Project Awakening x PC Games Insider: Interview

The following is an excerpt from a recent interview with PC Games Insider, for the full interview, read here.

Please tell us about Project Awakening, your blockchain-enabled project. A few years ago you said you wouldn’t add blockchain to the Tranquility server. What’s changed about blockchain now?

Well, nothing has changed. We’re not going to add it to TQ! We also said, specifically, we’re going to have a small tech team experimenting. If you go back to the announcement, it literally says that. We were doing experiments.

It was more on the eSports side in ’21. We were working with the team behind Tezos Blockchain. We were very impressed by the tech – and the tech is still impressive. And we were doing something to build an eSports experience on EVE that we were going to have XR and blockchain features. We were experimenting with these two things.

At the time, of course, there was a lot going on in blockchain. Let’s call it a mixed bag of stuff! And it made EVE players very angsty that we were going to change it all. That’s why we put out the statement. It’s like, “We hear you. That was never the plan. There’s no reason to change the database as it is (it’s actually a major surgery to do that). But we will continue to explore, and we have a small team which are going to carry that forward.”

And then last year we announced that that small team is now funded by $40 million. So no pressure, Small Team [laughs].

If you go to where the story started, it was in 2015. We actually did seriously take a look, for experimentation, at the Bitcoin blockchain. The Bitcoin protocol is quite flexible. You can use it for many different things. The Lightning network is built on top, because of the fact that it is extremely flexible.

There were games being made on Bitcoin as early as, I think, 2013. So there was a bit of a budding game scene there. We were taking a look at whether that would make sense. We have been interested about the persistence of virtual goods in the grander sense, obviously, for decades.

We aim for everything around EVE Online to go on forever. Having a database owned by a company located somewhere in the Docklands in London is not a bad plan, but it’s always good to hedge your bets. There is another plan, and obviously the blockchain choir has been yapping about. This is a good way to store value in a very anti-fragile way.

There are also technical pieces around blockchain that are quite interesting from a computer science standpoint. As we went deeper and deeper into this, we saw more and more opportunities to do something super-unique. So we started playtesting. The first playtest was December ’22. We had 2,000 people play for two weeks. And now we’re announcing that we’re inviting 5,000 people to play for six weeks on May 21st. We will also concurrently hold a hackathon while the playtest is being orchestrated, so people can extend the experience on their own, permissionless, completely free, as the game is running.

We believe we have created the physics where this is going to make sense, where it’s not required to be an engineer to play the game. You can still win this game just through being very socially capable, as you see in EVE Online. That takes enormous leadership skill, and communication, and conflict resolution, and strategic planning, and grit.

If you look at the average EVE alliance, they practically already have an IT department to run their infrastructure, which are often run from a database, working with an API gateway into the database for Tranquillity, the main server for EVE Online. But now you can develop all those alliance infrastructure tools, basically on-chain, through smart contracts, and through UI frameworks that we’ve added.

This is one of the learning points we have from EVE. There’s so much development that takes place around EVE Online, which is not orchestrated by us, and we don’t really provide extremely good tools to do it. They’re okay, but they could be better. Blockchains are very good at organising distributed development. I mean, what else are they good for?! We’re still figuring that out. But at that, they are provably good. People have been building on Ethereum without anything really blowing up.

And, concurrently to that, to make that even more efficient, we’re open-sourcing our Carbon engine, which we’ve updated to be able to do all this.

But that engine is also shared with EVE Online. So bits and pieces of the engine will now emerge as open-sourced models so that people can just see how it works. As they are developing in Project Awakening they have the full context of how everything works, which makes everything way more efficient. We’re doing a big push into this. We want a lot more people to participate in the creation of the world.

What philosophical vision is driving these changes?

In this concept of “forever”, you have to de-risk everything that causes fragility in the “forever”. I think we’ve shown over the past decades that if a project is open-sourced, it has more potential ways to live on than if it is locked inside of a company.

I have also seen it personally, now that I’ve been running EVE and CCP for 20-plus years, that people come and go that are working on the technology you build, and that’s the nature of life.

Generally you share, in order to maintain a stable brain trust around projects which are open. So we believe that we will eventually unlock a superpower, both for longevity but also for community contribution into improving the experience. And open source is a great way to do that.

When we were deciding to do this, we actually ran the movie backwards. We thought, “What is the value of having it locked away?” We’re not selling it as middleware – and security by obscurity is not really security. So what really is the value of having it locked away?

We kind of just thought about it like that. It is more valuable to have it open. There really is no value in having it locked away. And I think we are seeing this more and more. Even on Unreal Engine, the source code is out there, even though it’s not an open source project, per se. Having the source code is hugely useful.