According to Glitch’s website, I haven’t seen something like this before:

After playing the game pretty intensely for about three weeks, I don’t know what to think of that statement. There’s a lot about Glitch that’s incredibly new and refreshing– stuff that will influence the way some more-traditional MMOs are made, I hope. There’s also a lot about Glitch that’s astonishingly tired and conventional. The conventional and the radical often mix well in Glitch, but occasionally they don’t, and I can’t help but notice.

Glitch is a sidescrolling cooperative crafting MMO with a freemium payment model, played in Flash in a web browser. It’s not quite released yet, but when it is I’m sure that it will do well– it’s a heap of fun, no matter what I have to say about it. Plot-wise, you play a tiny person who lives in a universe that is currently being ‘imagined’ by eleven sleeping godlike giants. From what I gather, the name ‘Glitch’ is a reference to the weird and accidental ways independent life or culture forms in an ecosystem. In the world of these giants’ minds, the players are ‘mistakes,’ somehow. Their lives and their culture are happy accidents– much like our own.

And according to the info page of one large player group, the game’s creator, Flicker founder Stewart Butterfield, has said that “Glitch is a game about culture.” I haven’t been able to corroborate this quote, but I certainly hope it’s true, since there’s a lot of wisdom to it. Though Glitch gives its players many goals to pick and choose from, this game has a sandbox attitude, and many players treat it as a platform for social experimentation and creative acts of do-goodery. Some players drop cryptic, clue-bearing notes in the environment which lead others on a treasure-hunt. Some players host in-world events or parties to celebrate a variety of occasions. I’ve noticed two or three players who like to leave notes bearing poems from a variety of important modern authors hidden in the game’s subway stations or atop the game’s climbable trees. Quests are rare things in Glitch right now, and players tend to solve them as groups rather than on their own. Cooperation and cooperative invention are the stuff of culture, aren’t they? Glitch is rapidly developing an unusual culture of its own.

This is possible, I think, because Glitch is the first MMO I’ve seen that mechanically encourages goodwill. It also goes out of its way to encourage creative, cooperative problem-solving. For example: two people gathering on the same resource node will give each other resource bonuses, not compete with one another. There are achievements for everything, including making friends and giving other players free stuff– so everyone’s eager to do those things. The entire world is filled with tendable and destructable resource patches, and players must work together to keep them alive and productive. There’s hardly anything in Glitch which can’t benefit from cooperation.

This attitude is  perhaps most pronounced in special in-game events called ‘Street Projects,’ which require players to team up and produce many random items in order to ‘build’ new explorable areas in the game itself. Though many players treat this as endgame content, many low-level players participate, since player power isn’t determined by level: like in Eve Online, skills are learned on a timer-based system that is totally decoupled from time spent playing the game itself. If there’s a thing to be done, chances are that anyone could contribute– so everyone does.

When I participate in a Street Project, I’ll find myself willfully handing over resources to people with better crafting abilities than me so that they can finish the tasks needed to assemble the street. I’ll willfully spend all my savings to buy stuff at the auction house to make a million scrambled eggs  and turn them in to the collection point, totally unconcerned that I’m now utterly broke, with nothing to show for it. And I’m proud! I feel accomplished! I have spent all my crap, have an empty inventory, and I love it. It’s a crazy MMO that can accomplish this reaction in a player.

Glitch’s creators have put some great mechanics in place to incentivize the unusual atmosphere they want this game to have. Street Projects are one of the most successful examples: players crowd close around the resource drop-point, chattering away and handing hard-bought goods over to people they’ve never met before. When I’ve run out of things to contribute, I can sit down and cook food for everyone to raise their ‘mood’ and ‘energy,’ the two constantly-depleting stats which govern a player’s ability to influence the world. I can be helpful. That’ll make me feel good about myself. It’ll make me want to play again.

In most games, it’s game-controlled reward schemes which keep up a player’s hopes and keep them chugging away at the game. There are plenty of those in Glitch, but the more-powerful rewards are social, and are player-created. If I can help out in a Street Project, those people I helped will pitch in next time and help me. And if they do, I might do well enough to earn a trophy. Or perhaps the next time I try to do something weird and unusual in the game world– say, for example, copy an entire HP Lovecraft short story onto notes and lay them out in a row on a major street– those people will help me do it. Who knows? Investing in fellow-players is important, and it produces unusual rewards.

As part of its attempt to make something ‘you haven’t seen before,’ Glitch energetically avoids many traditional MMO sandtraps. Player wealth gaps are meaningless: they have no effect on the game world or a player’s ability to function in it.  One of the main leveling techniques– “donating” items to the giants who rule this world– involves producing valuable items simply to toss them cheerfully down an actual money hole. It does a lot to encourage a kind of detachment to goods and wealth in the game: everything’s there to be given away. Player commitment gaps are also a non-issue. A casual player dipping in for half an hour a day will function just as well as someone who commits hours and hours a day. Everyone gets all their energy refilled every four hours; someone who only plays once every 24 hours will always find their stats maxed and ready to go, while someone who plays all day long will have a much harder time being productive. There are no questgivers, no towns of exclamation-points: all quests are triggered by player milestones. Achievement hunting isn’t something you see many players doing, either. Achievements are awarded at almost random numbers, like 151, 11, 10008, and 41. If you can’t tell when you’re going to be rewarded for a task, you’re less likely to grind away at it like a robot. And speaking of robots, there aren’t heaps of people lying around AFK all day long, turning major gathering points into ghost towns, like some MMOs I’ve played: players take a mood and energy hit every 90 seconds, forcing them to keep playing or die from inactivity. It keeps the world looking alive and active.