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Why Multiplayer Games Are Just Distributed Systems | Ellyse Cedeno on BEAM & the Actor Model
Description
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 server logs do
the production horror story of someone pulling the live database drive mid-operation
Plus: why Ellyse wants to publish a 100% Elixir game on Steam, and what the open source game_server project on Codeberg is trying to do.
Recorded May 25, 2026.