Open Gaming Gardens

The obvious move is to go after the big closed systems. Steam keeps leaderboards and lets nobody near them. So does Roblox. So does the Game Center on your iPhone. Every one of those lists stops exactly at the edge of its platform, and you can get worked up about that.

We are not going to. Not because it would be wrong, but because it is the less interesting half of the story.

The finding that changed the direction

We went and checked whether you can even get records out of those systems. Legally, through their own interfaces.

The answer was not the expected one. There is barely any prohibition. There is something more fundamental: on almost all of these services, a leaderboard is technically scoped to a key the developer holds. At LootLocker, GameJolt, Newgrounds, Epic and Steam there is no query for "all leaderboards". There is only "this one board, with this one key".

Which means: the gardens were not locked. Nobody ever put in a door.

That distinction matters. You fight a locked door. You do not fight a missing one, you build it.

We found exactly one exception: Speedrun.com. Open interface, no account, a hundred requests a minute, documented. We took 125 runs from 25 games there and put them on our board, with the source on every single entry. The fastest 120-star run of Super Mario 64 now sits next to the record in a game somebody built last week.

That is not an attack on anyone. It is a demonstration that it can be done.

Where the music is actually playing

While we talk about yesterday's walls, roughly 400 new games appear on itch.io every day and 66 on Steam. One game every 3.1 minutes. Most of them run in a browser, came together over a weekend, and live at an address of their own.

Those games have no garden at all. No wall, no gate, no guard. They also have no leaderboard, because none of the existing ones is worth the effort at that size.

That is the actual point. We are not working against the walled gardens of yesterday. We are drawing the map for the open ground that is appearing right now.

Call it Open Gaming Gardens. Gardens without walls, which do not yet exist as a landscape because nobody looks at them together.

What is different in an open garden

For a developer inside a closed system, the leaderboard is a retention device. It exists to keep the player. That is why it stops at the border: a list reaching beyond the platform would defeat its own purpose.

For somebody who put a game together yesterday, it is precisely the other way round. They want the game to be seen. A leaderboard reaching beyond their own game is not a loss to them, it is the only way anyone shows up at all.

That is why a shared standard can work here and cannot work there. Not because one side is evil and the other virtuous, but because the incentives sit in different places. Whoever needs a wall builds one. Whoever needs attention builds a door.

The map we are drawing

It has three parts and none of them is clever.

First, a way to report a score. Three required fields, one address, no account. That is the standard we are working on. It is not one yet, but it is fully specified and running.

Second, a board where the results collect. One per game, plus a sum across all of them. Roaming widely gets you as far as topping a single board. That is deliberate: if finding is the broken part, wandering deserves the reward.

Third, a map of what is there. Where records are fresh, where they have stood for months, where first place is still free. An old, untouched record is not a statistic, it is an invitation.

What we need for it, and this is honestly the hard part

None of this works with twenty games. A cross-game ranking only becomes interesting once enough games are on it that roaming pays. Every additional game makes the thing more valuable for every other one, and below a certain mass, nothing happens at all.

We do not have that mass. We would rather say so than pretend.

What we do have: a proposal you can implement in five minutes, a handful of our own games using it, and 125 imported runs showing what it looks like when records from different worlds stand side by side.

If you have a game: hiscore.txt. Paste the address into your coding agent, it does the rest. You keep your game, your address and your players. You get a board, a backlink and a chance of being found.

And if somebody draws the map better than we do: all the better. What matters is that one exists.