hosting their own. We'll layer feeds and discovery on top of that so you can find and join the games that your friends are playing.

Closing Thoughts

This was fun.

Watching the World Cup with my son and chanting "España, España" to his dismay was fun.

The hour spent live streaming and playing with @iame.li , @trezy.codes , @scanash.com , @tynanpurdy.com , @rpg.actor , and @vicwalker.dev.br was fun.

Being in a World Cup host city and getting to go to the Fan Zone and chat about being the underdog with some Norwegians was fun.

All the nights staying up late watching soccer matches and making jerseys, scarfs, soccer balls, levels, and trophies was fun.

Figuring out the control schemes, how to make the physics feel fun and silly without being broken was fun.

Integrating with stream.place , rpg.actor , plyr.fm , marque.at , and cartridge.dev was fun.

Some people think of bluesky as a humourless land of liberal snobs. While the atmosphere is not bluesky all the people who I've had the pleasure of working with were part of a community I found through bluesky. This is an incredibly fun, welcoming, and rewarding community to be part of and I'm hoping to pay that forward with projects I'm building and things I'm doing.

When I hear people complain about the lack of humor on bluesky it's often more a reaction to getting called out for punching down. The beauty of games is that they give us the rules and the constructs on which we can layer a social system. We can form our tribes and name our opponents and bond with the people who we're playing with. Then we can mix up the teams and do it all over again. While there are certainly fierce sports rivalries, most fans realize they have more in common with each other than different. Every 4 years the world can put aside some differences and unite our tribes behind 2 teams, maybe we can do the same in our day-to-day lives with the things that make us treat people as "other"? Maybe some silly games that give us the social permission to talk to people who we normally wouldn't can help?

After all 2 years ago I sported my Italy scarf, and stood in the section I'd gotten tickets in – not realizing it was for the Croatian supporters – and despite tensions on the field we got along fine.

Note: I sent this photo to a coworker who is Croatian and asked them how to say "I actually love Croatia" in Croatian. They told me I was on my own... I guess we can still be a little Tribal.