Why Multiplayer Games Are Just Distributed Systems | Ellyse Cedeno on BEAM & the Actor Model

About this episode

Ellyse Cedeno discusses the intersection of multiplayer games and distributed systems, emphasizing the actor model's advantages for game servers.

Every player is a process. Every monster is a process. Every zone is a process. Sound familiar? In this episode, Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down with Ellyse Cedeno - technology and product leader with 25+ years across online games, distributed systems, and real-time platforms - to explore why the BEAM and the actor model are a natural fit for multiplayer game servers, and why the games industry keeps learning this the hard way. Topics include: why MMORPGs and telecom systems have more in common than most people realize the N-squared problem: why high player density is so expensive and how classic games solved it why Java threads and deadlocks were the original game server nightmare how the actor model eliminates lock management - and what that means for mob AI event-sourced vs tick-based architecture and when each makes sense zones, sharding, and the air traffic control analogy for seamless server handoffs building a NetHack-style multiplayer game in LiveView - and what the DOM diffing taught her about game state why the games industry is dominated by C++ and Unreal, and what it would take to change that using player behavior analytics to catch bugs before ops teams or…

People in this episode

Hosts: Allen Wyma, Francesco Cesarini

Guest: Ellyse Cedeno

Topics covered

• multiplayer games
• distributed systems
• actor model
• game server architecture
• player behavior analytics
• game development

Keywords

• MMORPGs
• N-squared problem
• Java threads
• lock management
• event-sourced architecture
• sharding
• NetHack-style multiplayer
• Elixir game
• production horror story

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: BEAM, Codeberg

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