Introducing the World of Player 7

Where Player 7 Started

Player 7 started with Overwatch.

My wife, Lucii, and I have more than 4,000 hours in the game between us, so talking about team comps, balance, roles, game modes, and all the little things we would change is pretty normal in our house. At some point, Flats talked about how he thought 7v7 could work better than 5v5 or even 6v6, and that got us talking.

Because adding another player is easy. Giving that player a reason to exist is the interesting part.

Seven players wasn’t the idea. The seventh player needed a reason to exist.

Almost immediately, Lucii suggested connecting that seventh player to the objective, and that was the question that cracked the whole thing open: What if the objective could come alive?

Instead of adding another Tank, another Damage player, or another Support, Player 7 would occupy an entirely different kind of space in the match: the Titan.

Titan is an objective role, not a character class. There isn’t a separate roster of Titan characters, and Player 7 isn’t locked into one traditional role. They can choose anyone on the roster who hasn’t already been selected. What makes them the Titan isn’t who they play, but their relationship with the objective.

The character you choose changes how you do the job. The game mode changes what that job is.

The Titan makes the objective come alive.

What Does It Mean to Make the Objective Come Alive?

Both teams always have a Titan. What changes from mode to mode is how those Titans interact with the objective.

They might need to survive, capture space, move something through the map, protect what they have built, or fight for control of a shared objective. The Titan slot gives the objective a player instead of leaving it as a passive piece of game logic.

In VIP, each team’s Titan is the VIP. The Titan has reduced health but deals double damage, so being the VIP does not mean hiding in the back and hoping nobody notices you. You are dangerous, but you are also easier to kill.

Every capture point on the map is active at the same time, but only the Titan can capture them. The rest of the team can defend, pressure the enemy Titan, create space, protect their own Titan, or hunt down the other team’s VIP, but they cannot cap the points themselves.

How you play that is up to you. Maybe your team builds around protecting the Titan. Maybe your Titan leans into the double damage and plays like a glass cannon. Maybe you split pressure across the map. Maybe you hunt the enemy Titan while yours sneaks a capture. There isn’t one correct way to be the VIP, and that is part of the point.

Payload Princess takes the Titan in a completely different direction. Each team has its own payload, and the Titan is driving it.

As you move across the map, you collect additional carts that attach to your payload. Those carts can have different functions, including things like power-ups and other effects, so what you collect changes how your payload develops during the match.

But getting bigger also makes you harder to protect. Think Snake. As your payload grows longer, the opposing team has more opportunities to collide with it. If they manage to hit your payload, you lose the carts you’ve collected and restart with your base payload. And you can do exactly the same thing to them.

The match becomes a cycle of collecting, growing, protecting, crashing, rebuilding, and deciding how much risk you’re willing to take.

You aren’t escorting the payload. You’re driving it.

Bot Pilot uses one shared objective. Both teams still have their own Titan, but there is only one bot and one pilot position, and only a Titan can control it.

That means the teams have to fight for the opportunity to put their Titan behind the controls. Win the team fight, and your Titan gets the opening to pilot the bot farther for your side. Lose the next fight, and the other Titan can take over.

Bot Pilot becomes a tug-of-war between winning fights and turning those wins into objective progress. Your team creates the opening. Your Titan takes the wheel.

Three modes, three completely different relationships with the objective.

The objective doesn’t have to be passive anymore.

And Then It Got Bigger

At first, Player 7 was a game mechanic.

That lasted about five minutes.

Once I started thinking about what the Titan could do, I started thinking about who would be playing around it. What kinds of characters would exist in a game built for seven players? How would team composition change when one player on each team had a completely different relationship with the objective? And, probably most importantly, who are these people?

That is where Player 7 stopped being just a hypothetical game mode and started becoming a world.

The roster began growing, and so did the roles. Tank, Damage, and Support were still there, but I started breaking them down further into the ways people actually play them: Dive, Brawl, Sustain. Hitscan, Flanker, Scout, Specialist. Utilitarian, Medic, Survivor.

Not because I wanted to build a giant spreadsheet of labels, but because those differences matter when you are thinking about how a team actually functions. A player diving into the backline is doing something very different from someone holding space. A Support built around keeping everyone alive is doing something different from one built around utility, disruption, or simply being almost impossible to kill.

And because Player 7 can choose anyone on the roster, those differences matter even more. The same Titan objective can feel completely different depending on who takes the slot.

That opened another door. Characters started becoming people instead of kits. People started getting histories, personalities, politics, cultures, arguments, loyalties, stupid jokes, terrible decisions, and reasons for being there.

And that is where the music came in.

And That Is Where the Music Came In

I don’t have a game studio. I don’t have a team of programmers, concept artists, animators, level designers, writers, and balance developers sitting around waiting for me to hand them Player 7.

What I do have is music.

Music turned out to be a really good way to figure out whether this world actually had something to it. A song can test an idea in a way a paragraph of notes sometimes cannot.

What does it feel like to play Tank when your job is to dive straight into the enemy team? What does the Flanker sound like when they are absolutely convinced that dying in the enemy backline somehow counted as making space? What kind of personality comes out of a Support whose entire identity is keeping everyone else alive?

What happens when you stop thinking about these things as ability descriptions on a page and start asking what they feel like?

That is what the music started doing. The roles could have attitudes. The mechanics could have jokes. Characters could have voices. A ridiculous idea scribbled into my notes could suddenly have three minutes of personality attached to it.

The more songs I made, the more Player 7 stopped feeling like a collection of mechanics and started feeling like somewhere I could actually go.

Introducing Player 7

That is what Introducing Player 7 became for me.

It isn’t a soundtrack to a finished game. There is no finished game. Actually, there isn’t a game at all.

Player 7 currently exists as a world: a collection of ideas, mechanics, characters, roles, stories, and music. I am not secretly developing it into a playable game, and there are no current plans to do that.

Unless, of course, an investor shows up one day and decides they really want to fund a seven-player hero shooter built around making the objective come alive.

In which case, hi. We should probably talk.

For now, Introducing Player 7 is a proof of concept for the world itself. The album asks whether you can understand a role through a song, whether a mechanic can have personality, and whether a character you have never seen on a screen can still make you curious about who they are.

Some songs explore what it feels like to occupy a role. Others start introducing the people who might eventually inhabit this world. Some are serious. Some are absolutely not.

I am not building Player 7 because I have a release date, a development roadmap, or a studio hiding somewhere. I am building it because I wanted to know what this idea could become, and music gives me a way to find out.

People First, Kits Second

One of the things I don’t want Player 7 to become is a roster full of ability kits wearing human-shaped costumes.

I want these characters to feel like people first.

They can have jobs, cultures, politics, beliefs, families, grudges, stupid habits, bad ideas, inside jokes, contradictions, and reasons for ending up in this world that have nothing to do with whether their ultimate is balanced.

Their abilities matter. Their role matters. But that should not be the only interesting thing about them.

A character can be funny without being a joke character. They can be political without turning into a walking speech. They can come from a specific place without being reduced to a collection of stereotypes from that place. They can be heroic and still be kind of an asshole. They can care deeply about something and still get things wrong.

I want them to feel messy in the way people are messy.

A song might start with a gameplay idea and accidentally turn into a story about land rights. A ridiculous character concept might end up having something real to say about corruption. A Support can raise questions about death, free will, and whether bringing someone back is actually a kindness.

And another character can just be really, really excited about hitting things with a hammer.

There is room for all of it.

A World That Comes From Somewhere

If the characters are going to feel like people, then they also need to feel like they come from somewhere.

I don’t want Player 7 to have a vaguely international roster where everyone technically has a country attached to their bio, but you could swap those countries around and nothing about the character would really change.

Culture should matter. Place should matter. History should matter.

Not because every character needs to represent an entire country, state, or community, but because where someone grows up helps shape the way they see the world.

That is already starting to happen.

There’s 2Spicy4U, an Albanian eco-warrior whose story reaches into land rights, corruption, protecting the place she comes from, and, naturally, a truly unreasonable number of peppers.

There’s a Thai Tank whose identity, culture, and relationship with Thailand are part of who she is rather than decorative details added after the character was designed.

And there’s Arkansas Toothpick, rooted in rural Arkansas and all the contradictions that can come with loving where you come from while still wanting better for it.

Her Arkansas isn’t just hog calls, Southern accents, and familiar imagery, although there is absolutely room for all of that. It is also family, land, the things one generation teaches the next, the belief that loving your home does not mean pretending everything about it is perfect, and the idea that loving people means everyone, not only the people somebody decides are acceptable.

Those things can exist beside the humor, the pride, the ridiculousness, and the very particular personality of Arkansas.

Because culture is not just tragedy, politics, folklore, or history. It is food, humor, language, music, family, arguments, the things people are proud of, the things they complain about, and the jokes that only make sense if you grew up around them.

I want Player 7 to be international, but I don’t want “international” to mean everyone gets a flag and a voice line. I want the world to feel like it is actually made of places, and I want the people in it to feel like they actually belong to those places.

That means doing the work. It means researching, listening, and knowing when something comes from my own experience and when I need perspectives outside of it.

Player 7 is still growing.

So are they.

Of Course It Gets Political

If Player 7 is going to have people from actual places, with actual histories, families, beliefs, and problems, then politics are going to show up.

I don’t really see a way around that, and honestly, I don’t want to.

Politics are not some separate layer that gets sprinkled onto a character after everything else is finished. They are part of the world people live in. Land rights are political. Corruption is political. Who gets protected is political. Who gets ignored is political.

Who gets to love openly, who gets to exist safely, who gets listened to, and who gets told to sit down and shut up can all become political very quickly.

That does not mean every song needs to turn into a manifesto. It means I am not going to sand the edges off a character just because the thing they care about might make somebody uncomfortable.

2Spicy4U can care about land and corruption. Arkansas Toothpick can love Arkansas while still believing Arkansas can do better. A character can be shaped by what their family taught them and still decide that some of those lessons need to end with them. Another character might not care about any of that and just want to win the match.

All of those people can exist in the same world.

I don’t want Player 7 to divide its cast into perfect heroes and obvious villains where everyone already knows who is right before they open their mouth. People contradict themselves. People grow. People inherit beliefs. People reject them. People love places that frustrate them. People can have good intentions and still cause harm.

That gives me a lot more to work with than simply deciding which characters are supposed to be “the good ones.”

I want Player 7 to have opinions. I want its characters to have opinions. And I want room for those opinions to collide.

Not because I’m trying to build a political simulator.

Because I’m trying to build people.

It Also Gets Weird

For all the serious things Player 7 can touch, I never want the world to forget that games are also ridiculous.

Especially multiplayer games.

Anyone who has spent enough time in a hero shooter knows that half the experience is strategy, teamwork, positioning, and mechanics. The other half is watching somebody make a decision so baffling that it becomes part of the group vocabulary forever.

Like Mizuki walking straight into a Sierra tracking shot.

Six different times.

In the same match.

At some point, you stop asking why.

That belongs in Player 7 too.

The role stereotypes belong here. The ego. The panic. The teammate who dies halfway across the map and insists they were creating space. The person demanding a counter swap before the spawn doors have even finished opening. The Support who has somehow become the exhausted parent of six other people. The Tank who has decided that forward is not merely a direction but a complete philosophy.

The conversations that make perfect sense to gamers and sound completely unhinged to everyone else.

That is where songs like Counter Swap Carl come from.

Not every part of Player 7 needs to reveal a new piece of lore or tackle something serious. Some ideas are funny because anyone who has played these games has met that person.

Or, occasionally, been that person.

I want room for satire, role jokes, stupid decisions, exaggerated personalities, and the strange little social ecosystem that forms when a bunch of strangers are thrown together and told they have ten minutes to cooperate.

Player 7 can have songs about land rights, identity, corruption, grief, free will, and the things people inherit from the places they come from, and then somebody can show up yelling about the team composition.

Those things don’t cancel each other out. They make the world feel bigger.

They also make it feel more like the reason any of this exists in the first place:

I really love games.

Not just their mechanics, but the people around them. The arguments. The memes. The impossible comebacks. The matches you want to forget. The matches you are still talking about years later. The completely unnecessary emotional investment in whether six strangers understand what you are trying to do.

Player 7 came from taking games seriously enough to ask what they could be, but never so seriously that I forget they are supposed to be fun.

From What If to What Is

Player 7 started as a what if.

What if 7v7 actually worked? What if the seventh player had a reason to exist? What if the objective could come alive? What if the characters were more than ability kits? What if a game world could start as music before there was ever a game?

I ask “what if” a lot. It is probably one of the most dangerous phrases you can give someone with a hyperfixation, because eventually I want to know what happens if I stop asking the question and actually make something from it.

That is where Introducing Player 7 comes in.

Player 7 is not a game. It may never be a game.

Maybe one day somebody with significantly more money than I have reads this and decides that a seven-player hero shooter with living objectives sounds like something worth building.

I would certainly answer that email.

But that is not what has to happen for Player 7 to exist.

It exists now. It exists in the songs, the characters, the mechanics that keep multiplying in my notes, and the conversations Lucii and I have about how a mode would work, what a character would do, or whether an idea is completely brilliant or completely ridiculous.

Usually there is a concerning amount of overlap between those last two.

Every time another piece clicks into place, the world gets a little more real.

I don’t need to know exactly what Player 7 will look like five years from now. I don’t even need to know what every character looks like yet. I can build it piece by piece, song by song, question by question.

Some ideas will survive. Some will change completely. Some will probably deserve to be quietly escorted out of the building.

That is part of making something.

“What if” is where Player 7 started. “What is” comes next.

And right now, I’m having a hell of a lot of fun finding out what that is.