I WATCH as two people build a flying machine. Suddenly, an engine slips free from its tether. It rolls down a grassy hill, arriving feet from a precipice, on the brink of a wide blue abyss. They both scramble to catch the device, grabbing it just before it tumbles over the edge.
This is . Set for a beta release later this year, it’s a multiplayer game in which players build airships to explore mysterious floating islands. Its developer, London-based Bossa Studios, says it is the first game to bring real-world physics and causality to a massive online world. Every action a player takes is governed by lifelike mechanics, and the results have an impact on every other gamer.
“Players will be able to explore and do whatever they want,” says Bossa co-founder Henrique Olifiers. “This is game design stuff that nobody could do before.” The technology is poised to change the way we manage the real world too, allowing unprecedentedly accurate simulations of everything from fisheries to cancer cells to whole economies.
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Building a virtual world with complex, unpredictable interactions between objects and players is a challenge because processing the ever-changing positions of all the elements overloads servers. Instead, most large multiplayer games use tricks and illusions to spoof complexity.
In Worlds Adrift, items can be moved around in an incredibly lifelike manner. Designer Luke Williams shows off the gameplay by dragging a large piece of machinery to the top of a column. “If someone walks underneath here I can drop it on them,” he says, with a mischievous smile.
A London start-up called is powering this live demonstration. Rather than make single servers simulate a whole sector of the virtual world, it computes individual elements using connected “worker” programs, running across a network of servers.
“The workers are like a swarm of bees or ants doing little things,” says Herman Narula, Improbable’s CEO. Acting together, they can achieve more than any individual server. The approach allows for low-cost simulations in which realistic interactions are ubiquitous.
Narula believes this level of detail is increasingly important for gamers. “People want to deepen their illusion,” he says. “Look at the rise of virtual reality and HD graphics. There’s clearly a demand to be in these worlds.”
“People want to deepen their illusion. There’s clearly a demand to be in these worlds”
The developers of Worlds Adrift want to realise a world in which people’s actions aren’t just lifelike, but have permanent consequences in the game. Trees will grow and obey the rules of a complex ecosystem, as will the animals that inhabit the landscape. When players cut down trees in a forest to build flying machines, those precise trees will stay cut down, says Olifiers.
Improbable aims to power more than games. Researchers and businesses can also use the platform to build large-scale simulations of real-world systems. Some are already in the making.
At the University of Oxford’s Institute for New Economic Thinking, and his team are planning to use Improbable to create a sophisticated model of the entire UK housing market, among other things.
Economists frequently rely on statistical modelling to make predictions. But alternative approaches in which buyers and investors, for example, are simulated on a more granular scale can offer a better understanding of how individuals’ behaviour affects the economy as a whole.
Revolutionary potential
These models often run up against a lack of computational resources, exactly the problem that Improbable solves for large game worlds. Pugh says that even supercomputers struggle with the level of complexity required, but initial tests with Improbable have been impressive. “It has the potential to be quite revolutionary,” he says. “They’ve solved the scalability issue that has handicapped building large-scale models of systems like the economy.”
If successful, Pugh’s models will be a powerful new tool for economic forecasts. They might inform a bank’s decision to lower or raise interest rates, or predict the long-term consequences of a new government policy. “Or you could go all the way up to simulating the world economy,” says Eric Bonabeau, CEO of Icosystem, a consultancy based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which builds models for businesses and the military.
Swarm simulations could also paint a clearer picture of the planet’s ecosystems, helping us conserve them.
, of the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment, is looking at fisheries off the West Coast of the US. “There’s evidence that productivity is probably going down in the ecosystem due to climate change,” he says. “Determining how a fishery should be managed as those changes kick in is quite a difficult problem.”
Up until now, the interactions between humans and the marine environment have been too complex to model accurately, he says. “The platform Improbable has developed is hugely impressive and should help us to produce the class of highly detailed models necessary to answer these kinds of questions.”
Improbable’s technology has medical applications too. “You could simulate cancer growth at scale, by simulating all of the cancer cells that are growing,” says Bonabeau.
“You could simulate cancer growth at scale by simulating all of the cancer cells that are growing”
Narula says Improbable could be used to model large transport systems, helping those who manage traffic flow. And he says the UK’s Ministry of Defence has been in touch, though they won’t reveal why they’re interested.
There are those who remain somewhat sceptical, at least of Improbable’s potential to transform game design. Jeff Orkin, a seasoned game developer and researcher, says using the platform to power complex in-game physics is interesting. But he worries that players might not always understand the sheer complexity of the world they inhabit. “It can be frustrating for players if things are happening and they don’t know what caused them,” he says.
The same sort of confusion is what often makes living in the real world vexing too. But if Improbable fulfils its biggest promises, then we might soon glean a much better understanding of why complex events unfold the way they do.
Perhaps these detailed simulations will let us take better control over systems which seem to have a mind of their own, for now. But at the very least, when it comes to gaming, simulating a world in detail could make for one hell of a playground.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Through the looking glass”
