Strand Type Games Need Urbit

How Death Stranding and Noby Noby Boy undermine their own premises

Urbit and Zorp have plenty of practical applications, but what really gets my imagination going are the ways that they can enhance creative works.

There are certain asynchronous multiplayer games, like Noby Noby Boy and Death Stranding, whose premises rely on the assumption that other players are contributing to a shared goal. The issue is that these games often feel thematically hollow due to the reality that the servers are almost certainly manipulating this social reality. As MatthewMatosis puts it:

"Noby games require a certain level of trust in the developer. Even for something as simple as Noby Noby Boy, it's impossible to independently verify the length submitted by every other player, so we need faith in the developer to handle that job accurately. Death Stranding does nothing to foster this faith; instead, it seems deliberately deceptive in an attempt to make its online elements look more impactful than they really are."

Noby Noby Boy ultimately ended up undermining its own concept by introducing "lucky weeks" where players' progress was multiplied by anywhere from 1,000x to 1,000,000x. Thanks to these multipliers, the shared goal was reached suddenly and anticlimactically.

Imagine if Noby Noby Boy's server-side code had been immutable. The developers would have had to pick their concept, release it, and then stand by it without backing down. Players would still be working towards the game's ultimate goal to this day. It would become a legend. And after a few decades, when the journey was finally completed, the game's final message to its players would hold that much more weight:

"You've probably noticed that our world is different from yours. The world we live in is made up of all 1s and 0s. That's why everything is so simple here.

Don't get me wrong, simplicity can be a good thing, but it means that everything in our world is set, including the ways in which we look and behave. If something unexpected happens within our world, it gets fixed by the people on the outside.

I'm not familiar with your world, but I've heard that everyone has choices and free will. You can choose to do the things you want to do and the things you don't want to do. I've heard that your world is made up of more than 1s and 0s.

I can't imagine what kind of world that is..."

These games make a real attempt at saying something and giving their players a unique experience, but to do the concept justice, you really do need new technology.

You really do need Urbit.