Last November, I blogged the open beta of Glitch, a whimsical, beautiful, dreamlike browser-based game from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, with help from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takehashi. Stewart and co took Glitch down after its initial test and did a substantial revision to it, which is now live. I've been playing the Glitch reboot today, and it's just so lovely I can't say enough nice things about it. It's one thing for a game to be fun, another for it to be fun and beautiful, but to be fun, beautiful and witty is something special.
Glitch is a web-based massively-multiplayer game which takes place inside the minds of eleven peculiarly imaginative Giants. You choose how to grow and shape the world: building and developing, learning new skills, collaborating or competing with everyone else in one enormous, ever-changing, persistent world.
What's different?
For starters, it's all one big world. Which means everyone is playing the same game and anyone's actions have the ability to affect every other player in the game. It also involves very little war, moats, spaceships, wizards, mafiosos, or people with implausibly large muscles. Also: we have egg plants. Egg plants make it very different.
