At its core, Glitch is a social game in which players must learn how to find and grow resources, identify and build community and, at the higher levels of the game, proselytize to those around them. For those expecting warfare of the orc versus mage kind, perhaps it might be best to reset your expectations. "Rather than you and me fighting each other with swords," Butterfield explained, "it could be you and me having rival religious factions battling each other for converts."
But that's only deep into the game. At first, players must get through Glitch's early levels by completing quests, gaining skills, growing, and making many different kinds of things with basic ingredients--from a cheese plate to a pickle to a fruit salad, for starters--and winding their way through an often Mario-esque world of various artistic styles, many of which can be thought of as being inside an individual giant's memories.
Still, despite what may seem like a simple game system, Glitch is by no means intended to be mastered in a few short hours. Rather, while players should be able to rise through the first few levels very quickly, getting into the upper reaches of the game could take weeks, or more. And, since Glitch has no specific goals or end-game, committed players could find themselves entertained for months or more.
Not for your average Farmville player Because Glitch is a thinking-person's social game, Tiny Speck is not aimed at the entire world, at least not at first, especially not teens eager for the next World of Warcraft. Instead, Butterfield admitted, "There's not a better way to say [who we're targeting] than people with above average intelligence and sophisticated tastes, in their 20s or early 30s...The intersection of NPR listeners and game players."
From the beginning, it was clear that an artistic aesthetic was essential to Glitch's fortunes, and in that regard, at the very least, there's no doubt Tiny Speck has succeeded. Throughout the game, players will encounter a series of stunningly beautiful styles, from denim mountains to clouds hanging on strings to a cracked open sky. Each of the many illustrators on the team is responsible for a different style, and in most cases, each style represents a different giant's imagination.
Tiny Speck's founders, too, seem to have a notable imagination. For example, the game plays out in accelerated time, with a game hour advancing six times as fast as a real hour. That means a day takes just four real hours to complete. The game also has what some might consider a strange calendar. Its 11 months are: Primuary, with 29 days; Spork, with 3; Turkmenbashi, with 55; Candy, 17; Fever, 73; Junuary, 19; Augtober, 13; Remember, 37; Doom, 5, Wiidershins, 47; and Eleventy, 11 days.

While Glitch shares some of the features of hard-core MMOs like World of Warcraft and EverQuest--principally quests, leveling up, an in-game economy and working socially with other players, as a 2D Flash game--it might at the same time feel mildly familiar to players of Facebook games like Farmville or Nintendo titles like the many iterations of the Mario franchise.

"The whole world was spun out of the imagination of 11 great giants," said Stewart Butterfield, the president of Glitch developer Tiny Speck, and better known as the co-founder of Flickr. "So you have to go back into the past, into the world of the giants' imaginations and grow...the number of things in the world, grow it in terms of physical dimensions, to make sure the future actually happens. So all the game play takes place in the past inside the world of the giants' imagination." "The whole world was spun out of the imagination of 11 great giants," said Stewart Butterfield, the president of Glitch developer Tiny Speck, and better known as the co-founder of Flickr. "So you have to go back into the past, into the world of the giants' imaginations and grow...the number of things in the world, grow it in terms of physical dimensions, to make sure the future actually happens. So all the game play takes place in the past inside the world of the giants' imagination."