The Spritely Institute
Hello! It's another day of our supporter drive! https://spritely.institute/donate
And today is the last of the "Tech Values" threads: https://spritely.institute/about/
Today's tech value / design goal is "Fun as a Revolutionary Act"!
Hey! We mean it! Let's get into why!
The Spritely Institute
From https://spritely.institute/about/:
> *Fun is a revolutionary act:* The reason technology tends to succeed is that people enjoy using it and get excited about it. We care deeply about human rights and activism. This is not in opposition to building tech and a community environment that fosters a sense of fun; planned carefully, fun is at the core of getting people to understand and adopt any technology we make.
The Spritely Institute
Spritely does fun things! We have fun characters, heck, we make VIDEO GAMES to show off our tech. And for those reasons, sometimes people write us off as not being a serious project.
This is serious business! Human rights! Lives are on the line!
We agree! That's part of why fun is *critical*!
The Spritely Institute
The connections to games go back even further! It's well known that "Spacewar!" was one of the first video games.
Porting "Spacewar!" and also authoring Space Travel was an important part of the history of Unix as well.
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/spacetravel.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game)
The Spritely Institute
Before we get into our specific examples, let's point out that major pieces of technical history, including on "social media", have a connection to games.
Slack, Discord, Flickr: all meant to be part of, or broke off from, or meant to enable a video game project in some way.
The Spritely Institute
But what about the games? The games! Yes Spritely has made quite a few games! https://spritely.institute/arcade/
Space shooters! Puzzle games! Cellular automata!
Hey, aren't you all, you know, just a bit *distracted* over there?
Actually it's all been very carefully planned! It's serious!
The Spritely Institute
Spritely has dived deep into areas of computer science, and to those who are exploring them, these areas of programming can actually become fun in their own way!
But from the outset, they can appear academic and stiff.
There's a reason for the characters, the whimsy.
Computing can be magical.
The Spritely Institute
People need a sense of fun to want to be somewhere.
The most successful social networks became so because people found joy on them, in some way or another.
Joy, fun, entertainment, social value and connection... they're essential. Part of life. Healthy.
We won't succeed without them.
The Spritely Institute
First and foremost, the primary people that people use social communication tech is fun and a sense of community.
People aren't signing up to spend so much time online just to put on a stiff collar and fill out a bunch of paperwork.
Socializing is about connection. It's about enjoyment.
The Spritely Institute
But there's a *reason* that the E programming language, which we firmly argue is the most innovative language around distributed security *ever*, grew out of a distributed virtual world environment.
Games aren't the main goal. But they do force you to be robust about *building the right things.*
The Spritely Institute
If games became the primary deliverable, this would be a big distraction.
This is one of the reasons that Spritely does its demos in game jams: time-boxed demos that show something off, but which you can finish and step away from.
But you get something tangible in the end!
The Spritely Institute
Now you may note that the two games we've focused on in this thread aren't particularly social.
Would you be shocked to hear that more social browser-based games are on the near horizon for Spritely?
Because you'd be right!
But... is that a distraction? Again... this is serious stuff!
The Spritely Institute
Aside from being *fun*, this gave us a real, running, actual example of Spritely's tech combined that we could not just show the world, but show ourselves.
Games force you to be very real about things! And when the tech is hard to explain, it's sometimes easier to *experience* something!
The Spritely Institute
Spritely is working on a lot of pieces to deliver its vision of p2p tech being the default, but there are two big ones:
- Goblins, our p2p time-traveling distributed programming environment https://spritely.institute/goblins/
- Hoot, our Scheme to Webassembly compiler https://spritely.institute/hoot/
Naturally, the most important thing to get to compile *is* Goblins on Hoot. Cirkoban used an early version of Goblins ported to Hoot as its foundation. That's what powers the time travel "undo move" in the game!
The Spritely Institute
We will, however, talk about one game *in particular*: Cirkoban! https://davexunit.itch.io/cirkoban
(Alt link: https://files.spritely.institute/embeds/cirkoban/)
Cirkoban is COOL AND FUN AS HECK but it also shows off something really important! It was the first demo of Goblins running in the browser!
The Spritely Institute
We'll talk more in the coming days and weeks about other demos we've used, including more modifications to Terminal Phase, that have shown off specific parts of Spritely's tech.
But you can play many of these games today! Many in your browser! https://spritely.institute/arcade/
The Spritely Institute
Terminal Phase has also been a great testbed and demo for all our tech. For example, Goblins supports transactionality and time-travel features. But that's hard to understand!
But here's a video of time travel in Terminal Phase! *No* gameplay code changes were made to enable time travel! The game was fully programmed, and then in retrospect @cwebber realized that time travel support was already there, and so simply spent an hour wiring up what was already there to the GUI so users could see.
The Spritely Institute
Spritely's tech is a big lift. Goblins is a distributed programming environment! It's not a trivial thing to design.
For this reason, the first serious program testing and using Goblins' tech was Terminal Phase, a space shooter that runs in a developer terminal!
It was a robust test on its own!
The Spritely Institute
Much of Spritely's tech is extrapolated from the designs pioneered in the E Programming Language http://erights.org/
But E comes from Electric Communities Habitat... a p2p distributed virtual world system which could run untrusted code and had user-run economies... in 1997! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNiePoNiyvE
The Spritely Institute
If what we're saying, if the values we've listed and talked about over the last few weeks have aligned with you? If this is the world you want to see happen?
Please consider donating! We could really use your help! We are a small nonprofit! Every donation helps a lot! https://spritely.institute/donate/
The Spritely Institute
That's it, that's the last technical value.
But that's not the end of our journey! Within the next few days, we'll have our technical roadmap up and more visually accessible on our site. And we'll start walking through that.
In the meanwhile...
The Spritely Institute
The characters, the whimsy, the games: these things are no accident.
Lots of corporations lie through their teeth and say they're "changing the world" while just trying to extract value for shareholders.
Well we really are trying to change the world.
But to get there, we'll have to have some fun.
The Spritely Institute
We need a computing revolution, we need to change the defaults of the way networked programs are written. Secure, peer-to-peer tech can't be the exception. It needs to be the default.
That's a big lift. Conceptual, fun, interactive demos are an important part of Spritely: they help us get there.
The Spritely Institute
OH WE FORGOT ONE THING! HOW COULD WE FORGET!
Speaking of fun! If you donate at the silver, gold, or diamond tiers... you can appear in the credits of our video game demos!!! https://spritely.institute/donate/
That's right! You get to appear in video games that CHANGE INTERNET HISTORY!
So, maybe donate :)
The Spritely Institute
Thanks everyone who's tuned into our "tech values" threads. "Values" are abstract, but they matter a lot!
Thanks to everyone who has donated! We are so close, SO CLOSE to crossing the $58k line. Which means we're getting close to $60k of our $80k goal! https://spritely.institute/donate/
Thanks everyone! 💜
Dan Connolly
@spritely @cwebber I invited my panel of expert video game reviewers (read: my sons) to check out Cirkoban.
Great suff!
They got pretty sucked into it :)
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