Ep. 13: Environmental Multiplayer

In this episode, Joel and Tim discuss environmental multiplayer -- the form of multiplayer that happens when a game isn't directly about interactions with other players, but where other players are still present in the experience. We talk shared world states with Dark Souls' messaging system, and Elite: Dangerous and No Man's Sky's discovery system. We talk shared road paradigms in The Trail, Journey, and the TruckerMP mod for American Truck Simulator and Eurotruck Simulator 2. Finally, we talk neighbor mechanics and emergent market systems in Animal Crossing, and how Sim City's bourgeois utopic multiplayer mechanics resulted in an unintended bourgeois hell.