Nolen Royalty on making things
The internet feels smaller than it used to be, as fun stuff concentrates into a few mega-platforms. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Nolen Royalty creates strange, fun new places and invites everyone inside to play chess, draw on eggs, or even write secret messages on one million shared checkboxes. Whenever he posts a new project, I feel like a kid on the playground again.
As part of the Making things project (intro here), I got to interview Nolen on what it means to connect people and keep the internet fun, and how he found his unique style.
Bobbie Chen (BC):
1. When anything is possible, how do you decide what to create?
2. If someone else can create it, why should you?
Nolen Royalty (NR): For me these days, I’m making games, which are both art and technical projects. My motivations are very personal. That’s different from tools or utilities that need to be useful, and end up being less personal as a result.
There are three things that I really like to do, and ideally a project hits at least two:
Connect people
Teach people
Make people laugh
BC: Is there a story behind these specific goals?
NR: Well, I sort of grew up on the internet. My family moved around a lot, so a lot of my friends are friends that I originally met and hung out with on the internet (though we eventually met in real life). That was an important part of my life, and I want to promote the idea that the Internet is a silly place to do silly things with other people. It should be fun, and it’s fun to laugh together.
About teaching people - my parents are both professors, so I think I’ve always loved explaining and being explained to. It makes me happy as a tech person to do a writeup about the interesting decisions and outcomes of a project. Like, recently a friend reached out to me and told me my blog post helped solve a technical issue he was facing, and I loved that.
And I do think I’m just good at making computers do weird and fun things. For example, I thought that it should be possible and fun to have a 1 Million Chessboards game, but no one had done it yet. So I should do it and share it, so that others can benefit from that work. I take a lot of pride in that.
BC: Did you always make games with these goals? Or how did you identify that style?
NR: When I was just getting started, making games and uploading them to itch.io, those games were actually pretty generic. I hadn’t figured it out yet.
It took time for me to identify a style that I enjoy and can point to as my personal style - no one else quite makes things at this intersection of style and technical challenge.
The Recurse Center, a kind of creative programmers’ retreat, really helped - I had heard about it from some coworkers, and it was nearby where I lived in Brooklyn, so I went. This was an environment where I could get a lot of feedback at early stages of a project, to quickly figure out what resonates with people and what doesn’t.
Hearing from people as they try it out is really encouraging for me. Every time I shipped something for people to try, even if I didn’t think it was very good, would help me improve and learn more about what I liked as well.
BC: It reminds me of the Ira Glass quote about taste: when you start to create, you have good enough taste to know that what you’re making is disappointing. But you have to push through it and keep going in order to close that gap.
NR: Yes! Go and make ten or fifteen things, get that feedback and be encouraged. Having a group of people you can share that work with is valuable and Recurse Center was really great for that.
BC: I think you’re making some of the most fun stuff on the internet today. But stepping back a little, you’ve mentioned many people think the internet is less fun than it used to be. Why do you think that is?
NR: There is a lot more fun stuff on the internet today! That’s just a fact, the total volume of fun stuff is a lot larger. The kinds of things that you used to StumbleUpon are still around even though StumbleUpon is gone now.
The “old internet” felt more personal. It was a smaller place. And now that all of regular life and business have bled into the internet, it’s a lot less unique. I can understand why people feel like the old internet is gone - it’s not, but it’s certainly a lower percentage of what’s out there now.
To connect people in the multiplayer things I like to do, you need to get enough people participating for it to get really interesting - Stranger Video was the first one that reached critical mass, which was lucky for me.
But social media has become more optimized for attention - by default, all you’ll see is clickbait. I think that’s a big reason why the average view of the internet is so much more pessimistic today.
And honestly, this is why I personally took a break from the internet for a few months. I was just tired of thinking about how to make people look at my stuff. I heard about the idea of “designing for the square” from a friend at MSCHF: every concept needs to make sense as a tiny square on an Instagram feed. That’s extremely constraining, and they need to consider this from the start so that they can make enough money to continue operating.
BC: So how do you find the fun stuff yourself?
NR: Discovery is still a very difficult problem. I spend a lot of time curating the places I spend time on - for example, on Bluesky most of my feed is my friends and creators I like. It’s worth it.
BC: On a personal note - you’ve previously written about your experiences with addiction and recovery. I was touched that your friends flew across the country to visit you in an intervention, near the start of your recovery. Does that influence your goal of connecting people with your work?
NR: Actually, I hadn’t really thought about it this way before. When I first got sober, almost all the friends I had left were internet friends, so it could be, a bit. But I had also been into that kind of thing earlier, too; Twitch Plays Pokemon was captivating when it first came out.
But in general, I went through such a rough time for many years. So by default pretty much all of my days are better - even my most terrible day afterwards is pretty good in comparison. That keeps me optimistic.
BC: Any final words of advice?
NR: Don’t do what I did! I was very lucky to get to where I am today.
For a while in recovery, I was motivated by wasted time. I wanted to make up for all the time I had lost and “catch up” to other people; and I worked very hard for many years where that was the main thing driving me forward.
But that motivation did run out eventually. Nothing like that lasts forever, and I still needed to figure out what I wanted afterwards.
You just gotta do it. Make things, reflect on the differences, and keep going.
Nolen Royalty makes and writes for the web because the internet can still be fun. See what he’s up to on his website, eieio.games.
Or check out the other interviews about making things with Amit Patel, Morry Kolman, and Seth Larson.